The American People Deserve An Alternative To Trump—Do The Democrats Deserve To Be That Alternative?

People Can Tell When A Politician Puts Their Own Career First

Early yesterday morning, Adam Gray inched a tiny bit closer to ousting Republican John Duarte in their blue-leaning Central Valley district. His lede went from 0.09 (190 votes) to 0.11% (227 votes) in the D+4, majority Latino district (66%) that stretches from the southern suburbs of Stockton to the western suburbs of Fresno, including all of Merced County, most of Madera County and parts of Stanislaus, Fresno and San Joaquin counties. Although Biden won the district by a comfortable 10.9 points, Democratic Assemblyman Gray lost it fractionally. Gray was one of the worst DCCC candidates of 2022— with an Assembly record that was extremely conservative and extremely corrupt— and this year they recruited him again and, with their allies, spent over $14 million to get him into Congress. If you’re rooting for him to win— and it looks like he will— you should be aware that you’re rooting for a Blue Dog who is worse than Manchin and worse than Sinema. UPDATE: More votes were counted last night and Gray's lede is now down to 143 votes (0.07%).

Yesterday, David Dayen asked an important question: What Is The Democratic Party? “Amid despair and recriminations on the left and unprecedented multiracial support on the right,” he wrote, “many are talking yet again about a realignment. But the real paradigm shift will only come when one political party actually responds to the public’s needs. MAGA has its own strategy to do that: mass deportation, tax cuts and deregulation to satiate business, and a neo-19th-century reprisal of high tariffs. Project 2025 shows that Trump and his allies have prioritized removing structural impediments to this agenda, skirting constitutional hurdles, firing disloyal bureaucrats. But Trump’s erratic record as president did not produce firm support. Even in this ‘realigning’ election, four Republican Senate candidates running in states Trump carried lost, and the House barely budged. As president, Trump only has a short window to earn public trust, which has proven elusive for two decades. The much more mysterious question is this: Who leads the Democratic Party, and what do they offer America?”

Dayen noted that “one bad outcome of the election that could paradoxically prove useful for Democrats’ future is the uniformity of the swing away from Kamala Harris. Practically no section of the country, no demographic subgroup, nothing was spared; she lost vote share relative to Joe Biden in 2020 in all but two states. This actually keeps Democrats, or at least it should, from playing their favorite parlor game: slicing and dicing the exit polls and county-level data until they find somebody to blame… Harris had no core, just a bundle of positions that fluttered with the political moment.”

Some commentators have decided that Democratic losses amid a strong economy and powerful association with unions, both tangible and symbolic, means that the mother’s milk of politics, economic policies that improve people’s lives, no longer matters. Biden did have many successes in his presidency, which if they hold (a big if), will propel the country toward a better future. But these commentators should look closer at the lived experience of Americans today.

Though unionization rules improved under Biden, a lack of consistent organizing across the labor movement meant that union density continued to shrink; more than 90 percent of the working class is not organized. Biden’s industrial reshoring led to a manufacturing construction boom, but that is not the same as permanent manufacturing jobs anchoring a community. Millions of families benefited from full-employment policies; but many more millions are affected by inflation, which hits everyone.

For half of Biden’s presidency, wages did not outpace inflation. That reversed itself, but Americans see wage increases as the result of their own talent and inflation increases as a government failing. The primary channel to tame inflation, Federal Reserve interest rate hikes, increased the cost of borrowing, making big purchases like mortgages and car loans more expensive. The cost of living in 2024 was simply higher than in 2020 across the board.

…The cover-up of Biden’s obvious mental decline until the whole world witnessed it at the June debate made Democrats look like a party full of liars trying to trick the American people. And here is where we get to one of the bigger problems with the Democratic Party today: its tendency toward conflict aversion.

For three and a half years, nobody wanted to say Biden couldn’t hack it, or even interrogate the evidence. Even after the debate, some progressive politicians attempted a strange play to back Biden in exchange for some platform positions. Status within the party was prized over telling the public the truth.

Establishment Democratic politicians constantly lament the loss of a Republican Party they could work with. They make a fetish of bipartisanship, of adopting positions that “even Republicans” support. Harris appeared most at home when promising Republican representation in her cabinet, even as she called her Republican opponent a threat to everything we hold dear. There is an important role for compromise in American politics, but when compromise becomes a candidate’s virtue and calling card, voters wonder what underlies it, if anything.

Democrats have an unwieldy coalition of progressives and moderates, consumer advocates and Wall Street bankers, environmentalists and labor organizers, muscular foreign-policy promoters and pacifists, people who want the party to be about tax fairness and health care and abortion and democracy and any of about a hundred other silos. Little stitches together these priorities, outside of being a jumble of words on a page.

In the end, the sum of all these discrete and disparate passions is a passionless party, one that relies on focus-group testing to set priorities rather than any animating set of principles. Democrats prefer to diagnose voters, rather than take care of their concerns. And there’s no leader currently available to mold this mass into anything coherent. In that void, the other side fills in the blanks, and the public, absent any other information or clear definition, tends to believe them.

Also yesterday, George Packer wrote that the Democrats’ “long drift away from the most pressing concerns of ordinary Americans, and toward the eccentric obsessions of its donors and activists, helped restore Trump to power. “For two and a half centuries,” he wrote, “American politics alternated between progressive and conservative periods, played between the 40-yard lines of liberal democracy. The values of freedom, equality, and rule of law at least received lip service; the founding documents enjoyed the status of civic scripture; the requisite American mood was optimism. Although reaction has dominated local or regional (mainly southern) politics, it’s something new in our national politics— which explains why Trump has been misunderstood and written off at every turn. Reaction is insular and aggrieved, and it paints in dark tones. It wants to undo progress and reverse history, restoring the nation to some imagined golden age when the people ruled. They want a strongman with the stomach to trample on the liberal pieties of the elites who sold them out. This is why so many voters are willing to tolerate— in some cases, celebrate— Trump’s vile language and behavior; his love affairs with foreign dictators; his readiness to toss aside norms, laws, the Constitution itself. Asked by pollsters if they’re concerned about the state of democracy, these voters answer yes— not because they fear its demise, but because it has already failed them. They don’t think Trump will destroy democracy; he’ll restore it to the people.”

