Losing parties are always looking for an explanation. When they lose big – when they lose the White House and both houses of Congress – that search becomes a full calculation. What’s wrong with the Democrats? How can they justify themselves?
Those questions are not without answers. The challenge is to determine what is most important.
The simple answer – and indeed part of the explanation – is “we want a better person”. Kamala Harris was truly terrifying. But that only raises another question: why did the Democrats end up with such a clunker?
The mainstream media did their best to shut him down, partly because they liked Harris and partly because they hated Donald Trump. That’s why they ignored his obvious mistakes six weeks after party leaders abandoned Joe Biden and anointed Harris as his successor. He was promoted to the top by bad journalists and broadcasters. When their hot air died down, Kamala crashed. Even spending $1.5 billion filling the runways with silly ads wasn’t enough to convince centrist, independent voters.
Harris faced several challenges. The first, and most important, was that he was second in command in the unpopularity. He was inextricably bound to its failure. If almost 80 percent of voters say the country is “on the wrong track”, the burden is almost insurmountable.
That burden was made even heavier by the fact that the vice president’s job was to handle immigration – and it was dangerous. He always assured the public that the border was closed and secure. It wasn’t, and the voters knew it.
Second, Harris could not justify these claims by pointing to any significant accomplishments, whether as vice president or US senator. He didn’t say anything about those years and just mentioned his previous record as California’s attorney general.
Third, Harris lacked an identity important to voters at every level: he was unable to articulate, clearly and externally, what he stood for. That was a two-fold problem. One was his salads that were always talked about. One of them was the inability to explain why he changed positions on several important policies, abandoning those he was promoting as the Left’s candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2019-2020. Without a convincing explanation, voters did not know what policies he would pursue as president. It wasn’t enough to say, “I’m not Trump, and I’m not Biden”.
Bad interviews
Harris’ inability to speak coherently off the cuff also meant that he could not take advantage of the changing media. It was just too dangerous to appear on podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, even if that meant predictably raising the younger vote. He even moderated his interviews on three friendly, old-media sites: CBS’s Sixty Minutes, The View, and Late Night with Stephen Colbert.
His answer to Sunny Hostin’s softball question on The View was the low point of the entire campaign. Asked if he disagreed with any of President Biden’s policies, he seemed surprised by the obvious question and said he didn’t think about the differences. Ugh. He had a chance to correct that mistake on Stephen Colbert’s show and still came up empty.
If your agent is that bad, it’s not hard to explain why you’re lost. But that’s only part of the answer, and Democrats will lose again if they stop there. A bad candidate for the president does not explain why he lost the Senate or failed to take the House, which he was expected to win. That doesn’t explain why they stuck with such a bad candidate in the first place.
And it doesn’t answer their most difficult question: should they continue with their current agenda, including politics, or return to the center, closer to Bill Clinton’s center-Left position? It is an urgent question because, in 2028, they will not have their greatest wealth in the last two elections: the dislike of almost half of the voters for Donald Trump.
These questions about the future of the Democrats overlap. It all includes progressive politics, which has been the beating heart of Democratic Party politics since the presidency of Barack Obama.
It was politics that led candidate Biden to choose Harris as his first running mate. He first promised that he would choose a woman and then narrowed his choice to a black woman. There were only two leaders, and he chose the wrong one. A better choice would have been moderate Rep. Val Demings, former police chief of Orlando, Florida. He was more skilled and articulate than Harris and would have signed that Biden would take a centrist, inclusive policy.
Biden repeatedly said he was committed to those policies but, as it turned out, he wasn’t. What he was committed to was the party’s massive spending plan, which led to the highest inflation in 40 years, a series of progressive social policies, and few restrictions on mammoth federal bureaucracies, filled with civil servants who support Democrats. agenda.
State-building
The problem for the Democrats is that they want to change their entrenched positions. This is compounded by the fact that they have already achieved the greatest goal they have pursued since Franklin Roosevelt. The modern Democratic Party is based on that plan. They succeeded in putting the government in the center of Washington; building a great governance of the country; increase the role of the president; and undermine that of Congress and the state.
A major step in that process was Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The last part was government-sponsored health care, which passed under Barack Obama. Having completed that entire agenda, the big question for Democrats now is: “What’s next?”
Trump has his own solution: roll back most of the country’s administration. That’s the task he gave to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who will need a lot of help from Congress. They are sure to face strong opposition from congressional Democrats, establishment Republicans, liberal judges, mid-level bureaucrats, and other winners in the current system.
If Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy get their way, the Democrats will run and overturn their efforts. But they will say how they will pay for the big new projects and explain why many existing projects have failed.
This failure is most evident in K-12 schools, poor resettlement programs, and lawless urban communities. So far, the party’s only answer is: “use more”.
Why not ditch the unpopular plans and move back towards the center? Because the existing programs benefit important Democratic constituencies, such as teacher unions, and are led by other party experts, government officials. Large companies also benefit from significant carve-outs and will fight to keep them.
But Democrats who want to rebuild the party face another problem. There are no leaders. The current crop – Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Barack Obama – have been completely damaged by defeat and are busy blaming each other. The new president does not emerge until the party wins the congress or settles on the next president.
This leaves many state party organizations, led by governors and senators who want to control party direction and vote themselves. The fight will pit leaders from “deep blue” progressive states like California, Illinois, and Massachusetts against their peers from Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Georgia, all divided “purple” states.
Democrats can still win the presidency in 2028 without a change in policy or recession or other major shocks. Without that, the future of the Democrats depends on new leaders and new policies. That future comes down to a key decision: will Democrats continue on the same progressive path or back to the center?
Charles Lipson is the Peter B Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago. His latest book is Free Speaking 101: A Practical Guide for Students. He can be reached at charles.lipson@gmail.com
Expand your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for three months with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, cash offers and more.