According to progressives like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Party’s collapse in the 2024 election is a very simple story. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sanders wrote on November 6th. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.”
Sanders and other progressives are right, at least partly. Economic anxieties did drive many voters, especially working-class voters, to throw their lot in with former President Donald Trump. Nonetheless, some progressive policies enjoy broad public support, even in red states like Missouri, which recently voted to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and require most employers to provide paid sick leave.
But in the bigger picture, across the country, left-leaning, working-class Democrats suffered major setbacks. In Montana, Jon Tester lost the Senate seat he won in 2006. Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, one of the nation’s fiercest advocates for labor rights, and first elected to the Senate in the same year as Tester, lost to a wage-thieving car dealer. In that state’s ninth congressional district, Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), who has been in office since 1983 and never won below 55 percent of the vote, only won reelection by less than a percentage point. Clearly, working-class politics—the true kind, not the hollow promises of Trump and JD Vance—wasn’t enough to save congressional Democrats this year.
Does that conclusion extend to Vice President Kamala Harris? She certainly didn’t run as a progressive à la Sanders. She walked back her previous support for Medicare for All and a federal jobs guarantee. On foreign policy, she diverged from progressive positions like an arms embargo on Israel. But Vice President Harris didn’t lose due to her failure to commit to progressive policies, as The Gavel News editor Julie Huynh eloquently argued. Rather, she lost because she was seen as too liberal by a right-wing electorate exasperated by four years of Democratic governance.
Here, I draw on a data set of over 3,000 voters published by Blueprint, a Democratic-aligned public research initiative. Of 25 criticisms of Harris, “Harris is too pro-Israel” ranked 23rd in relative importance. On the other hand, among the strongest criticisms of Harris were inflation (1st), illegal immigration (2nd), and “Harris is too liberal” (9th). In fact, most of the top criticisms can be generalized as some variation of “Harris is too liberal.” To the median voter, Harris was closer to a fiscally incompetent, border-opening, Biden-lite radical liberal than a cop-loving génocidaire.
Of course, that characterization is unbelievable to us progressives because we know Harris isn’t one of us. We called her “Copmala” as a pejorative in 2020. We accused her of selling out for becoming Biden’s running mate after blasting his opposition to busing and jovial recollections of working with segregationist senators. We demanded, though not always expected, greater displays of courage from her on the genocide in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis on the Mexican border. But we progressives are a political minority. Relative to the electorate, our priorities and beliefs are unimportant and unpopular, and the numbers prove it.
According to the Blueprint data set, the most effective criticism of Harris among swing voters who broke for Trump was “Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues instead of helping the middle class.” After the presidential debate in September, we rightfully mocked Trump for his ugly remark that Harris wanted “to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” a gross spin on an interview in which Harris supported gender-affirming surgeries (i.e. providing healthcare) for transgender prison inmates. But the Trump campaign produced a TV ad centered on that quote, ending with the line “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” Tragically, it was one of Trump’s most effective ads. The ad aired at least 30,000 times in every swing state and shifted voters 2.7 percentage points in favor of Trump after watching it. It didn’t matter that Harris barely brought up transgender rights on the campaign trail, because Trump was still able to dishonestly brand her as a wildly liberal, out-of-touch radical coastal elite.
That’s how he won: by lying. He won by lying about the historically strong economy, the lives of hardworking immigrants, his eminently qualified opponent, and everything else under the sun. If you think Americans can’t stand liars, Donald Trump will break your heart every day. If he’d ever told voters the truth, he wouldn’t have won reelection, but an election won with smoke and mirrors is an election fairly won. More than half of Americans believe we’re in a recession. They’re wrong. Most voters believe government support for transgender rights has gone too far. They’re wrong. And 47 percent of voters believed Vice President Harris was too extreme. That number was lower than the 54 percent of voters who believed Trump was too extreme, but while Harris only won 5 percent of the voters who believed she was too extreme, Trump won 12 percent. Of course, part of this is a reflection of our nation’s apparent willingness to pick and choose when Trump is being serious. But besides that, the American electorate is just more conservative than we progressives would like to believe.
Revisiting the argument that, as Senator Sanders claims, explicitly running on a progressive platform could have carried Harris to victory, I see potential but not a panacea. Harris called for transformative policies, to be sure, but frustratingly, she lacked a snappy, signature policy like Medicare for All or “Build the Wall” (“$25,000 in down payment support for first-time home buyers” is good policy, but you can’t put it on a yard sign). For the record, I’m skeptical that adopting progressive policies across the board would have changed the outcome — it’s possible, especially because it could have differentiated her from President Biden, but it could have bolstered Trump’s argument that she was a dangerous, radical California liberal. Working-class voters have been voting against their economic interests for decades, as the right has consistently leveraged cultural issues to distract from their disastrous economic policies. At the end of the day, the Harris campaign operated on the flawed assumption that voters wanted to turn the page on the Trump era. The average voter certainly disliked Trump as a person but voted for him because they missed the life and economy they had before the pandemic. It was the only way of regaining the past.
So how do we build the future? At this moment, the progressive movement is at its lowest ebb since at least Ronald Reagan’s reelection 40 years ago. Another Trump presidency will gut labor rights, intensify the genocide of Palestinians, and decimate the global environment, among countless other devastating things. And the 2028 Democratic nomination is shaping up to be a jungle; I count eight current governors, senators, and representatives who probably have at least some interest in running, such as Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and Arizona Senator-elect Ruben Gallego. Though it’s far too early to tell, for all the reasons I expressed earlier, the party has little reason to nominate a progressive. The year 2028 may spell defeat once again.
But victory is, and always will be, measured beyond candidates and elections. The biggest victories are won every day. They are won by people who refuse to surrender to their suffering or wallow in what could have been. I know these victors personally. They are the Haitian youth of Brighton High School who refuse to let lies and dishonesty define their humanity. They are the Boston College students who cried on November 6 but found reasons for joy on the 7th. They found their faith in the American promise, in dark passages and bright days alike. In the work that is to come, we will find our faith again.
Aspiring high school history teacher. Some of my opinions are OK
