The Democrats’ Defeat

On 20 January 2025 Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States. At the time of writing, it seems likely that the Republicans will win control of the House as well as the Senate. For the Democrats it is a major defeat. Never before has so much money been spent on a US election, to so little avail. For all Trump’s hobnobbing with billionaires, Harris had a large advantage in campaign funding.

The usual debate about the future of the Democrats has begun. The party’s left-wing gadfly, Bernie Sanders, has come out with a sharp denunciation of its abandonment of the working class. Historical associations range from the still painful memory of 2016 to the reorientation of the party personified by Bill Clinton in the 1990s; from Stuart Hall on the right turn in 1970s Britain to Bertolt Brecht writing from 1930s exile. But there are two distinct strands in all the opinion and argument. From the left, Gabriel Winant in Dissent pinpoints the ‘solipsism and complacency of Democratic Party officialdom’, which could barely wait to return to the losing playbook of Hillary Clinton’s doomed campaign against Trump:

Witnessing Biden’s stubbornness [and] Harris’s unaccountable refusal even to allow a token Palestinian American to deliver a pre-vetted speech at the Convention … one had to ask whether these politicians even cared whether they won or lost. They alternated between calling Republicans a mortal threat and promising to include them in the cabinet; they paused their warnings of fascist encroachment only to give cover to the world’s most militarily aggressive far-right and racist regime.

The Democrats, in other words, comprehensively failed to set the terms of ideological debate in any respect. Their defensiveness and hypocrisy served only to give encouragement to Trump while demobilising their own voters, whom they will no doubt now blame – as though millions of disaggregated, disorganised individuals can constitute a culpable agent in the same way a political party’s leadership can.

Winant’s critique of Democratic centrism offers him a context within which to locate Kamala Harris, who personifies the high-achieving, insincere, vacuous incoherence that thrives at the top of the American political class. This was evident in 2019 during her ill-fated run for the presidential nomination. It became even more apparent in 2024 when she seemed in her stage-managed interviews to be under the control of an algorithm struggling to compute the least offensive combination of phrases and buzzwords, rather than a person with actual beliefs and positions.

Harris undeniably faced misogyny and racism. These experiences gave her most famous phrase – ‘I am speaking now’ – its thrill. Here was a person, a voice asserting itself. But the question of what she had to say remained. And with their de haut en bas tone, her words merely amplified the class dynamics of an upper-middle-class, Californian tech-set lawyer talking down.

Whereas the American left look to the inner workings of the Democratic Party to account for defeat, those closer to the party’s centre tend to reverse the gaze and attribute its failure either to circumstantial factors such as post-Covid inflation, or to the left-wing policy positions that were absorbed into the party mainstream following the first Trump victory in 2016. Centrists claim that the left is committed to an identity politics that is irrelevant or repulsive to large parts of the electorate. They extend this critique to what they call macro-progressivism – the willingness of the Democrats to pursue an overtly progressive economic policy. Back in 2021, Larry Summers, for a brief period Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary and the ultimate enforcer of the 1990s neoliberal orthodoxy, warned of the implications of inflation. Now that the price shocks of 2021-23 are being cited in polls as a reason people voted for Trump, the centrists demand that the Democrats distance themselves in future from any bold economic policy experiments.*

From a historical perspective, there are two ways this battle over the future of the party could play out. In the early 1990s, after three successive defeats, the Democrats shifted to the neoliberal centre ground personified by Clinton. Obama maintained that position. After 2016, the party moved to the left, especially following its breakthrough in the 2018 midterm Congressional elections. That momentum was sustained through the 2022 midterms. The next test will be the midterms in 2026.

As data-driven pundits have pointed out, America’s recent economic history is not exceptional. Inflation was common across the West as post-Covid supply chain problems unwound. The substantial stimulus policies pursued from 2020 by the Democrat-controlled Congress and the Biden administration did not deliver markedly worse outcomes in terms of price shocks than other countries experienced. And the US did better in terms of GDP growth, productivity and employment. In terms of real wages, the inequality gap narrowed. This makes it less surprising that the loss suffered by the Democrats, though painful, was modest compared to that inflicted on incumbents in the UK or France, for instance.

The defining feature of US politics in the current era is how small the margins are. This election saw large movements in specific groups: Latino men to Trump; college graduates to Harris; better-off voters to the Democrats; working-class Americans to the Republicans. But it remains a matter of a few percentage points, with the vast majority of the electorate entrenched in two camps and most of the country barely contested. What moves those voters who do change their minds from election to election remains obscure. Both parties presented the electoral choice as one of extremes. They contended most fiercely in the swing states, fighting for a few hundred thousand voters who, despite the stark differences between the candidates and both parties’ alarmist rhetoric, apparently remained undecided. Hence the paradoxical spectacle of modest bread and butter inducements being offered in an attempt to win support for grand causes such as MAGA, or saving US democracy from Trump’s tyranny.

