What Both Moderates and Progressives Got Wrong (and Right) About the Democratic Electoral Defeat

There is nothing like an electoral defeat to provoke infighting and finger-pointing. But losing twice to a character like Donald Trump should be cause not just for argument but for deep introspection by all wings of the Democratic Party. That party progressives and centrists continue to blame one another with the same tired arguments shows they are not taking the consequences of Trump’s reelection seriously enough.

Between 2016 and 2024, in three very different political environments under varying circumstances, Trump first notched a shocking electoral college win, then overperformed his polling against Joe Biden to almost secure reelection in 2020, then won a popular vote victory in 2024 despite being overwhelmed in field and paid media.

The moderate wing always blames defeats, or even narrow victories, on leftist social and economic policy, which allegedly turns voters off Democrats. The progressive wing counters that an untapped pool of voters is yearning for a bolder economic and social message that will overwhelm bigotry and provide the votes needed for a governing majority.

Both sides have a point, but the truth is that this perennial debate is as circular as it is outdated. It does not address the more fundamental problems facing the Democratic Party as the nation braces for a second Trump term and looming authoritarian rule.

Let’s start with what the moderates get wrong. The centrist theory of the case in 2024 is that Trump won because leftists went too far with arcane and unpopular social justice advocacy and set the country against it. Clinton-era consultant James Carville, for instance, laid the blame for Harris’ election loss on “preachy females,” while Maureen Dowd referenced the Democrats’ “mistaken identity politics.”

The problem with this theory is that the centrists were functionally in charge during Trump’s rise over the last decade and called the shots on messaging and campaigns. Moderate Democrats successfully sidelined the Sanders 2016 economic populist campaign in favor of Hillary Clinton’s more careful and modulated political approach. Joe Biden ran the apotheosis of a moderate, folksy, anti-identity-politics campaign, ruthlessly focused on tailoring its message to the median voter. In 2020, Biden proceeded to severely underperform his polling, winning by only a few tens of thousands of votes across the swing states despite Trump being an unpopular incumbent who had mishandled a pandemic and the economy.

In 2024, Kamala Harris crested in popularity and good vibes while she and newly minted running mate Tim Walz were freewheeling with brat memes and calling their Republican opponents weird. As her messaging moderated and became so careful and disciplined as to become almost robotic, her numbers faltered. By the end, Harris had made Liz Cheney her most prominent surrogate in a push for Republican votes, eschewing anything vaguely leftist or identitarian, emphasizing her prosecutorial chops, focusing on kitchen-table economics, and rejecting fascism.

That careful approach did not work. Republican voters did not cross over by significant margins. Centrist Democrats blame the penumbra of Harris’ more liberal 2019-2020 era positions, but downballot Democrats who had also taken liberal positions did not suffer the same fate. Democratic turnout was down in critical liberal strongholds, indicating an enthusiasm gap among left-leaning voters.

There is no evidence whatsoever that a Dean Phillips or Seth Moulton running an inoffensive “it’s the economy, stupid” institutionalist campaign would have outperformed Harris against Trump when Trump the Destructive Buffoon has been clowning on institution-protecting Democrats for the better part of eight years by activating a “smash everything” voter coalition.

Nor is the centrist approach durable, even if it were practical. At its best, it purports to activate a “reasonable” coalition of Mitt Romney Republicans and Hillary Clinton Democrats against Trumpist extremism. But what happens if Trump finally passes from the scene and Republicans select a less offensive candidate? Nikki Haley obliterated Joe Biden by 10 points in head-to-head polling in early January 2024. A coalition that depends on disaffected anti-MAGA Republicans would fall apart instantly as those voters return to their natural home in the GOP.

Finally, it is difficult to take the centrist position that Democrats should abandon leftist identity politics and embrace economic populism seriously when those same centrists had slammed the Sanders 2016 era leftist politics as insufficiently protective of marginalized communities. Now that leftism is more associated with “woke” identitarianism than demands for universal healthcare and breaking up banks, intersectional theory has become the centrist punching bag du jour—even though it was centrist advisors who had embraced and demanded it. It seems very convenient that, for the anti-woke caste, punching left is the answer to every problem that ails the Democratic Party, regardless of the circumstances and even if their bromides are 180 degrees from what they had espoused eight years ago. Such arguments of convenience should be treated with extreme skepticism.

