The Dems Are Lying to Themselves About Why They Lost
And that will make it much harder for them to turn the ship around.
After half a year out of the public eye, Kamala Harris reemerged… to promote a book. In an appearance this summer on the “Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” Harris announced that her book, 107 Days, would give readers a “personal and candid” tour of last year’s ill-fated presidential campaign. But it rapidly became clear that the book would hardly provide a hard-hitting look at the reasons Donald Trump won back the White House.
When Colbert asked what Harris would have done differently, she responded that “none of us achieves any success without having an incredible team.” Asked whether she could have done more to distance herself from Joe Biden, Harris assured the audience that “I have an incredible amount of respect for him.” By the end of the half-hour interview, even Colbert, about as sympathetic an interviewer as Harris could have hoped for, lost patience. When Harris evaded yet another question by saying that a full answer “requires a lot more time than we have right now,” Colbert turned to the audience and dead-panned: “Are we in a hurry, guys?”
The book, published this week, confirms that Harris doesn’t have a serious theory as to why she lost. She has become a little more willing to criticize Biden; but rather than grappling with the real failings of the administration in which she served as vice president, she mostly focuses on his supposed lack of loyalty to her. (She was, she writes, “angry and disappointed” after Biden called her in the run-up to her debate with Donald Trump to warn her not to distance herself from him: “I just couldn’t understand why he would call me, right now, and make it all about himself.”) She suggests that she decided against choosing Pete Buttigieg as her running-mate in part because she thought Americans would struggle to accept a gay vice president, writing that he would have been a perfect running mate for her if she was a straight white guy. (“We were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man … It was too big a risk.”)
Other than that, the entire book is custom-tailored to hone in on a single argument, which has the disadvantage of being boring and unconvincing, but the apparent advantage of preserving her ability to run again: Harris insists over and over that she simply did not have enough time to mount a compelling campaign.
Given how disastrous the consequences of Harris’s loss are likely to prove, her lack of introspection about the reasons for it are especially galling. And as it happens, her attempt to deflect any blame from herself is so ham-fisted that it is likely to backfire; the title, the thesis and the tenor of her book practically invite readers, whatever their political orientation, to retort with all of the ways in which she herself is at fault for her defeat.
But it would be unfair to single her out, for in truth she is closer to being the rule than the exception. Other parts of the Democratic Party don’t appear much more keen to discover the causes of their defeat. The party is, for example, about to publish an “autopsy report” on the 2024 election. According to media accounts, it will exclude any consideration of mistakes made by the Harris campaign or even the role played by Joe Biden’s initial insistence on staying in the race.
This has left the Democrats in a strange position. After eight tumultuous months in office, Donald Trump has grown unpopular with the American public. His approval ratings have steadily fallen. He is now about 10 points underwater. But despite this window of opportunity, Democrats are failing to capitalize on their opponent’s weakness.
According to a poll this summer in The Wall Street Journal, 33 percent of voters hold a favorable view of Democrats, compared with 63 percent who hold an unfavorable one—the party’s worst numbers in the history of the poll. The generic ballot, which has historically been a good predictor of results in elections like next year’s midterms, is a little less scary. House Democrats hold a 3-point advantage over House Republicans. But at the same point in the 2018 electoral cycle, when they beat Republicans in a landslide, they held a 7-point advantage.
So what would an honest autopsy reveal? Why are Democrats so unpopular with so many Americans? And how can the party accomplish the one thing that is indispensable if it wants to resist Trump’s escalating attacks on the basic rules and norms of the American Republic—win elections?
Insofar as Democrats have grappled with their defeat at all, they have blamed an unfavorable information landscape, sometimes even claiming that voters soured on Biden’s administration due to “misinformation.” On every metric that mattered, they claim, his term in office was a huge success; if ordinary voters do not recognize the merits of “Bidenomics” or the successes of his foreign policy, it is because of the omnipresent propaganda on X, Fox News, and the Joe Rogan show.
The truth is less flattering. The inflation-adjusted income of average Americans fell over the course of Biden’s term in office, as Jason Furman, a Harvard professor who served as Barack Obama’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, has pointed out. The poverty rate rose. Nor was the crisis at the southern border imaginary. In part because Biden’s White House issued a series of executive orders that reduced enforcement, the number of illegal crossings surged in an unprecedented manner between 2020 and 2023.
