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Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory
January 31, 2025 • Matei Alexandru
Exploring How the Democratic Party 2024 Strategy Put Trump Back In Office
The story of Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump in 2020 is in many ways similar to the defeat he dealt Hillary Clinton in 2016. While each are unique, they are chapters in the same story- they lost the race they should have won.
Rather than offer an analysis of which counties went to which candidate and tilted the Electoral College balance in Trump’s favor, I want to examine the strategy the Democratic Party ran with in 2024 and how it all but guaranteed Trump’s victory. In doing so, I hope to answer a different question than “how did Trump win”, or even “how did Kamala lose?”, but rather “did the Democrats display remarkable strategic stupidity, or did they campaign intentionally poorly and allow Trump to win?” With such an abysmal performance, the question is rightfully asked: what was the Democratic Party’s desired outcome pursuing the strategy they did? It is clear that their strategy was poor in a number of ways I intend to probe closely here, but the question is why did they commit themselves to this? Did they truly want to win, did they not know how, or did they throw the game on the chance that they could survive Republican fascism if they’re cooperative enough?
Let’s explore these questions. Within them, examine the Democratic Party and the trends within it, Joe Biden and his presidency, as well as his time as a candidate and the transition to Kamala becoming the Democratic nominee. Even more illuminating for the question we seek to answer are the ways in which Kamala Harris, the Democratic establishment, and the liberal media reacted to the loss. We will take closer looks at each of these things.
The Democratic Party of 2024
While we, on the Left, are often conflated with the Democratic Party, and goals confused with the political agenda of the Democratic Party, we understand, at best, there is a pocket of progressives in the Democratic Party, which exists amid other tendencies hostile to it. Let’s begin this discussion with an examination of these trends.
There are many articles, which present several attempts to delineate the existing ideologies within the Democratic Party. Here is my contribution.
The Democratic Party has three noticeable trends within it. Each of these has varying numbers of adherents and levels of influence within the Party. The goals of each of these are also incongruous. They are the progressive wing, the liberal “pragmatic” wing, and a batch of conservative Democrats making up the small remainder. The dominant trend among these is liberal pragmatism. There are a handful of progressives, some more progressive than others, and they represent a distant second place of the party’s composition.
In most scenarios, made especially obvious in the years since Bernie Sanders’ first presidential campaign in 2016, the liberal pragmatists and conservative Democrats form a solid “anti-progressive” bloc. The pragmatists see progressives as unelectable and a strategic vulnerability, and the conservatives simply do not support progressive policies.
The progressive wing has been represented by the Squad since 2016 when Bernie Sanders first ran for president. Their agenda has included issues like raising wages and lowering costs of living, improving national infrastructure, and converting to green energy production. It has also encompassed social and political equality for racial minorities, sexual and gender minorities, and religious minorities. There is much that holds their positions back from being socialist, and so I will go on calling them progressive as they represent a step forward compared to existing conditions, but do not represent the conditions of liberation for the people they seek to help. Similarly, their foreign policy positions are mismatched to each other and often not consistently anti-imperial if even bothering to go beyond simple military budget cuts.
The Squad at the time were seen to represent a continuation of Sanders’ democratic socialist concept, and their elections represented a poke in the eye of those anti-progressive Democrats. They insisted Bernie Sanders had no electability or appeal outside the most progressive pockets of the Democratic Party, and these elections called their fundamental strategy “truth” into question.
The progressive Democrats’ recent agenda has been embodied in their support for a Green New Deal and the Build Back Better Deal. They were vocally upset with the Biden administration for allowing the Build Back Better proposals to be dramatically dialed back to entice more moderate/anti-progressive Democratic, and Republican support. Unsurprisingly, those compromises did not make the bill anymore “passable” and the progressive wing was dealt a loss from within their own party against their agenda.
With respect to the rest of the party, the progressives represent an often-unwelcome minority bloc within the Democratic party. This can be said from the broad lack of support they receive from the pragmatists on policy and the willingness of the Democratic National Committee to work hard to unseat progressives with alternatives to their right. It will be important to remember this when we come back more directly to the question of the Democrats’ goals in 2024.
