A Manifesto For Despairing Democrats
All hope is not lost. To recover from this bruising election defeat, the Democratic Party needs to rediscover the nucleus that once bound it together - its defence of the American working-class.
Democrats find themselves staring into a bottomless pit of despair, as they’re forced to grapple with the fact they have to face another four years of a Trump presidency without controlling any of the levers of Congress to restrain him from his worst impulses.
The one solace they can find is that Tuesday’s election results could have been so much worse. In fact, it was almost apocalyptic. If the June debate that forced Joe Biden to retire from frontline politics had never happened – which, by all intents and purposes, it shouldn’t have since presidential debates are usually held in the Autumn – then, Biden would have remained as the nominee, likely leading the party to its biggest defeat since 1984. 6-8 Senate seats would have been lost, giving the GOP a filibuster-proof majority, not to mention an overwhelming majority in the House. Ironically, Harris may have saved the party, just not in the way she might have hoped.
But that’s just a hypothetical. This is the reality. The election wasn’t even close. For the first time since 2004, a Republican presidential candidate won the popular vote. Voters not only chose him but also picked a Republican Senate to empower him further. Trump now has a clear mandate. And with few opponents in his party to stop him, he’s free to pursue whatever policy or retribution he wishes.
Reckoning with the surprising defeat should be a starting place for the Democrats, before they entangle themselves into debates about policy positioning or the culture war. In recent years, liberalism has been consumed by a panic over “misinformation,” an impulse toward the management of online discourse and media coverage to protect the vulnerable public from the lure of populism and conspiracism. The lesson of 2024 isn’t that this managerial effort failed to protect swing voters from fake news. It’s that it succeeded in a more perverse purpose: It protected liberals from reality, from seeing all the ways that their own choices were leading downward to a predictable defeat.
Instead of complaining and grovelling, Democrats need to understand why 51% of the electorate rejected them before they can even begin to start on the road to recovery. Too many Democrats reflexively assume that any person backing Trump must be a bigot or an idiot. But let’s beware of invidious stereotypes, for finger-wagging condescension alienates undecided voters; it’s difficult to win support from people you’re calling idiots and racists. Many working-class Americans have been left behind economically and have reason to feel angry. And Democrats aren’t going to win elections as long as they seethe at a majority of voters.
The magnitude of Trump’s victory was such that the idea that a single tactical or strategic miscalculation cost Harris the election is an absurd proposition. She did not lose because of Gaza or because she refused to go on Joe Rogan. She lost ground with every demographic, failed to outperform Biden in any state and struggled from the countryside to the city. For several decades, voters identified more with the Democratic Party than with the Republican Party. But in some polls this year, more people have affiliated with the Republican Party than with the Democratic Party. That speaks to a wider problem. It’s also not enough to just blame the state of the economy (or, at least, the perception of it), though that certainly played a large role with how ubiquitous it is. Trends like Latinos and the working-class drifting away from the Democrats has been happening for over two decades now. This election just turbocharged it.
It was foreseeable that voters would punish the Biden administration for failing to make a major policy pivot after the midterm elections, when despite the Democrats’ overperformance in key Senate races, they still lost the House of Representatives and saw no meaningful improvement to Joe Biden’s dismal approval ratings.
Triangulating after a midterm loss is a tried-and-true tactic for improving an administration’s position, yet it’s a tactic that the Biden Democrats largely eschewed: There was no Clintonian push for a sweeping legislative deal on deficit reduction, no serious outreach on social issues, no reconsideration of the aggressive efforts to regulate gas-powered cars or forgive student loans, and only a too-little-too-late effort to restore order to the southern border.
It was painfully obvious, that Joe Biden was not equipped for the rigors of a re-election campaign, let alone the rigors of four more years in office. This reality the Democratic Party did get around to reckoning with — but at least a year too late, and only when the reckoning was forced upon its leadership. And that delay was fatal, because of another foreseeability: that Kamala Harris was just not the candidate that a political party would put up if it took its own rhetoric about the existential stakes of the election seriously.