Democrats were also harmed by quashing debate about Biden’s evident cognitive decline. His incapacity left the administration without an effective spokesman. It also provoked a crisis of trust in its principal protagonists. That will likely cast a shadow over the party’s future until a new generation of leaders is willing to level with the American public about this collective failing in a—truly—“personal and candid” fashion.
Nor, as her ill-fated interview with Colbert once again demonstrated, was Harris a strong candidate. Back in 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign suffered from talking too much about policy detail and too little about a broader vision for America—but at least voters understood the kinds of things that Clinton would seek to do on her first day in office. Harris’s campaign, by contrast, was an exercise in vibes. Harris would, she promised, spread joy; but many voters struggled to understand what she actually wanted to do with the power to which she aspired.
The most important reason for the difficulties Democrats are facing is even more profound: They are out of step with the views and the values of most Americans.
It is at times tempting to think that American voters don’t know what they want. They were angry at Biden’s lax handling of the southern border but quickly turned on Trump’s heavy-handed immigration policies. They mistrust Democrats on economic policy, fearing that they will raise taxes without courting economic growth, and yet they dislike Trump’s “big and beautiful” budget bill.
But there is a coherence beneath the apparent confusion. On both economic and cultural issues, most Americans have views that are both moderate and reasonable. Those views don’t merely amount to splitting the difference between the current positions of Democrats and Republicans; they are a principled expression of moderation.
Economically, most Americans are deeply aspirational. They want their leaders to focus on economic growth and believe in the promise of the market economy. This makes them skeptical of Democrats’ tendency to favor high taxes and introduce onerous regulations. At the same time, most Americans are angry at the ease with which billionaire hedge fund managers and large corporations can evade paying their fair share of tax. They both believe in capitalism and are angry at the privileges enjoyed by self-serving insiders.
Culturally, most Americans despise any form of bigotry, discrimination, or exclusion. They are outraged by racism, appreciate the contributions that immigrations have made to the country, and believe that sexual minorities should be able to live their lives as they choose. This makes them deeply concerned when Trump deports Hispanics to foreign jails without a semblance of due process and throws patriotic service members out of the military because they happen to be trans. But most Americans also suspect that universities, and other important institutions, routinely discriminate against white and Asian American applicants in the name of diversity; that it is important for a nation to control its own borders; and that athletes who have experienced male puberty enjoy an unfair advantage in female sporting competitions.
All of this suggests a path forward for Democrats that is both principled and pragmatic.
Take the economy. When Democrats attack capitalism, they make themselves electorally irrelevant in large swaths of the country they desperately need to vanquish Trumpism. But Democrats can absolutely expand their coalition by combining an appreciation of the free market with a sharp condemnation of the ways in which the current practice of capitalism is rigged. They should fully embrace an aspirational vision centered on economic growth—while full-throatedly condemning corrupt forms of crony capitalism.
Something similar holds true for culture. During the time of Richard Nixon, the “silent majority” of Americans may have been sexist, racist, and homophobic. Today it is not. It is absolutely possible to win electoral majorities if you fight for a tolerant America that opposes racism without degenerating into a zero-sum brand of identity politics; if you celebrate the contributions of immigrants without giving up on enforcing the southern border; and if you stand up for the rights of sexual minorities, such as the trans service members who are being pushed out of the military, without decrying as a bigot anybody who has concerns about the fairness of trans athletes competing in female sporting competitions.
So why didn’t Harris say any of these things in her interview with Colbert? Why, in fact, are so few Democrats anywhere in the country willing to level with the American public?
Political scientists have long constructed models of electoral politics in which parties swiftly and efficiently move toward the positions that are most likely to let them win national elections. But in practice, there are many obstacles that stop parties from responding to the preferences of voters.
Legislators in safe seats may care more about winning primaries than about building nationwide majorities. Activist groups, young staffers, and big donors may be more interested in their own political purity than in winning elections. Elected officials, increasingly stuck in a narrow partisan echo chamber, may fail to understand the preferences of the voters for whose support they are supposed to vie. All of these factors help to explain why Democrats haven’t been able to seize the vacant center of American politics.
Since the election, there has been some debate about the outsized influence of “The Groups,” the sprawling network of nonprofit organizations, from Indivisible to Poder Latinx, funded by billionaires and progressive foundations that have an outsized influence on the Democratic Party. As critics have pointed out, many elected leaders are hamstrung by a perceived need to fill out an endless stream of questionnaires from such organizations, thereby committing them to honoring the orthodoxies that alienate most other voters. But the more fundamental problem is that the party’s personnel is increasingly drawn from an elite milieu that is likely to agree with those orthodoxies in the first place.