But progressive advocates are no less guilty of misleading and self-serving claims.

To hear progressives tell the story, Democrats were undone not by a backlash against leftist cultural politics or inflation but by failures of neoliberalism and messaging. President Biden didn’t put his name on stimulus checks, Harris ran a right-coded campaign that failed to turn out the liberal base, and the anti-MAGA majority was uninspired to turn out due to lack of motivation. Democrats failed to activate economic populist progressive impulses in persuadable voters, which left them vulnerable to far-right cultural demagoguery. Besides, Fox News would drive these sorts of narratives just as effectively no matter what positions Democratic candidates took in previous campaigns.

All of this would be pleasant fiction if it were true. But it is not.

First, blaming the vice president for ineffectual messaging ignores that her campaign was broadly effective. Her numbers were far better in the battleground states where her campaign was most visible. It’s difficult to know yet whether Harris’s strengths lay in her messaging, paid media, or vaunted field programs, but she was definitely doing something right.

Far from ignoring the economy, Harris’s campaign was primarily focused on economic issues such as housing and price gouging. The campaign was so persuasive on these issues that, according to exit polling, it ended up fighting Trump to a draw on perceptions of who would be a better economic steward. Whatever the reasons Harris lost beyond broad disgruntlement about inflation, it wasn’t because most voters believed Trump would be better for the pocketbooks of the working class.

Meanwhile, the progressive narrative often assumes that Democratic positions on issues like criminal justice reform and immigration are broadly popular. A large base of voters will turn out for someone who espouses and defends those positions effectively.

Election results seem to suggest otherwise. Progressive economic policies may not be an electoral gold mine regardless of their framing, and progressives may drastically overestimate public support for liberal social policies. Progressive prosecutors who advocated for criminal justice reform were obliterated. In California, voters turned down a minimum wage increase—the bread-and-butter of progressive economics—and defeated a measure to allow local communities to institute rent control. Meanwhile, voters overwhelmingly approved a measure to repeal more lenient misdemeanor sentencing and rejected a measure that would ban prison labor. If progressive California votes this way, it heralds larger problems for candidates and campaigns focused on these issues.

The public was in a reactionary mood. Harris’ bipartisan appeals to Republican voters may have fallen flat, but they’re not why so many voters in urban strongholds switched to Trump between 2020 and 2024.

Some argue that Democrats were undone not by cultural resentments but by a broad-based backlash to inflation. They correctly note that incumbent parties worldwide—left and right—were indeed swept out by voters angry about post-COVID price increases. It is further true that Democrats weathered that storm better than most.

But Democratic losses were not evenly spread. They were acute among not only non-college whites but also Hispanics, Asians, and Black men. Democrats managed to gain ground, however, among college-educated voters, especially college-educated whites. Between 2012 and 2024, Democrats actually gained ground with white people overall by one percentage point due to a 17-point gain among white college-educated voters. This educational polarization and racial depolarization belies the argument that Democrats suffered across the board from inevitable economic disgruntlement.

(There is also a separate problem: progressive economics for the last decade wagered that voters would tolerate modest inflation in exchange for higher wages and reduced inequality. That bet failed as voters credit wage gains to their individual hard work but blame inflation on external forces. But that is a subject for another essay.)

Yet another version of the progressive case says maximalist positions did not damage Harris. Sure, she once took on issues like decriminalizing border crossings or publicly funded gender-affirming surgery for prisoners. But, they argue, Fox News would have attacked her equally effectively for any left-leaning positions.

This argument is ludicrous. Yes, right-wing propaganda is a fact of life. But some things are certainly easier to demagogue than others. It’s generally better not to take deeply unpopular niche positions where one can. As well might, a conservative activist insist that it wouldn’t matter if a Republican advocated for total abortion bans with no exceptions for rape or incest because the left would attack them regardless. That would be a stupid argument, as Democratic attacks on such a far-right politician captured by evangelical interest groups would be more effective than on a Republican who took a more modulated stance.