Faced with this surreal situation, the obsessive focus of the Democratic centrist technocrats on the finer points of Beveridge curves and output gaps increases the leftist suspicion that they are out of touch with anything beyond their bubble. This is not to deny that the question of what causes inflation is interesting and important. But it is a long way removed both from the clash of ideological identities that dominated the campaign and the daily struggles of working-class Americans, which are not a matter of a percentage point here or there in the consumer price index but of fundamental cost of living issues such as housing, healthcare, childcare and education. Large-scale structural reform is off the table, for the lack of a necessary majority. But Democrats should not conflate the real cost of living crisis with the details of macroeconomic policy calibration. In so doing, they risk hardening their modest political ambitions into false econometric certainty.

An excessively data-driven analysis can itself be profoundly misleading. The fact that 32 per cent of voters identified the economy as their number one issue in this election, and of that group 80 per cent voted Trump, should be taken for precisely what it is, a close association. The question of causation remains open. People have real economic problems, but we should not underestimate voters. If in this election you chose to say that the economy was your top concern, you were first and foremost rejecting the rhetoric of democratic emergency that dominated the Harris campaign. If this election was for you about bread and butter issues, you were not enrolling in the resistance. It is hardly surprising, therefore, to find such a large majority in this group in favour of Trump.

In modern America, neither economic self-description as articulated in polling nor political identity are independent variables. It is likely that in the coming weeks, large numbers of voters who in early November declared themselves in such surveys as the monthly Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index to be miserable about their financial circumstances will feel better about their affairs. Nothing will actually have changed in terms of jobs, prices or incomes, but because ‘their guy’ is back and Harris is out, they will feel more optimistic. Business confidence among small businesses – one of the Republicans’ core constituencies – will probably see a similar leap. To chase these votes through fine adjustments in macroeconomic policy, as though there were some optimal point on the trade-off curve that would have flipped enough of them in swing states into the Harris camp, was folly. What was needed was not a conservative shift in macroeconomic policy, but a more comprehensive political effort to acknowledge, address and neutralise the inflation issue.

If the small-bore analysis made by centrist technocrats reveals an underlying conservatism, the left critique errs in the opposite direction, overshooting the moment of anxiety and defeat. This is intellectually illuminating. It offers a kind of comfort – cold, perhaps, but nevertheless a comfort. But it takes us away from the question of how to avoid the worst in the here and now. It may be true that Democrats in their current configuration cannot constitute a truly progressive governing bloc. It may also be true that, without that bloc, many ambitious reforms will be thwarted whenever they do gain power. This is the lesson of the Biden administration, as of every progressive US administration in modern history.

But in terms of defending existing rights and power positions, in terms of retaining the possibility of further change, in terms of preventing the worst, what was at stake on 5 November were the 270 seats in the electoral college. And to have a decent chance of winning them, it was not necessary to build a historic progressive bloc. It was necessary to run a competent campaign and to field candidates capable of presenting America’s reality, both its promises and its challenges, in language that was compelling and reassuring at the same time. Biden and Harris both failed to do that, and Biden’s outrageous refusal to step aside until the last moment robbed the party of any chance of finding a stronger candidate.

In 2020 what America needed above all was to be reassured that normality was still within reach. But as Biden’s term went on, what came increasingly to the fore was his version of returning the US to its pre-Trump greatness. The Biden presidency was restorationist and Harris promised to continue in that vein. Essentially, they wanted to rerun 2020 and found themselves, instead, in 2016. They were defeated by Trump’s charismatic, free-wheeling, undisciplined promise of nationalist, xenophobic, racist and misogynistic radicalism. It may be that by 2026 the electorate will have tired of this. The economy may not play in Trump’s favour in the way it did after 2017; it is already now close to full stretch. Foreign policy is more vexed than in his first term: Ukraine could become what Afghanistan was for Biden, a humiliating defeat. And despite his calls for peace, his positioning on the Middle East points in the opposite direction. By 2028 a fresh team of Democrats may fancy their chances. Being the party of normality has its appeal, but it reinforces precisely the wrong instinct. The polycrisis that is unfolding demands not a return to the status quo but urgent, progressive answers both at home and abroad. To formulate and articulate those, the Democrats need politicians, not algorithms. They need personalities capable of responding to the profound questions facing contemporary America.

13 November