There is a glimmer of hope amidst all this gloom and sorrow. The fact downballot Democrat candidates running for the Senate and House outperformed Harris by not-so insignificant margins is proof that this election wasn’t an outright reject of the party itself much like 1984 once was. Candidate quality still matters. Republicans are on track to keeping the House by a very small majority after suffering high-profile losses in New York and California. It won’t take much to flip it in 2026.
Reclaiming Congress and the White House by 2028 is possible, but only if they commit to reform. What follows is by no means an exhaustive list, but it offers a rough framework for the party to work with and start to rebuild. Here are a few things they can do differently:
1. A compelling and unifying message = What Democrats need the most is an overarching narrative, something that can reunite its fractured coalition and allow it to win back the trust of the American working-class. It’s not enough for liberals to proclaim that they have better policies because Democrats increasingly are the party of university-educated elites, and they have an unfortunate knack for coming across as remote and patronizing scolds. They need to win back their trust, which involves changing how they’re perceived. To do that, they first need to clear out the old vanguard. Pelosi, Schumer, Biden, Harris, Clinton – all of them need to be ignored and forgotten about. The party needs to move on from the legacies of the past and replace them with new blood, rising stars that can deliver the party’s message eloquently. Whoever replaces Jaime Harrison as chair of the party needs to be beholden to the party’s base, not its archaic elite who have proven they do not understand the interests of most voters. The nomination process needs to be overhauled, so that its more accessible and transparent to avoid the pitfalls that befell Sanders in ‘16 and ‘20 when the party’s apparatus conspired to deny a populist from seeking the nomination.
To her credit, Harris offered a little bit here and there. 50k tax break for startups. 6k child tax credit. No taxes on tips (though, that was clearly plagiarised from Trump). While they may have been appealing, there was ultimately no coherent vision for what a Harris administration would look like, which was all but confirmed when she was asked on the The View what she would do differently than Biden, to which she replied, ‘nothing.’
2. Break with neoliberalism and embrace economic populism = The Democrats are struggling to persuade less-engaged voters like young men, the working-class and certain minority groups, all who happen to be the most economically vulnerable. Embracing a populist message is the key to winning them back. The Democrats have never fully grappled with the wreckage of fifty years of neoliberal dominance, which has left swathes of American adrift as local places are hollowed out, rapacious profit seeking cannibalizes the common good, and unchecked new technology separates, isolates and radicalises people. The last 4-5 Democratic presidential campaigns have been marked by lacklustre rhetoric, often too closely alligned with the establishment over fears of alienating the wealthy donors that fund and lobby certain party leaders. Harris pivoted right on economics and coddled the Cheneys, Biden was more focused on ‘restoring America’s soul’ than any tangible economic revival and Clinton regurgitated the same playbook given to her by Goldman Sachs.
Going forward, they need to confront the housing and wealth inequality issue head on. That needs to be the centre of their campaign. It’s extremely clear by now that policies matter far less than how the message is conveyed. And it's not just about a more powerful message, it's about harping on one, maybe two issues all the time, so that all media coverage has to cover that repeatedly. Speaking on a broad range of topics in a clear, satisfactory way will just mean nobody remembers what you said.
The hurt is there for average Americans. Trump keeping Elon Musk, one of the wealthiest men in the world, actively involved in his administration will be a reminder of that. Highlight tech billionaires stealing people’s data and listening to them through through their apps is a threat almost anyone can acknowledge is dystopian. When Musk inevitably uses his position to harvest data or manipulate the levers of power, that will be a good gateway. Poor and middle class people get eaten up by medical bills and that’s unlikely to change in Trumps term. Return the party to its New Deal roots.