It is true that civil rights advances only happen because activist groups push elected officials to embrace progress, even if that progress is initially unpopular. But if those interests push too fast and too far, or if elected officials are not circumspect, then reactionary backlash can sweep them out and undo decades of advances. It is also the job of activists to understand when caution is the better part of valor, even if their organizational and funding incentives reward maximalism.

As to identity politics in general, critics do not typically suggest that Democrats backtrack on any policies or throw any marginalized groups under the proverbial bus. But they rightly note that progressives and social justice advocates need to start talking about identity and the American experience in a more inclusive and less alienating way.

History is instructive on this point. After Trump’s 2016 victory, Democrats and aligned groups took on racism, sexism, and homophobia, but their intersectional approach too often involved categorizing Americans into overlapping oppressed identity groups, stridently policing language with gatekeeping faux pas, and applying class struggle theory to every culture and identity conflict.

Regardless of its intrinsic merits as social philosophy and historical analysis, electorally, it has been a disaster for the marginalized groups it was designed to serve. It has thrilled college-educated whites and a vocal activist class while alienating working-class Americans of all ethnicities and driving men into the arms of repulsive “manosphere” figures. Most Hispanics and Asians have an aversion to seeing themselves as separate, hyphenated oppressed classes in need of equity. They want to simply have equal access to the American Dream unfettered by structural racism.

Democrats have believed a generous approach to immigration would win Latino voters, on the belief that they would intrinsically sympathize with Latino immigrants. This is not the case, as Latinos of all demographics shift significantly to the right. The once reliably Democratic Rio Grande Valley is reddening quickly. Florida is now a deep red state. And in a result that heralds a sea change for how both parties should think about electoral coalitions, a majority of Latino men appear to have voted for Trump. The evidence suggests they aren’t voting for Trump despite his immigration policies but because of them.

Meanwhile, Democrats also suffered erosion with voters of Asian descent as well as to a lesser degree with Black men, despite portraying themselves as the party that will stand up for “people of color.” The phrase “people of color” itself seems overly reductive, given rapid racial depolarization.

That the only group who shifted left in 2024–college-educated white professionals who are, by intersectional theory, society’s most privileged class—is darkly comical. It invites mockery and requires introspection from those who claim to be helping the marginalized.

Now what?

Both the centrist and progressive analyses of the 2024 election are fatally flawed. They both demand a focus on pocketbook issues but diverge on why. The centrists demand that we throw vulnerable minorities under the bus to win back “regular people” while paying no mind to the decline in turnout among the Democratic base that is causing election losses. Meanwhile, the progressive case is that a robust focus on the “working class” will magically inoculate Democrats against others. They’re both drastically wrong, but admitting why they are requires challenging assumptions about how the Democratic Party views its voters and how to communicate to them.

But one thing is clear: both left and center-left have lost control of the media environment to the far right. Low-information voters have been stewing in a sea of right-wing conspiracies on almost every available channel. There is almost nowhere that either progressive or center-left messaging competes. AM Radio? A Christian nationalist wasteland. Local TV news? Either apolitical or dominated by Sinclair’s propaganda. Cable news? Fox rules the roost. Podcasts? Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson are tops. Start a new account on YouTube or TikTok and see how fast far-right content floods your recommendations. Elon Musk singlehandedly turned Twitter into a haven for literal neo-Nazis.

Most persuadable voters who shifted to Trump had no idea what his policies were. Many support Democratic policies but will not vote for Democrats because their information channels have rendered the brand toxic. Democrats cannot compete by throwing paid media at Foxified and Roganized voters in election years. Not when voters are swimming in far-right disinformation the rest of the time.

All the centrist and progressive interest groups should attack each other less and focus more on how to redirect the billions wasted on late-paid media into long-term communications and organizing infrastructure. For example, if the Trump administration forces a sale of TikTok, buying it would be a good use of progressive donors’ money. Preventing Elon Musk from purchasing BlueSky or MSNBC would be another, as would funding liberal counterparts to organizations like Prager U and Turning Point USA. One cannot reliably win elections with paid media and field when the baseline media landscape is tilted far to the right.

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