By Matt Bruenig, who writes about politics, the economy, and political theory, with a focus on issues that affect poor and working people. He is currently the president of 3P, a think tank founded in 2017. The primary mission of 3P is to publish ideas and analysis that assist in the development of an economic system that serves the many, not the few and aims to fill the holes left by the current think tank landscape with a special focus on socialist and social democratic economic ideas. Bruenig previously worked as a lawyer at the National Labor Relations Board and as a policy analyst at the Demos Think Tank. Originally published at his website.
For me, this election differed from the last two in that my particular policy interests — a universalist welfare state, mass unionization, and socialization of wealth — were absent. The Biden administration achieved nothing significant on these fronts. There was no primary campaign that featured a candidate championing these causes. Harris did not run on them.
This absence made me fairly intellectually detached from the election, not because the outcome doesn’t matter, but because it had no real stakes for the stuff that I promote in the discourse.
Other elements of the left-of-center world did not have this luxury.
The macro people are contending with a reality where fiscal and monetary policy helped achieve high employment, good GDP growth, and some wage compression, but Democrats still lost.
The self-styled populists got to run the relevant parts of the administrative state — Lina Kahn at FTC, Jonathan Kanter at DOJ, Rohit Chopra at CFPB, among others — and were able to achieve significant influence beyond that through a “whole-of-government” approach that had agencies as far flung as the Copyright Office, the DOT, and the NLRB all taking actions meant to support this broader agenda. All of these agencies took actions championed and then celebrated by this group. The self-styled populists even had significant influence over crafting the little bits of policy Harris actually released. But Democrats still lost.
The foreign policy apologists spent the year leading up to election in the unenviable position of having to defend that the Biden administration provided money and weapons to the Israeli government to assist the carrying out of an atrocity in Gaza. They argued that this was necessary because a less supportive policy would cause some voters to stop supporting Democrats. To the extent that Biden’s actual policy caused some voters to stop supporting Democrats, the argument was that those voters need to get over it and realize that Trump is worse than Harris in a variety of ways. Democrats still lost.
The moderates got to essentially run the Harris campaign. This group claimed that the way to win the election was to move to the right in rhetoric and in policy on things like immigration, guns, and identitarian issues while also paring down the policy agenda to a few seemingly popular topics like health care and abortion. Harris clearly did run her campaign this way, but Democrats still lost.
When the party does what you want, either in policy or in campaigning, but still loses, it is hard to escape this feeling that maybe you are implicated, maybe people now think you are stupid and your ideas were wrong. This also triggers a sort of defensiveness in the form of finding other explanations or defiantly doubling down. It’s a troubling thing to watch when viewed from the outside.
The truth of course is that nobody has some kind of silver bullet for how to win elections and generally people who talk a lot about that topic end up having views about the optimal way to govern and campaign so as to win elections that conspicuously overlap with their own separately-formed policy preferences or some unrelated antagonism they have with some other faction in the party.
Last time Trump won, the convenient explanation was that it was because of racism. This is nice because it places the blame elsewhere and on something that there is little you can do about because anti-racism is something that cannot be compromised.
The racism explanation seems to be falling away this time in part because Trump made inroads with nonwhite voters, most prominently Latinos.
The emerging convenient explanation this time is that it all comes down to inflation. Prices are up 20 percent since Biden took office. During the Trump administration, they only grew by 6 percent over the same period of time.
This explanation is convenient because it’s plausible to argue that (1) inflation was mostly caused by factors outside of Biden’s control, including post-COVID supply issues and the post-COVID spend down of pandemic savings, (2) to the extent that inflation was caused by things like the American Rescue Plan, that was part of achieving the other macroeconomic policy goals of high employment, GDP growth, and wage compression, and (3) the bout of inflation was a one-off thing related to unique dynamics that don’t have much to do with policy questions going forward. So the inflation explanation is consistent with “we did nothing wrong” and “we don’t need to change anything going forward.”
Which is not to say it isn’t true, just to say it is convenient in that it can conceivably absolve all of the groups above who may otherwise have a finger pointed at them.
For now, I don’t really intend to make bold claims about why this election was lost or how to make changes that will result in the winning of all future elections. Instead, as I did in 2016 and 2020, I will simply try to determine who will carry the torch for the left in the next Democratic presidential primary and see if I can help them construct a well-designed social democratic policy agenda.