The Democratic Party sees itself as the advocate of the little man. But according to one telling chart, Harris’s electoral coalition was so affluent that it most closely resembled that which voted for Bob Dole, the Republican candidate, in 1996. For all of its lip service to diversity, the personnel that staffs the Democratic Party and its affiliated organizations is even more homogeneous. These staffers are highly likely to have attended a prestigious college, to live on the coasts, and to have spent the bulk of their lives working in politics.
For all these reasons, the energy in the party has for the past decade been with a toxically unpopular form of identity politics. Some senior figures within the party continue to defend these ideas—and the more radical the actions of the Trump administration become, the more loudly they will claim that any course correction amounts to capitulating to the White House. If Democrats decide to dig in their heels, they will likely continue to lose favor with the American public.
Even quietly walking back some of the most extreme ideological excesses of the past decade, as the Harris campaign arguably did in 2024, is unlikely to suffice. To fix the party’s brand, Democrats need to distance themselves from their most unpopular positions—and then formulate a new worldview with enough clarity that voters actually understand what they now stand for. Some leaders have had the courage to criticize the party’s positions on a few hot button issues, like Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona. But so far they too have failed to give voice to such a broader vision in a principled and steadfast manner.
The irony of the present political moment is that Republicans are also failing to speak for the great majority of Americans.
Trump has pulled off a remarkable electoral feat. Back in 2016, he was seen as helming a coalition of the past. Against the odds, he had somehow managed to mobilize enough old, rural white voters to defeat the Democrats’ supposedly ascendant coalition. But this feat was sure to prove temporary, as indicated by Trump’s inability to win the popular vote. As the American electorate continued to diversify—with demographic groups that have traditionally voted for Democrats growing and those that traditionally voted for Republicans shrinking—the specter of Trumpism was widely expected to be banished from American politics.
Instead, Trump gradually diversified his electoral coalition. Between 2016 and 2024, he significantly lost in vote share among white voters. He compensated by increasing his share of among black, Asian American, and especially Hispanic voters. As many of the Republican Party’s younger leaders have explicitly stated, its future likely lies in turning into a movement of the multiracial working class.
But that is not how Trump has governed so far. His budget may have included a few shrewd concessions to aspirational voters, such as exempting tips from income tax; on the whole, it was an exercise in redistribution from the bottom to the top. So far, the pull of special interest groups and the ideological predilections of big donors count for more than electoral self-interest.
Nor does this administration speak for most voters on cultural issues. A clear majority of Americans—incidentally including most Hispanics—were unhappy with Biden’s permissive handling of the southern border. But only a minority of Americans favor the cruel chase for illegal immigrants on which top administration officials have publicly prided themselves.
Over the last few electoral cycles, America has seemed split into two rigid ideological blocs: Blue America and Red America. But the reality is rather more subtle. On major policy questions, most Americans have reasonable views that aren’t well represented by either party. Far from polarizing into two implacable blocs, Americans are increasingly refusing to identify with either Democrats or Republicans; indeed, the number of independents has steadily risen.
As Yuval Levin and Ruy Teixeira have argued, this leaves a giant political opening that could allow either party to construct a much broader electoral coalition, one that would likely dominate the next quarter-century of American politics. Both parties have a clear path toward building such an electoral juggernaut by overcoming the special interest groups and ideological constraints that have made them so inflexible. If Democrats want to win elections and put an end to the MAGA movement, they need to be the first to get there.
That means they need a leader who shares the worldview of the majority of Americans, someone who can fight for an inclusive America without sounding woke and take on special interests without talking like a socialist. That candidate will need the courage to confront the constituencies, from activist groups to progressive billionaires, that currently hold outsized sway in the party. A candidate sufficiently inured to the wrath of the ideological enforcers within the party will talk like a normal person—and actually say something worth listening to when they are given an opportunity to speak to millions of people on TV.
Trump is doing what he can to squander the huge opportunity for a political realignment that last year’s victory handed him and his party. It is perfectly possible for Democrats to step into the breach, and set themselves up to win a lasting majority for a more inclusive vision of America. If they fail, they may have only themselves to blame.
A version of this essay was originally published by the Boston Globe.
You can leave out the part after “about why the lost the election”.