Did the Democrats only have “bad policies”?
Since leaders scramble to assign full blame for Donald Trump’s decisive win on Tuesday, this particular round of post-election finger-pointing is very different from the most recent cycles.
Unlike many other past elections with narrow margins, Trump’s popular vote victory and his uniform swing across most states and counties somehow defied all simple explanations like a racist electorate or discontent over President Joe Biden’s foreign policy.
Even chalking the election entirely up to inflation seems more convenient and incomplete.
Senator Bernie Sanders, who earned around 6,000 fewer votes in his reelection bid than Kamala Harris did in Vermont, came out on Wednesday with a statement that blasted the Democratic Party for abandoning working-class people, who were overwhelmingly on Trump’s side.
This critique rapidly gained traction, with many commentators arguing that Harris and the Democrats lost touch with working people’s needs, prioritizing issues such as democracy and abortion rights way too much.
“If voters didn’t believe that Harris had a true plan to make their lives better, it’s hard to fault them, really.”
That’s what Matt Karp explained most recently. “I wish we had enacted the housing, care, and child tax credit elements in Build Back Better, so we would have had concrete cost-of-living benefits to run on” former Biden administration official Bharat Ramamurti lamented on Thursday.
Moreover, we’re not here to discuss what politicians should or shouldn’t do next time around. The best thing we can do is hope that elected officials use their time in office to pass good, well-designed legislation that improves people’s lives.
However, it seems as if the discourse is barreling toward a well-trodden yet weird place. The “appealing” contention points towards the fact that the Democrats could have turned their electoral fortunes around, only if they had passed the right policies and then campaigned more effectively on those programs.
In the most recent years, this type of philosophy has been known as “delivers”, coined to suggest that voters could elect politicians who deliver on their promises to solve their issues.
“Deliverism means governing very well and establishing quite a record that the electorate really needed to win” as American Prospect editor David Dayen wrote.
Right after the 2022 midterms, Senator Elizabeth Warren argued in the New York Times that voters rewarded Democrats, especially for certain programs such as pandemic relief and infrastructure modernization.
Other policies, such as allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices or capping insulin costs for older Americans, as Warren argued, were exactly what led voters to cast their ballots for Democrats.
Party leaders favor a particular version of this theory that we presented: policies could create “positive feedback loops”, building loyal constituencies who would further enable policy victories through their continued electoral support.
For example, it’s no secret that Democrats think it’s easier for workers to join unions to improve their standard of living, as well as improve Democrats’ electoral position by increasing the number of union members in the United States.
Deliverism’s appeal also lies within its intuitive logic, especially for college-educated rationalists who are drawn to clear cause-and-effect relationships.
For instance, good policies could lead to subsequent electoral victories. However, there’s not a lot of evidence that policymaking really works like this.
Decades of scholarship have proved that most people don’t understand how policies work, what policy benefits they are getting, or which party is actually responsible for enacting specific policies.
Moreover, even when a politician designs a program to facilitate their process of taking credit, that still doesn’t automatically work out to their benefit.
Those who got health insurance through Obamacare Medicaid expansion, for instance, proved very little change in voter turnout or party loyalty.
As Northwestern University political scientists Daniel Galvin and Chloe Thurston mentioned in their latest research on the questions enlisted above, history should drastically challenge the premise that good policy success would automatically lead to political rewards for the party that passes it.
“Upon further inspection, the intellectual basis for believing that policies are appropriate vehicles for building electoral majorities, or even good substitutes for the most tedious work of organizational party-building, is pretty thin.” as they explained.
Now, of course, this isn’t to say that Democrats shouldn’t strive to pass good policies. The expanded child tax credit during the pandemic was a good policy, even if the wide majority of voters showed muted enthusiasm for it.
Moreover, it’s not the case that politicians are never rewarded for good policy. In fact, plenty of voters still credit Trump for the stimulus checks they got in the mail throughout the pandemic, checks that were prominently featured next to the president’s name.
Doing good things and taking credit for those things can sometimes help. However, as Democratic leaders move forward to focus on working-class priorities, they also face two sobering realities.
One is that policies alone rarely drive electoral outcomes, and an increasingly stark divide could separate non-college voters from the college-educated liberals and socialists who decide to lead the party and its allied progressive groups.
Navigating such tensions could be needed to chart further strategies. Moreover, the research suggests that Harris’s loss couldn’t be avoided even if she emphasized Biden administration accomplishments more accurately. This mentality only oversimplies a much wider complex political reality.
Bernie Sanders’s take on why Kamala lost
Bernie Sanders is a well-known champion of progressive policies, and he was quick to point out the widening gap between the Democratic leadership and the voters it was meant to serve.
“It should come as no surprise that a Democratic Party which has obviously abandoned working-class people would find that the working class, well, abandoned them too,” Sanders mentioned.
He continued to lament when it comes to the party’s inability to address the concerns of key demographic groups, stating that “First, it was the white working class, and now it seems to be the Latino and Black workers, too.”
He further emphasized the deepening frustration of Americans, especially since they face rising economic instability, a much wider wealth gap, and inadequate support systems, such as a lack of guaranteed paid family and medical leave.
Democratic party at a crossroads
Reflecting on the outcome of the election as well as the Democratic Party’s total failure to secure a victory, Sanders cast doubt on the Democratic Party’s ability to learn from its own mistakes.
“Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who have full control over the Democratic Party learn the lessons they need from this disastrous campaign?” he asked.
He also wonders if the Democratic party will understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans seem to be experiencing.
He also wonders if they had any ideas as to how we could take on the increasingly powerful oligarchy, which has way more economic and political power, but he seriously doubts it.
Sanders calls for political change and grassroots solutions
Sanders also concluded his statement by inviting serious reflection on the future of the political landscape. “There’s a series of political discussions that are now out there about the path forward for those of us who are concerned about grassroots ideas and even possible movements within American politics.”
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