The most dominant section of the Democratic Party is made up of liberal pragmatists. These people do not all have severe distaste for a handful of progressive policies, but consider nearly all of the progressive agenda unelectable with the American public and not legislatable in the American congressional system. As a result, they are willing to make many concessions when supporting progressive bills that ends up alienating or enraging (or both) progressives. This does not mean, however, that the pragmatists are progressive friendly. Many have very hard and low limits on how much progressivism is too much. In fact, a great number of today’s pragmatists got their start as progressives only to eventually turn their backs on a progressive agenda. This includes people like Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris who were once known as prominent progressives, but that was shattered in the 2020 Democratic primary when all the progressives dropped out and supported Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders after Sanders began picking up early momentum. But this group of Democrats also includes figures like Bill and Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, Hakeem Jefferies, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi.
The smallest, yet often most decisively important, group are those legislators who are functionally conservative yet are elected Democrats. This includes the Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema figures within the party who show routine support for Republican initiatives and are regularly withholding support from Democrats on key votes. These legislators are not always required to snuff out the progressives, but are always willing to help. Where the progressives constitute an unwelcome minority of the party, the conservative Democrats are a rather welcome minority. This, in broad strokes, illustrates the ideological makeup of the Democratic Party during the 2024 election.
Joe Biden as a President and Candidate
The next important issue to unpack in understanding the Democrats’ decision making is the president who sought re-election, Joe Biden.
Biden became president not because of the nation’s love for him, but because of the unpopularity of Donald Trump. After four years of political chaos, of diplomatic brinksmanship that had the country on the edge of wars with several different countries, economic performance that barely percolated to the working class, and the disastrous response to COVID-19, the American people voted against Donald Trump much more than they voted for Joe Biden.
Donald Trump’s unpopularity was crucial for a character like Biden to win the 2020 election. He was seen as a creep with a habit of touching children and young women inappropriately. He was seen as the embodiment of everything in the Democratic Party Bernie Sanders ran against. He was once an anti-integrationist during the Civil Rights era, he was against Medicare for All, student debt cancellation, and was reluctant to embrace the Green New Deal until after elected and still never managed to get it through Congress. He also drafted the Senate version of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, as it marks part of the Democratic shift to emulate Republicans’ “tough on crime” approach. When Biden said, on the primary campaign trail, “nothing would fundamentally change”, the argument the Democratic Party was stubbornly refusing to evolve and was ignoring the working class was landing more and more.
Biden’s nomination was marred in the same allegations of institutional foul play against the Bernie Sanders campaign. Some may remember that in 2020, Bernie Sanders made important early primary wins that worried the Democratic establishment, made up primarily of the pragmatists within the Party. Remembering Trump’s ability to win in a crowded field, the liberal pragmatists of the party pressured or persuaded nearly every candidate to back out and support Joe Biden. It was James Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden that many saw as a decisive event that gave Biden South Carolina and turned the tide against Sanders. Mistakes that the Sanders campaign made that Biden was able to make use of are many, but beyond the scope of this article.
Coming into 2024, several issues proved to be sources of controversy and unpopularity for Biden. Most felt was inflation, a constant obstacle to Biden’s argument to the public that he was repairing the economy. A growing labor movement that was kicking off during the first Trump administration was still going and was even growing. Especially in the final year of his presidency, there were several high profile labor disputes that both captured national attention and also lifted union sympathy to record levels. One was the double strike of the writers and actors in Hollywood. The other was the UAW strike of the Big Three automakers. These were both labor wins and served as big demonstrations to the public of the power and benefits of organized labor. It is on the heels of these things that a massive railway strike was being coordinated that threatened to bring the whole economy to a standstill. If the swell of labor support wasn’t enough, the railway strike was being organized just after the East Palestine, OH train derailment that caused enormous environmental and public health damage when flammable fluids ignited in the crash, and cleanup responses were abysmally handled. The controversy called national attention to train safety as well as the demands of the train workers which included how safety checks on trains were to be done, as well as improved hours and the addition of any sick leave at all for railway workers.