The Democratic Party finds itself on the wrong side of a historic swing toward right-wing populism, and tactical repositioning won’t help. The mood in America, as in electorates all over the world, is profoundly anti-establishment. Trump had a mass movement behind him; Kamala Harris was installed by party elites. He offered disruption, chaos, and contempt; she offered a tax break for small businesses. He spoke for the alienated; she spoke for the status quo.

Democrats have become the party of institutionalists. Much of their base is metropolitan, credentialed, economically comfortable, and pro-government. A realignment has been going on since the early ’70s: Democrats now claim the former Republican base of college-educated professionals, and Republicans have replaced Democrats as the party of the working class. As long as globalization, technology, and immigration were widely seen as not only inevitable but positive forces, the Democratic Party appeared to ride the wave of history, while Republicans depended on a shrinking pool of older white voters in dying towns. But something profound changed around 2008.

… In some ways, the Biden administration and the Harris campaign tried to reorient the Democratic Party back toward the working class, which was once its backbone. Biden pursued policies and passed legislation to create jobs that don’t require a college degree in communities that have been left behind. Harris studiously avoided campaigning on her identity as a Black and South Asian woman, appealing instead to a vague sense of patriotism and hope. But Biden’s industrial policy didn’t produce results fast enough to offset the damage of inflation—no one I talked with in Maricopa County, Arizona, or Washington County, Pennsylvania, this year seemed to have heard of the Inflation Reduction Act. Harris remained something of a cipher because of Biden’s stubborn refusal to step aside until it was too late for her or anyone else to make their case to Democratic voters. The party’s economic policies turned populist, but its structure—unlike the Republican Party’s mass cult of personality—appeared to be a glittering shell of power brokers and celebrities around a hollow core. Rebuilding will be the work of years, and realignment could take decades.

So much of the Trump Reaction’s triumph is unfair. It’s unfair that a degenerate man has twice beaten a decent, capable woman. It’s unfair that Harris graciously conceded defeat, whereas Trump, in her position, would once again have kick-started the machinery of lies that he built on his own behalf, continuing to undermine trust in democracy for years to come. It’s unfair that most of the media immediately moved on from Trump’s hateful rhetoric and threats of violence against migrants and political opponents. His campaign was unforgivable— but in the words of W. H. Auden’s poem “Spain,” “History to the defeated / May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.”

The Trump Reaction is more fragile than it now seems. Trump’s behavior in the last weeks of the campaign did not augur a coherent second presidency. He will surround himself with ideologues, opportunists, and crackpots, and because he has no interest in governing, they will try to fill the vacuum and turn on one another. The Trump administration, with a favorable Congress, will overreach on issues such as abortion and immigration, soon alienating important parts of its new coalition. It will enact economic policies that favor the party’s old allies among the rich at the expense of its new supporters among the less well-off. It’s quite possible that, approaching 80, Trump will find himself once more among the least popular presidents in the country’s history. But in the meantime, he will have enormous latitude to abuse his power for enrichment and revenge, and to shred the remaining ties that bind Americans to one another, and the country to democracies around the world.

The Trump Reaction will test opponents with a difficult balancing act, one that recalls F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line about a first-rate intelligence holding two opposed ideas in mind while still being able to function. The Democratic Party has to undertake the necessary self-scrutiny that starts with the errors of Biden, Harris, and their inner circle, but that extends to the party’s long drift away from the most pressing concerns of ordinary Americans, toward the eccentric obsessions of its donors and activists. But this examination can’t end in paralysis, because at the same time, the opposition will have to act. Much of this action will involve civil society and the private sector along with surviving government institutions— to prevent by legal means the mass internment and deportation of migrants from communities in which they’ve been peacefully living for years; to save women whose lives are threatened by laws that would punish them for trying to save themselves; to protect the public health from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s security from Tulsi Gabbard, and its coffers from Elon Musk.

…A few weeks before the election, Representative Chris Deluzio, a first-term Democrat, was campaigning door-to-door in a closely divided district in western Pennsylvania. He’s a Navy veteran, a moderate on cultural issues, and a homegrown economic populist— critical of corporations, deep-pocketed donors, and the ideology that privileges capital over human beings and communities. At one house he spoke with a middle-aged white policeman named Mike, who had a Trump sign in his front yard. Without budging on his choice for president, Mike ended up voting for Deluzio. On Election Night, in a state carried by Trump, Deluzio outperformed Harris in his district, especially in the reddest areas, and won comfortably. 

What does this prove? Only that politics is best when it’s face-to-face and based on respect, that most people are complicated and even persuadable, and that— in the next line from the Fitzgerald quote— one can “see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

Something tells me that when the final numbers are in, almost every congressional Democratic candidate— the good (like Deluzio), the bad (Jared Golden, by a fraction of a point) and the ugly (John Mannion)— will have beaten Kamala last month. So far, the only congressional candidate I found, maybe the worst “Democrat” of 2024 who did exactly as bad as Kamala did in his district was John Avlon in Suffolk County, NY. Though Biden only lost this purple district by 1.8 points (under the current redrawn boundaries), Avlon and Harris each lost it by 11.4 points!