3. There needs to be a clean break from identity politics = What many struggling Americans want is a redistribution of dignity and some vision of increased opportunity. Instead, they get lectured about identity and insensitive language. Wokeness may seem like a little thing, but it offended people viscerally and was taken as an emblem of a party run amok. It’s abundantly clear that most voters find it, at best, divisive, and, at worse, destructive and counterproductive. o regain primacy, they’ll need to row back on progressive ideas such as transgenderism, reparations and racial quotas, all backed by no more than 30% of Americans. That doesn’t mean sacrificing vulnerable or marginalised communities, it means stop perpetuating views that are considered anathema to most voters - harping on about toxic masculinity, labeling anyone opposed to mass immigration a fascist/racist and defending ideas 99.999% of the world disagrees with except for Twitter progressives, such as biological men competing in women’s sports. That last one might not affect too many voters, but the mere idea of even defending it pushes people away. While many on the educated left live in a highly verbal world and perceived the push to tweak language and offer pronouns as an effort to be inclusive, it came across to the working-class as excluding them and generally confusing.
A person’s gender or racial identity is starting to matter less. Many assumed (incorrectly), that the GOP’s hardline stance on immigration and crime would push Hispanics and African-Americans away, respectively. What ended up happening was Trump built the most diverse voter coalition for a Republican candidate in decades. Most Latino men voted for him, despite the fact he advocated for deportations and more stringent border controls. There are several factors that explain this development but the most convincing one, perhaps, is that minority groups are starting to vote based on their class and own personal grievances rather than their ethnicity.
4. Reclaim patriotism and faith = It might be easy for the liberals in their cosmopolitian bubbles to forget, but tens of millions of Americans are motivated by their faith and love of country. Conservatives effectively weaponise this to their own benefit by painting their opponents as Godless traitors who care very little about their constitutencies. And to a degree, they’re right. This is compounded by the tendency of some on the educated left to scorn religion, which to many voters is a pillar of reassurance in difficult times. Given that 74 percent of Americans believe in God, according to Gallup, while only 38 percent of those over the age of 25 have a B.A., condescension is a disastrous strategy. They need to re-package their policies in ways that can rebuke these claims they’re not patriotic enough. Democrats should argue why investing in forgotten communities and uplifting the poor is the best civic duty one can make, why fighting the corporate class from exploiting the Earth’s natural resources and abandoning communities is the most patriotic duty one can muster. It’s all about the message - how Democrats entwine the two together.
5. Campaign less with celebrities and seek common ground with working people once again = No one is going to change who they vote for depending on which candidate Mark Ruffalo endorses. It’s clearly not working. Despite boasting a roster of supporters that included Eminem, LeBron James, Beyonce, Billie Eilish, Oprah, Harris still fell short in all of the swing states by two points. Remaining within the parameters of Hollywood circles just reinforces the perception that the Democrats are the party of the elite, an image they need to shred to win back trust. Celebrity endorsements should be kept to a minimum and only deployed strategically in locations that make sense. They’re good at energising the party but do very little at converting voters.
6. Embrace new forms of media from the ground up = As the old media legacy becomes more obsolete with each passing year, more people have drifted to alt-media for their news. It’s something the American Right has been exploiting for years now, creating their own hegemony over podcasts and streams, recruiting new voters through effective messaging and positing them as anti-establishment. It’s one of the reasons Trump managed to connect with young people and win over a majority of first time voters. There is no reason only right-wing influencers should control the largest podcasts. Democrats not only need to fund their own ecosystem but allow it to develop organically and keep them in check, much to the same extent right-wing podcasts pressure their party into adopting new positions.
7. Stop blindly defending institutions = If democrats are always in the position where they’re defending democratic institutions that most people find to be fundamentally broken or elitist, then they’re going to be defenders of a broken system, ceding Trump and his acolytes the political capital style themselves as mavericks willing to tear down these aforementioned institutions and in an era of polarization and anti-establishment sentiment, that has never been more appealing. Abstract concepts of defending democracy will not resonate in the same way as tangible things like wages and the price of groceries. To combat this, they need to go one step further – it can’t just be about salvaging democracy but also fixing and reforming it so it’s accountable, transparent and listens to the interests of the majority. Now they’re in opposition, it is an argument that becomes a lot easier and less hypocritical for Democrats to make.