Biden made some accomplishments in making the government more labor friendly and even in passing some legislation that brought a great deal of manufacturing jobs and renewable energy production to the country if they weren’t to be quickly derailed by the second Trump administration. He was even the first president to stand on a picket line with striking auto workers. So it was a great blow to his of-the-people, working-class image when Biden used the powers of the Presidency to prevent the United Railway Workers from striking. While he managed to push some of the unions’ demands on the train companies, no motion was made on worker hours, and most importantly, on sick leave, which the railway workers of the United States remain without to this day.
This, however, was not the only demerit against his pro-labor posture. After all, while Biden certainly took steps with the staffing of the National Labor Relations Board to make sure solidly pro-worker lawyers were running the agency, it remained poorly funded and poorly staffed. Because of this, much of its improved attitude was wasted on a huge volume of union elections and labor violations cases that the NLRB could never hope to keep pace with. Backlog kept it as hamstrung as when Trump appointed a former McDonalds executive to lead the agency in his first administration.
While Biden was president, student loan and medical debt remained massive drains on people’s wealth. Rents and costs of living soared while wages remained low. Medicare for All made no progress, no part of the social safety net was repaired, rebuilt, or added to the machinery of state. Overall, Biden’s pro-labor posture seemed only to have to do with unions, and only supported them in certain instances and not those where workers would have been in a decisively powerful negotiating position such as with the railway workers. Biden’s NLRB could only limp along in its efforts to be pro-worker and enable workers to form unions while the rest of the economy remained a deeply hostile environment for union and non-union workers alike.
The greatest source of controversy may be the one that proved his true downfall and long-term legacy. After October 7, Biden took and maintained a position of absolute support with Israel. That support took the form of weapons that directly enabled Israel to kill what may be around 100,000 Palestinians after new reports show existing death counts may be as much as 40 percent below actual numbers (Human Rights Watch 2024).
This support was seen as an outrage by wide sections of both the Democratic Party base and the American public with much of the American public viewing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza as unacceptable, and even genocidal. The most radical opposition came from students and young people and Arab and Muslim Americans came to be fundamentally at odds with continued support of Biden for another term as president. The Uncommitted Movement was an organized effort by Democratic primary voters to pressure Biden into changing his course dealing with Israel. It mobilized nearly half a million primary votes against Biden with Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, young and university-aged voters representing the biggest bulk of these voters.
By the time he stepped down as the Democratic presidential candidate in the 2024 race, Biden had sent nearly $18 billion to Israel. That figure was released at the one-year mark since Israel’s genocidal response to the attacks on October 7 (Murphy 2024). Since then, in addition to the military aid packages, Biden’s administration had blocked four separate ceasefire deals, provided coverage for Israel as they undermined peace talks going so far as to kill their Palestinian co-negotiators, and even saying the International Criminal Court had no right to call Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal after years of insisting that Vladimir Putin was for Russia’s actions in Ukraine. The United States government’s support for Israel was on full display and put the fraud of US commitment to human rights and a laws-based international order on display as well. Internationally, Israel and the US have both sustained blows to their stance in the international community. Domestically, the Democratic base was shattered with young voters, Arab Americans, and Muslim Americans all having a fundamental distrust and dissatisfaction with the Democrats complicity in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
So taken together, Biden entered the 2024 electoral season with all of these conditions to contend with. There was a lackluster economy that most working class people felt left behind in. There was a sense that Biden was only sometimes pro-labor and his stance as a voice for workers was damaged after his blocking of the railway workers strike. He oversaw the Supreme Court’s takedown of Roe v. Wade and was never able to influence Congress to make meaningful protections in law to replace the Court’s struck-down precedent. Important things like access to medical care, improvement of infrastructure, and shifting to renewable energy were left undone. As he promised in the campaign, nothing was fundamentally different. In addition to that was his role in the genocide in Gaza wreaking havoc on his ability to unify the Democratic Party base. By the time he eventually stepped aside and made room for Kamala to become the presidential nominee, he had a disapproval rate of 62 percent.
