In The American Political Realignment There's A Big Sweet Open Space For A Popular Progressive Party

Too Late For Democrats To Pay Attention To John Stuart Mill?

“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives,” intoned British philosopher and Member of Parliament John Stuart Mill at the University of St Andrew’s where he was Lord Rector. “I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party… There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power.”

And as the GOP slips inextricably into fascism, the Democratic Party continues its rightward post-FDR shift into old-fashioned conservatism. It’s a terrible mistake, first and foremost for the American people, but even for the careerists who put themselves before their constituents. From a policy perspective, it certainly isn’t what most people want, even though most Democrats have been unable to communicate the policy agenda most Americans favor. As the Kamala Harris campaign lurches rightward,” wrote Branko Marcetic last week, “pundits want us to believe she’s just following the will of the voters. The facts don’t bear that out... [I]t’s a mistake to treat the Democratic Party’s rightward lurch under Kamala Harris as an accurate measure of the country’s politics as a whole, or even to treat support for Donald Trump or Joe Biden and Harris as a proxy for ideology.”

Take the issue of raising the federal minimum wage. Harris never talks about it: not a the debate with Trump, not in her first sit-down interview in August, not in the Univision town hall she just did. Though it might be part of the Democratic platform, for all intents and purposes, it has been dropped from her campaign and presidential agenda.

Does this mean the country has turned against a $15 or higher minimum wage, a major left-wing priority that was one of the Bernie Sanders campaign’s (and, later, Biden’s) flagship policies? Obviously not, as we can see not only from robust recent polling that shows the measure is wildly popular across party lines, but from the results of state and municipal ballot measures that have routinely seen Americans directly vote to hike the wage— including in deep red Florida, 60 percent of whose voting residents backed raising the wage to $15 four years ago, at the same time they elected Trump and a spree of Republicans downballot.

This isn’t the only such example. There are a host of progressive policies that poll well across the board that Harris either refuses to take up, like adding dental dental coverage to Medicare and lowering the program’s eligibility age, or doesn’t ever talk about, like a national rent cap. In a political system where both parties beg for money from corporations and the ultrarich, treating what policies those parties do and don’t support as a reflection of the will of the voters doesn’t make much sense.

Harris’s rightward lurch on foreign policy isn’t justified by meeting the electorate where it is either: polling consistently shows that voters, especially in swing states, are worried about the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East escalating, see preventing that escalation as a higher priority than total military victory, oppose Israel’s war and favor an arms embargo on it, and prefer the United States generally shrink its global footprint to focus on domestic problems.

These are all positions traditionally espoused by left-wing voices, and they’re also positions that Harris is on the opposite side on. Several of them are actually much closer to what the public has been (wrongly) told are the positions held by Trump, who is consistently trusted on foreign policy more than Harris.

In fact, the clearest and most consistent takeaways from election-related polling are not that voters think Harris is too far left and that Trump’s policy platform is what Americans want. It’s that voters are most concerned with the cost-of-living crisis that we’ve all taken to calling “inflation” as shorthand, that voters are drawn to Trump largely for this reason, that they want to hear more from Harris about what she would actually do as president to solve this, and that they don’t think she would break from President Joe Biden, whose years in power they associate (not unfairly) with feeling poorer.

At the same time, we’re only two years out from a midterm election in which Republicans, convinced that voters had turned against socially liberal views on abortion and LGBTQ rights, failed miserably to capitalize on an unpopular incumbent president by making what turned out to be an alienating conservative assault on both issues central to their identity. Even now, a left-populist candidate is within striking distance of beating a Republican for a Senate seat in Nebraska, a state that hasn’t voted blue since 1964 (yes, by taking a more conservative position on immigration, but also by running on a more liberal position on abortion).

Meanwhile, Trump and his campaign organization are not exactly acting like he’s running for president in a country that’s lurched rightward.

Trump has spent the bulk of this year running away from Project 2025, the deeply unpopular blueprint of radical right-wing ideas that members of his first administration devised in partnership with the Heritage Foundation, and which the campaign once proudly touted and has many overlaps with his official campaign documents. He’s renounced the GOP’s politically toxic stance on abortion, to the point of wrenching control of the platform-writing process and angering the party base with a more centrist position. The biggest takeaway from the vice-presidential debate was how Trump running mate J. D. Vance pretended to be someone else with a whole different set of beliefs.

That’s all before we get to the fact that, despite Trump’s resilience in the polls, his campaign has gone from consistently leading to being neck and neck in the popular vote, even trailing— and that Harris, in spite of running a far more conservative campaign, is not exactly running away with it either.

In fact, Trump’s resilience in the polls is in large part explained by the time he departed from right-wing economics.

Commentators have scratched their heads over why voters seem to have a nostalgia for Trump’s final, chaotic year as president in 2020. One obvious reason is that a Democratic-led Congress passed, and Trump signed into law, a hugely expensive welfare state expansion that, despite the hardship of the pandemic, was transformative for many people: income inequality narrowed on a historic scale, debts were paid off, money was saved and many had the newfound financial security to find new, more rewarding, and lucrative careers.

