Democrats Lost Because of Their Bad Policies, Not Their Bad Attitude

To hear a lot of the post-election buzz from every direction, the Democratic Party has a terrible attitude problem. It’s full of arrogant elitists and self-important political consultants for whom much of America is terra incognita. Instead of recognizing why Trump voters love the man, Democrats continued to sneer at them and insult their intelligence by calling him a thug and a criminal and worse. Asked by the New York Times how her fellow Democrats had “disrespected” voters, centrist survivor congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington responded with apparent fury:

I was talking to a woman who runs one of the largest labor and delivery wards. She said 40 percent of the babies there have at least one parent addicted to fentanyl. What is empathetic — to tell them that’s their problem, or to take border security seriously? People are putting their groceries on their credit card. No one is listening to anything else you say if you try to talk them out of their lived experiences with data points from some economists.

Then she got angrier:

Sometimes I feel like people just can’t hear me, so I’m not going to bother saying it to some of these people. They’ve got to come to Jesus; I can’t make them do that. I’m very focused on here and loyal to here. What I really hope happens is we change the kinds of candidates we’re supporting. I hope that other normal people see me and decide they can run, too.

So according to this post-2024 role model, Democrats are abnormal people who blame fentanyl addicts for their problems and reject the “lived experience” of Americans.

From the opposite ideological direction, progressive icon Bernie Sanders was also spitting mad, as Time reported:

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sanders said in a statement released on Wednesday just before Vice President Kamala Harris delivered her concession speech. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

Such bad, bad people, these Democrats are! As the headline in Democratic gadfly Josh Barro’s take on the election summarized this common line of self-attack: “Trump Didn’t Deserve to Win, But We Deserved to Lose.”

Before I go any further, let me hasten to make it clear I do not share another common refrain in the post-election commentary, excoriating Democrats and left-of-center commentators for “pointing fingers” or “forming a circular firing squad” or any of the other code phrases for “STFU…the enemy is listening!” Democrats and their allies owe it to the many people who worked hard on or otherwise contributed to their campaigns this year, not to mention the millions of people whose lives will likely take a turn for the worse during Trump 2.0, to thoroughly examine what happened and why. But in that spirit, let’s don’t automatically assume the problem was a bad collective attitude or an inability to relate to people who ultimately voted Republican. The alternative interpretation is that Democrats became identified with bad policies that voters thought were hurting them and the country. This is hardly a problem that is exclusive to Democrats: Republicans will eternally pursue lower taxes on the wealthy to the very ends of the earth despite all the evidence that they don’t work, aren’t fair, and also aren’t popular. Indeed, Donald Trump shows every indication he wants to take his party back to a cult of protectionism that Republicans finally abandoned nearly 90 years ago, and if he does and that predictably backfires on him, his party will pay the price as well.

During the two years (2021-2022) when Democrats held a governing trifecta and could pretty much do as they pleased they pursued policies that contributed to excessive inflation and to an explosion in cross-border migrations, and on November 5 they paid the price for that. On the inflation front, yes, I understand, supply-chain disruptions had a lot to do with suddenly rising prices, and yes, I get it, Democratic policymakers were trying to head off a possible recession. But by enacting two big packages of new federal spending (the first being focused on boosting consumer spending rapidly) on strict party-line votes, Democrats inevitably owned the high inflation rates that ensued which to this day are regarded bitterly by low-to-middle income people, including young people starting off careers and families. I’m not enough of an insider to know the extent to which people in the Biden administration or the Congress knowingly courted this economic and political danger. But I do know it happened after a period of liberal elite fascination with “modern monetary theory,” which holds inflation fears associated with reckless fiscal policy as mostly misguided. And it also happened at a time when most of the people running the government never knew or no longer remembered the political consequences of high inflation in the 1970s (or more recently in other countries). They should have known better or been more careful, and Kamala Harris and countless other Democratic candidates in 2024 paid the price for that mistake.

There’s also no question that Democrats courted disaster with relaxed border policies (not to mention massively underfunded law enforcement policies) at the precise moment when conditions in Central and South America produced an unprecedented surge of asylum-seekers. In doing so, did they harbor malice towards U.S. citizens, native or naturalized, or seek to deploy them as illegal voters, as the Trump campaigned alleged with zero evidence? No, of course not. But they waited to reverse border policies until as Trump had warned migrants became a visible presence and a political controversy all over the country. And so very burned was Kamala Harris that she tried to ignore immigration policy entirely and lost the opportunity to score points over the economic and humanitarian disaster of mass deportation that Trump was promising.

And it wasn’t just bad policies that damaged Democrats; it was also the memory of bad policies living on through Republican attack ads. I can only imagine the evil cackling of whoever first ran across the 2019 ACLU questionnaire in which presidential candidate Kamala Harris expressed support for publicly-funded gender-affirming surgery for federal prison inmate and detainees (presumably including those detained for immigration violations). Amplified by some spliced-together interviews, this turned into a massively repeated ad from the Trump campaign. And you can understand how this combo platter of defensible positions added up to something that convinced swing voters Harris was from a different moral universe than theirs. They might be fine with fundamental transgender rights (as the strong negative public reaction to the right’s “bathroom bill” proposals a few years ago showed). And they might oppose inhumane treatment of undocumented immigrants, or of federal prisoners generally. They might also accept that governments have to spend money on things the courts order them to do. But add it all up, and Harris had unwittingly made herself the candidate of, as the Trump ad put it, “taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens.” To her credit, Harris didn’t abandon or hedge her support for transgender rights. But like immigration, it became a topic she avoided, which hardly built public trust.

Why is it important to keep this distinction between bad attitudes and bad policies front-of-mind? Because otherwise Democrats can fall into the trap of assuming that cosmetic appearances of sympathy with swing voters can neutralize these policy problems. There’s not much question that Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz as a running-mate in part because he was highly acceptable to progressives but at the same time could boast of being a gun owner, a military veteran, and a native of the rural heartland; he was almost aggressively normal in every way. But none of that changed the widespread perceptions (documented regularly by polls) that swing voters perceived the Harris-Walz ticket as “too liberal” and rigidly ideological. Walz is a fine fellow and I thought he was an excellent choice for veep. But at some point, unfairly or not, all the normie talk without direct engagement with the Democratic party’s unpopular and ineffective policies came across as no more authentic as Mike Dukakis climbing into a tank or John Kerry donning hunting garb.

So moving forward, give yourself a break, Democrats. Stop beating yourselves up for not “getting” Trump voters and begin reconsidering how your policies affect voters and how they perceive you.