Democrats Have Only Themselves to Blame

One way to process a traumatic event is to tell yourself things couldn’t have been any other way. When Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump eight years ago, this self-protective reflex gave us a host of excuses from prominent liberal politicians and media figures: Russian bots and nebulously-defined “election hacking”; Bernie Sanders’s primary challenge; the existence of third-party candidates; the amorphous menace of “populism”; and so on. Scapegoats like these were useful in deflecting blame from those actually responsible for bungling a winnable election. They also served to mystify Trump’s victory by pinning it on forces beyond human awareness or control.

It’s still too early to say with any certainty how America’s liberals are going to process Trump’s decisive defeat of Kamala Harris this week. But, sure enough, some elite Democrats and pro-Harris media figures are already casting themselves as hapless victims of circumstance and suggesting Trump’s reelection was more or less inevitable. Leading the charge has been the Harris campaign itself, which in an official statement cited “unprecedented headwinds that were largely out of our control”, lamenting that “the whole country moved to the right” as if describing a weather event or an act of God. Harris, as MSNBC broadcaster Joy Reid argues, ran a “historic, flawless” campaign that was failed by voters (a line also pushed by several others). In fact, there was absolutely nothing inevitable about Trump’s victory – and it’s nakedly obvious where the blame for it lies.

Clinton 3.0.

As in 2016, Trump remains a divisive and exceptionally unpopular figure and, all told, looks to have received just 2890,000 more votes in 2024 than he did in 2020. With the assistance of big corporate donors, Democrats out-fundraised their opponent by huge margins. After Biden’s victory four years ago, they also had a readymade template for how to defeat him — preaching ambitious social policies and activist government — but bafflingly opted to pursue a rerun of Clinton’s disastrous strategy instead.

Eschewing populist messaging and any attempt to reach out to the progressive left, Harris championed a warmed-over version of the “everything is fine” ethos that doomed Democrats in 2016. Surrounding herself with a coterie of advisors from the Obama and Clinton extended universes, she leaned heavily on celebrity endorsements – “She had Queen Latifah [who] never endorses anyone!” noted one MSNBC host, expressing their shock at Harris’s loss – and cast herself as a post-ideological “pragmatist”. Abandoning Biden 2020’s embrace of Roosevelt-inspired messaging and rhetorical salvos against big business, she eagerly took campaign advice from her brother-in-law at Uber and made billionaire Mark Cuban one of her most prominent surrogates. Amid a cost of living crisis, and given existing perceptions of the Democratic Party as elitist and out of touch, it was an approach that evidently failed to resonate.

At its core, the Harris campaign’s strategy rested on the idea there was a vast reservoir of right-leaning anti-Trump voters it could rely on to deliver victory and conducted itself accordingly. Dick Cheney, who left office with an approval rating of -13, was welcomed onboard, as was his daughter Liz, a former Republican Congresswoman whose primary loss in 2022 was the second-worst experienced by a House incumbent in 60 years. Harris pledged to appoint a Republican to her cabinet and spent more time campaigning alongside the likes of Cuban and Cheney than with popular labour leader Shawn Fain of the United Auto Workers union. Her campaign bafflingly sent the rabidly pro-Israel congressman Richie Torres to Michigan to antagonise Arab Americans and trotted out Bill Clinton to defend Israel’s killing of civilians.

This supposedly pragmatic strategy can only be called a catastrophic failure, even on its own terms. Despite months of outreach to Republicans, Democrats ultimately won the same minuscule share of Republican voters they attracted in 2020 – losing millions who voted for Biden four years ago.

True enough, Biden’s profound unpopularity – on the eve of this week’s vote his disapproval rating was a dismal 56% – did create real problems for Harris. The Democratic establishment’s decision to ignore both polls and common sense and go all-in on his reelection until the charade became impossible can thus be blamed for quite a lot. Nonetheless, the Harris campaign could have distanced itself from the incumbent president and mostly didn’t even bother. Substantively, it remained in lockstep with his deeply unpopular support for Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Afforded the chance to say what she would have done differently from the country’s much-disliked president, Harris came back with nothing (besides appointing a token Republican to her cabinet).

A slow-motion car-crash.

Very little of this was inevitable or the result of conditions beyond the Democrats’ control. Gifted an unprecedented opportunity to change course a few months out from the election, they instead embraced a strategy already proven to fail: promising continuity and running as the standard bearers for Washington’s ancien régime. In an age shaped by popular antipathy towards the political mainstream, this pro-establishment message was destined to fall flat. Trump’s populist bona fides have always been a sham, but given the option of showing deference to elites or spitting in their faces, countless millions who feel hopeless and ignored by those in power were obviously going to choose the latter (those hit hardest by inflation appear to have voted overwhelmingly for Trump, for example, while those least affected voted overwhelmingly for Harris).

In the 1990s, neoliberal triangulation was sometimes a viable electoral strategy against a backdrop of economic growth and generalised optimism about the century ahead. In a world defined by stagnating wages, falling living standards, rising precarity and a faltering political and economic settlement, the so-called “third way” is an anachronism that can no longer deliver even short-term victories against compromised opponents. As long as nominally progressive and liberal parties continue to champion a broken system and reject transformative mass politics, the radical right will continue to win.

In the coming weeks, elite Democrats will keep insisting that Trump’s reelection was unavoidable, blaming every group and demographic imaginable, from Arabs and Muslims to Latinos to the handful of voters who opted for a third-party candidate. As in 2016, nothing about this outcome was inevitable – and the Democrats have no one to blame but themselves.

Update, 12 November 2024: The vote count had not been completed when we first published this piece, which claimed that Trump had won 2m fewer votes in 2024 than in 2020. With approximately 95.1% of the votes now counted, Trump has won 890,000 more than in 2020.