You Can’t Blame The Congressional Debacle On Poor Candidate Quality Alone

Oh, the DCCC roster was the worst I’ve ever seen— and many of the incumbents looking most likely to lose their seats are among the worst in the House: the 3 Blue Dog co-chairs, for example. But this was the Trump-led red wave the GOP was looking for in 2022. They needed him at the top of the ticket for it to materialize. He was and it did. I’ll have more to say about individual races soon— and why garbage conservative candidates like John Avlon (NY) and Rudy Salas (CA) lost). But this evening I want to remind you that we’re in the middle of a political realignment with the Democrats seeming to abandon the working class to back the interests of the upper middle class donor class instead. It was a big mistake when Bill Clinton initiated it and it’s still a big mistake— as we saw last night.

This morning, Alexandra Rojas, executive director of Justice Democrats, noted that “The leadership of the Democratic Party has repeatedly chosen to let Trump, the GOP and corporations dictate our policy positions rather than our own base or the people who will inherit the future we are fighting for. Our leadership cannot say they stand for peace and the sanctity and prosperity of all lives if we continue to let families get forced out of their homes because they can’t make ends meet in this economy; throw away our asylum policies because of Trump’s demonizing of immigrants; or refuse to stop funding bombs we know are wiping out entire generations of families in Palestine. The Democratic Party is rapidly losing its legitimacy amongst the everyday people and marginalized communities continuously used as stepping stones to win elections. For as long as our Party has cozied up with corporate CEOs, right-wing billionaires, and big money Super PACs, everyday people in this country have seen Democrats’ populist platitudes as hypocrisy at best, and outright deceitful at worst. The reality is that the leadership of both parties is bought and paid for by billionaires and corporations that are dividing our communities, undermining our fundamental freedoms, exploiting our workers, and destroying our planet. These monied interests are on the frontlines of destroying our democracy, taking away the power of voters through their unprecedented spending in elections— while those in power refuse to stand up and fight back. For eight years, the Democratic Party has been the Party against Trump instead of the Party for the people.”

Want something to be frightened about… or be sad about? How about this?

Jeet Heer, wrote today that the Democratic Party elite is responsible and should be held to account, as we suggested for the party mandarins in Florida. “With Trump winning his second term, it is worth noting that there was no absolutely accountability by the Democratic Party when he won in 2016. Losing an election to so dangerous and corrupt a figure as Donald Trump should cause a political party to do some major inward reflection on their own failures of policy and political strategy. Instead, all the Democrats who bore responsibility for the 2016 failure— starting with Hillary Clinton— found a way to blame anyone else but them. This was most notable in the spread of the Russiagate fantasy, which had a small kernel of truth but became an elaborate liberal mythology for evading their own policy failures. Aside from Vladimir Putin, other alleged culprits for Trump’s victory included Bernie bros who allegedly sat out the election in spite, James Comey for releasing two letters about the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton, the media for overplaying the Clinton e-mail story and giving Trump too much airtime, and the general bigotry of the American public. While some of these factors did play a part in Trump’s victory, they functioned mainly as distractions from the inconvenient— to the party elite—  truth that Clinton and the Democrats bore a much greater share of the responsibility. Clinton ran an uninspired campaign that focused too much on Trump’s personal foibles, while her party refused to take responsibility for neoliberal policies that had immiserated the American working class. Further, Clinton focused her message so heavily on winning over suburban college-educated voters who were normally Republican, and who in fact overwhelmingly stayed with Trump. This caused her to ignore the much larger number of voters who were working-class and non-college-educated.”

The key to understanding the Trump era is that the real divide in America is not between left and right but between pro-system and anti-system politics. Pro-system politics is the bipartisan consensus of establishment Democrats and Republicans: It’s the politics of NATO and other military alliances, of trade agreements, and of deference to economists (as when they say that price gouging isn’t the cause of inflation). Trump stands for no fixed ideology but rather a general thumbing of the nose at this consensus.

The main fact of American politics in the post-Obama era is that an ever larger majority of Americans are angry at the status quo and open to anti-system politics. Trump won as the candidate of anti-system anger in 2016. In 2020, he suffered the liability of being the status quo even as Covid was ravaging the world. But by 2024 he was able to return again as the voice of change, bolstered by the fond memories many Americans have of the economy under his presidency— and of the temporary, but generous, expansion of the welfare state under Covid emergency measures.

On October 14, I published a column arguing that Kamala Harris was replicating the mistakes of Hillary Clinton in 2016. I wrote:

To a distressing degree, Harris has been spending the closing weeks of her campaign trying to win over Never Trump Republicans, at the expense of highlighting her own economic populism and defense of abortion rights.

This tactic inevitably calls to mind Hillary Clinton’s singular focus on Trump’s unfitness for office— an issue her campaign elevated as a way to win over suburban college-educated Republicans. As Senator Chuck Schumer notoriously declared in 2016, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Schumer’s math was ridiculously wrong for an obvious reason: Non-college-educated voters outnumber college-educated voters by nearly two to one (64 percent to 36 percent). So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Clinton lost in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin. The only thing that keeps the Democrats viable is that they have strong support from non-college-educated Black and Latino voters, but polling over the last few years shows that support from these groups has also been eroding.

One big reason Clinton lost in 2016 was that she neglected the working-class base of the party at the expense of trying to win converts from Never Trump Republicans.

I went on to argue that Harris could still make a course correction and recommit herself to economic populism. And it is true that there was some effort along this line, especially in the ads her campaign ran on local media in swing states. But in the end, this wasn’t enough. To a self-destructive degree, Harris tied herself to the policies of Joe Biden, an unpopular incumbent. This gave Trump an easy pathway to again be the voice of dissatisfaction and change.

Democrats will need to radically reform themselves if they want to ever defeat the radical right. They have to realize that non-college-educated voters, who make up two-thirds of the electorate, need to be won over. They need to realize that, for anti-system Americans, a promised return to bipartisan comity is just ancien régime restoration. They need to become the party that aspires to be more than caretakers of a broken system but rather is willing to embrace radical policies to change that status quo. This is the only path for the party to rebuild itself and for Trumpism— which without such effective opposition is likely to long outlive its standard-bearer— to actually be defeated.