Despite all his issues with voters that made him a vulnerable candidate (it was widely believed even before he was forced to drop out he would lose to Trump), what proved to be Biden’s undoing was his age. The sense that the Democratic Party was becoming a gerontocracy was mostly a joke before this election; but Joe Biden had more and more dramatic instances of mental unawareness and confusion making a growing number of blunders and seeming visibly tired and unfit in his appearances on television. In the end, when he debated Donald Trump and was short of breath, gazing confusedly, and barely speaking coherently, it was clear he had to be replaced as a candidate.
He stepped down with roughly 100 days for Kamala to assemble and launch a campaign. By this time, Americans had a deep distrust for the Democrats because of their willingness to peddle Biden as a sharp and spry man ready to lead. As his visible appearance declined more through the end of his presidency, reports came out he had been functionally incapable for most of his presidency. Questions ran amok about who was really running the White House, why so many were willing to cover up the president’s condition and have him as a candidate, and what the real state of the Biden government was.
This represents the election season and Democratic Party Kamala Harris would inherit to lead.
Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party in the 2024 Election
During the election, Joe Biden was already quite unpopular, and once again, the fact that Donald Trump was both controversial and unpopular made it rather shocking the two candidates were nearly neck-and-neck for most of the election season. The bar was set very low, and Joe Biden, for all the reasons listed above, couldn’t clear it confidently.
When he finally stepped aside and Kamala became the Democratic Party nominee, there was a feeling among Democratic voters of relief that there was someone new, someone younger, and someone with less of a history that voters could see as a fresh face; yet the base was no more unified around Kamala Harris than it was around Joe Biden.
It is at this point we must bring our discussion of the various ideological pockets within the Democratic Party back. Earlier in her career, Kamala was part of a series of younger progressive Democrats elected to the national legislature in the 2000s. As was stated earlier, this perception existed for plenty of Democratic voters, but was already being called into question by the 2020s. In the wake of the George Floyd riots and the Democrats failure to represent and advance the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement, much new scrutiny was applied to the Democratic Party including Harris. Her time as a top cop in California played against her. Her heavy-handedness with non-violent offenders in court and placing trans people in jails that did not correspond to their identity had made her progressive image begin to crack. When she backed out of the 2020 Democratic primary with the rest of the candidates and backed Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders, any good will that existed between her and the contemporary progressive pocket was gone. Her credentials as a progressive were officially gone. And like Elizabeth Warren and even Nancy Pelosi once upon a time, working class sympathies (to the extent they were actually there) were put through the “pragmatic” treatment. For the most part, her policy suggestions were all business-friendly capitalist initiatives to drive investment in new ventures all the while forgetting that most Americans were living paycheck to paycheck and were asking for a raise and healthcare much more than they were asking for business loans. And this was before she was the 2024 candidate.
When she was named nominee without a single person voting for her in 2024, she already faced long-standing questions about her popularity on the national stage. She had lost the primary in her own home state as a presidential candidate and was no more popular among the pragmatists than among the progressives.
Without a doubt, there was a sense of refreshment, relief, and enthusiasm that accompanied Kamala’s campaign launch. People were eager to know what her policies would be, but more importantly, if they would represent a shift from Biden’s lethargic economy, and especially if her approach to Gaza would be any improvement on Biden’s.
Her initial polling suggested she was slightly more popular than Biden and able to sway slightly more independents her way than Biden was. Some interpret her polls to suggest people were less enthusiastic about her than relieved Biden was out. Throughout the election season, Harris would have the same trouble as Biden clearing the low bar of outpacing Trump’s popularity and going confidently into the election. By June, she had only a narrow polling lead over Trump after her polling numbers had “soared” and by September, her approval reached a two-year high of 44.9 percent according to a 538 poll (Newsweek 2024).