Almost all of that expanded welfare state gradually disappeared under Biden.

…So no, it is not really true that the country has lurched right, and certainly not that the rightward shifts we’ve seen are simply part of some organic process of the electorate coming to its senses. But we can say one thing for sure: the Democratic establishment is turning rightward, and it is determined to do so after a short-lived experimentation with mildly progressive governance under Biden. Whether Harris wins or loses in November, the result will be spun to argue there is no alternative.

“Three years ago,” wrote Stanley Greenberg last week,  I titled my piece in The Prospect, “Democrats, Speak to Working-Class Discontent: It’s the one way to mobilize Blacks, Hispanics and Asians, not just white workers.” When the campaign began “Harris and Walz were doing precisely that. Major speakers at the Democratic convention took up corporate greed, the hardships from high costs, and the current battle for the middle class. They pointed out what Harris said in an economic speech on August 16: ‘Donald Trump fights for billionaires and large corporations. I will fight to give money back to working- and middle-class Americans.’ Base voters made the cost of living their very top concern, and she was finally telling them it was her top priority too.”

When Trump attacked her for being “to the left of Bernie Sanders,” Kamala foolishly all but dropped her messaging about helping working and middle class voters and “went back to identity politics by talking about the need to raise support with Black men. They announced a new agenda that included providing one million fully forgivable loans for Black entrepreneurs to start a business, and support for training for good-paying jobs, including pathways to become teachers. And it included protection for cryptocurrency investments. Black men apparently disproportionately make such investments. In this group-by-group targeted approach, they didn’t mention her plans on the Child Tax Credit. Harris cleaned that up in recent interviews on addressing Black men.

Greenberg concluded that the campaign’s “‘optimism’ was mainly communicating satisfaction with the status quo at a time when two-thirds said the country is headed in the wrong direction. President Biden interrupted the White House press briefing to talk about the strong economy. And Harris struggled on The View to say what Biden policies she disagreed with. They were communicating more continuity than change. Based on the campaign’s current strategy, there is good reason to believe the campaign believes there is an ‘anti-MAGA majority,’ a concept developed by Michael Podhorzer.”

In this new period of high-turnout elections since Trump, “more people are voting not because more people believe one or the other party will make their lives better, but because more people are convinced that one or the other party will make their lives worse.” Or simply, “for many, voting has become an act of self-defense.”

Podhorzer was one of the Democratic analysts who thought Biden could win. He attacked the hysteria around Biden’s polling. Eventually, he predicted, the race will be shaped by this new MAGA reality and intense campaigns in the battleground states. The election results will look very different from that polling.

Reportedly, President Biden changed his mind on deciding to run for re-election after Democrats did surprisingly well in the midterms. Podhorzer also embraced the midterms. He felt it showed Democrats could win nationally running on abortion and democracy, while touting the strong economy. I tried to remind Biden’s team and the public in my writing that Democrats lost the midterm congressional total vote by two points. Not dealing with the cost of living leaves you painfully short.

…In reports on ad testing by an independent firm called Blue Rose Research incubated by the super PAC Future Forward, the NY Times reports the most effective ads were the ones that educated viewers on her economic plans. Specifically, she said, “When I am elected president, I will make it a top priority to bring down costs. We should be doing everything we can to make it more affordable to buy a home and more than 100 million Americans will get a tax cut. I will help families; letting you keep more of your hard-earned money. As president, I will be laser focused on creating opportunities for the middle class that advance their economic security, stability and dignity.”

In other words, It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!, the title of my book co-authored with James Carville. And it’s also the cost of living, stupid!

I believe the Harris campaign will pay a lot of attention to a new poll from AP/NORC to shape their own close. Perhaps it will empower others in the campaign to get the priorities right. It shows Harris with a big advantage on “abortion policy,” “election integrity,” and “climate change.” Importantly, it has an 11-point advantage on “natural disaster relief.” But the economy is the top voting issue, and Harris has a 12-point lead on “taxes on the middle class” and 5 on the “cost of housing.” She trails by only 2 points on the “the cost of groceries and gas.”

Closing positive with Harris battling for the middle class and helping everyone on their very top issue will engage and unite the Democrats’ base. That will shift the trajectory of this race.

UPDATE: The Biden team, many of whom now remain with Harris, believed in its soul that voters, when faced with the prospect of putting Trump back in office, would pull back. But my poll in June asked simply, “Thinking ahead to when the election is over, what do you FEAR most, Donald Trump returning as President or Joe Biden continuing as President?” A minority of 47 percent feared Trump’s return, but a majority of 53 percent feared Biden continuing the most. That deep conviction puts them out of touch with the country and the base that is desperate for change.

I believe the Harris campaign will look closely at the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that shows her trailing by two points. In their prior poll, Harris had equal numbers viewing her favorably and unfavorably. Now, the unfavorable is up to 53 percent, 8 points above the positive. Her attacks are hurting her more than Trump.