With Donald Trump’s re-election—and the collapse of the Kamala Harris campaign—it’s likely that Democratic finger-pointing and recriminations from within the party apparatus will come swiftly. At the very least, there will be a Democratic Party committee devoted to figuring out what went wrong, and what adjustments the party needs to make to be competitive going forward.
These campaign post-mortems are important exercises to make sure that the party is on the right track, but just as often as not, they serve to protect key decision-makers within the party apparatus and set an advantageous agenda going forward for party leaders.
After an election cycle that saw $215 million in anti-trans ads from Republican candidates and Super PACs, and approximately zero dollars in countering pro-trans ads from Democrats, it’s likely that Democratic support for trans issues will be blamed for Harris’s failure on the campaign trail (as we already saw with Representative-elect Tom Suozzi in the New York Times yesterday). There is a poll out showing that 50 percent of voters think support for trans people has gone too far, which I’m sure will find its way into many campaign write-ups both internally and in the media.
But I find blaming trans rights to be a stretch for several reasons, besides being a trans person myself. First is that Democrats didn’t even attempt to mount an effective response to any of the anti-trans ads. Harris rarely mentioned trans people explicitly, and when she did, it was with mealy-mouthed promises to “follow the law,” about government-provided gender-affirming care—law that will likely see a swift change once Republicans take power in January, by the way.
The word “trans” was only mentioned twice during this year’s Democratic National Convention. Democrats didn’t run on trans issues and didn’t bother to make a counter-argument during the campaign season. Republicans may have won on trans issues, but Democrats didn’t lose on trans issues—they just forfeited the game from the jump.
Rather than focus on the party’s stance on trans rights, I hope post-mortems will zero in on the other ways the Democratic Party and Harris campaign fell short. For example the economic numbers are seemingly bustling right now. Unemployment is as low as it can go, the stock market is way up, and worker productivity has never been higher. All of these were part of the core message of the Harris campaign.
However, 67 percent of voters also rated the economy as “not so good” or “poor” according to Washington Post exit-polling data. A deeper look at the exit-polling data shows exactly the structural problems with Biden’s economy that voters have been dealing with.
According to NBC News exit-polling data, Harris won voters with an income of at least $100,000 by an eight-point margin, 53 percent compared to 45 percent for Trump. That is a dramatic swing from 2020, when Trump won the same income bracket by 12 points, or 54 percent to Biden’s 42 percent. Conversely, voters making less than $50,000 and those making between $50,000 and $99,000, both voted narrowly for Trump by a two-percent margin. Those demographics both broke hard for Biden in 2020 by 10 percent and 15 percent respectively.
In other words, the economy is going strong, but only for those at the top of the income scale. Those at the top turned out for Harris, hoping to keep the good times going. But a lot of others felt left behind, and drowning under increasing rent and housing costs and cost-of-living increases, simply voted for blunt-force change at the presidential level.
In the face of this kind of structural headwind, it would have been difficult for any incumbent to succeed, and few incumbent parties have survived the inflation crisis of the last few years in industrialized democracies in the west.
On top of the harsh economic electoral environment, the Harris campaign tried hard to tack to the centre and win over so-called “Never Trump” Republicans. She gladly accepted an endorsement from former Republican vice-president Dick Cheney, one of the most unpopular former government officials of all time, and even campaigned with Liz Cheney in the symbolic birthplace of the Republican Party, Ripon, Wisconsin.
But Harris’s centrist strategy fell flat and she underperformed Biden in traditionally Republican and independent areas like the Milwaukee suburbs or Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
We can talk all we want about trans issues, or however unwinnable the trans sports issue is, establishment Democrats can lash out at leftists as much as they want, leftists can point the finger at Harris’s stance on war in Gaza or the campaign’s embrace of the Cheneys all day long. The blame game is normal for failed campaigns.
But if Democrats want to compete going forward, they need to figure out a consistent message that resonates with the working class. They need a real plan for bringing down housing costs quickly, and a way to increase real wages and they need to be able to clearly communicate it with voters outside of big cities.
That, not finger-wagging at trans people or any other marginalized group, is the way forward. Our futures all depend on it.
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