The climax of the bump in enthusiasm came in the shape of “weird”. It began as a throwaway comment about Republican fixation on single women and their contributions to the country, and it soon took on a life of its own. It was a rare moment of the Democrats effectively communicating a contrasting difference between themselves and Republicans that mattered to people. We will see that this would be one of the only moments where the finger of the campaign was on the country’s pulse. But as “weird” became posted across the internet and the campaign spent a week or two stuffing their messaging with it, questions began to arise about serious policy proposals. The honeymoon period of Kamala’s campaign was coming to a close.
At first, there was a great hope that Kamala’s policy positions would both be a departure from Biden’s approach to the economy and to Gaza, and a chance for the Democratic Party to be united behind a new and exciting policy agenda. This excitement was amplified when Tim Walz was chosen as Harris’ running mate. He was a popular governor with small town appeal with serious progressive credentials from his time as Minnesota governor. Those accomplishments included legalizing marijuana, invested in affordable housing and made efforts to protect tenants’ rights, and set legislative benchmarks for women’s reproductive health and Trans rights. Progressives especially hoped this would signal a more progressive direction to her policy. And while the pragmatists would argue otherwise, the progressives had a strong argument to make that campaigning to take Tim Walz’s legacy as governor and push for national application of what Minnesota had put into law, there would have been the same broad Democratic and independent support that Bernie Sanders was able to cultivate by committing himself to a left-populist message on economic and social issues.
If strategists in the Democratic Party had urged this, perhaps Kamala could have taken both the White House, a chunk of the legislature if not a governing majority, and maybe even down-ballot offices and been able to act boldly on her agenda with a strong Democrat bloc to support it (something Democrats also don’t seem to do!). What she did instead was surprising if you are thinking as a pro-Democratic strategist who would want them to win elections, but not surprising if you are familiar with the ratchet effect and the role the Democratic Party plays in it.
The fact is this: to win the election, Kamala would have needed to at least unite her base. This would require a bold set of protections for women’s reproductive rights, a working class friendly economic policy and a big appeal to unions, and a definitive shift on Gaza policy. We will return to how she handled these needs shortly.
Let us once more consider the wings of the Democratic Party. We have progressives, liberal pragmatists, and conservatives. With the treatment of Bernie in 2016 and 2020, it was becoming clear the pragmatists and conservatives shared a disdain for the more sweeping policies the progressives were championing. When Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, the Democrats blamed progressives and third party voters for not supporting Hillary against Trump. From then on, the pragmatists and conservatives in the party would work together against the progressives to prevent or water down their policies, to keep them out of party leadership, and if possible, to unseat them in favor of “moderate” Democrats or even refugees from the Republican Party. This would be made obvious in 2020 when the herd of candidates aside from Biden and Sanders left the field and rallied behind Biden, effectively stifling the Sanders campaign’s primary progress. It would be made even more obvious in the congressional elections after October 7 when AIPAC funneled money to pro-Israel and anti-progressive Democrats to unseat progressives even while funding Republicans in the same races. By the 2024 election, the view of the pragmatists was clear: progressives are preventing the Democrats from winning elections and they must be stopped by moderate Democrats who can more easily work with Republicans to pass legislation. And at this point, Kamala would campaign in a way that would signal her full departure from progressivism, and would also embody the pragmatist view that Democrats would prefer to work with moderate Republicans to advance mild and almost always business-friendly legislation than with progressives to pass more sweeping working class-friendly laws. It would also communicate that Democrats believed they could win the election without progressives if they effectively messaged to anti-Trump Republicans. So what did this look like?
With Kamala, it began at the Democratic National Convention. It was a long year for the Uncommitted Movement and pro-Palestine voters. Media called Palestinian supporters anti-Semites and terrorists and police brutalized students and then corporate America blacklisted as many identifiable students from their future fields as possible. With the Biden administration continuing the arms deals, and the Biden UN delegation stopping any progress on a ceasefire, many were feeling like the Democratic Party was quickly running out of chances to heal the wound between the pro-Palestinian elements within the party and the rest of it.
As I said before, Kamala needed to do three things to secure her base: campaign hard for women’s rights, hard for unions and bring a populist economic message, and display a real change of direction with Gaza and Israel.
At the Democratic National Convention, no opportunity was given to Palestinians or pro-Palestinian organizers in the party. Protesters stood outside the convention and Democrat delegates wishing to speak on the Palestinian genocide were turned away. One was given an opportunity to address a crowd in a non-televised segment of the convention. This came not long after pro-Palestine organizers in the Democratic Party had a meeting with Tim Walz canceled as they stood at his offices waiting to be greeted as planned. The wounds between Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, particularly the many Palestinian Americans who had family members and friends killed in Gaza as their own government helped it happen, were becoming impossible to heal. It would be unclear just how much these communities had drifted away from the Democrats until the might of the election. Well before then, however, it would become clear that this task of solidifying her base would not be accomplished.
Then comes the labor question. There are several aspects to this. On one hand, there was the contrast between Biden’s pro-labor image and campaign messaging, and Kamala’s own image and messaging, and on the other there is the question of Kamala’s relationship with organized labor.
Kamala had an opportunity to build on Biden’s labor legacy. He was, after all, the first president to stand on a picket line and his work with the NLRB genuinely improved the ability of workers to organize. The Inflation Reduction Acts and whatever parts of the Green New Deal managed to become law would only survive with a subsequent Democratic term in office to see them mature, and that would have made for a powerful campaign message to voters in the many red states where projects were to take place.
Attached to this was also the legacy of Tim Walz. His ability to push through several progressive laws made him a very popular governor. He signed many laws that had been progressive goals for a long time and consistently demonstrated popular support on a national level. And even Bernie Sanders before Tim Walz was able to prove that progressive policies had plenty of national support to be electable.
On the task of securing the women’s vote, Kamala pursued a dual strategy of targeting women’s fears about their abortion rights being taken away, and did so rather effectively, while simultaneously playing to the moderate and conservative tendencies of suburban women. We’ll come back to the economic messaging and conservative-friendly tones later. Beyond the scary rhetoric describing a reality for women under Trump, there was nothing. There was no discussion about a law or constitutional protection for women’s healthcare and bodily autonomy rights. As ever, the Democrats stared the erosion of abortion rights in the face and still thought it should be used as a perpetual wedge issue than protected by law and the issue laid to rest.
To recap, Kamala had to do these things to ensure a unified base and an ability to mobilize voters: 1) show a sharp change in direction on Gaza and willingness to pressure Israel and hold them accountable for war crimes in Gaza; 2) present a worker-friendly economic policy akin to Tim Walz that would represent an effort to protect and build on pro-labor (from a progressive perspective) policies from the Biden administration, one which would also constitute a genuine alternative to the Republican economic agenda instead of an attempt to soften its edges; 3) offer a permanent solution on the perennial question of abortion ensuring broad protections for women’s healthcare and bodily autonomy rights in the form of legislation and/or constitutional protections.
What did Kamala end up doing? She focused her entire campaign message on Trump, his crimes and his personality, and his controversy making a contrast of characters that mostly missed the point of what made Trump appealing. She missed the point that people gravitated toward the attention he paid (at least in rhetoric, and probably on so) to working class economic issues and that he was willing to break with norms to get his policy goals accomplished.
With Gaza, she signaled some potential sympathy for Gazans but never made any hard statements on Netanyahu or his cabinet. As an extension of that, she also had nothing to say about the expansion of Israeli settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, about the US recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, or any deeper efforts to establish a lasting peace in the Middle East.
Concerning women’s issues, as stated above, there was sharp and often fear-inspiring rhetoric and commercials, but no positive message about protecting the rights on women in any permanent ways. Even still, this was the only area where Kamala actually made a meaningful contrast between her policy and the Republican policy.
To the point about working class economic concerns, Kamala could not have done worse. Rather than campaign on the Biden pro-labor legacy or the Tim Walz governor record, she pitched a message about small business loans and cryptocurrencies. Whenever she mentioned dinner table issues it was in passing. It was the same for ambitious national projects on infrastructure or energy production. Beyond labor, on other progressive issues such as criminal justice reform and immigration reform, Harris had little to say. That’s not entirely true—on immigration Kamala normalized most of the Republican “border crisis” arguments from 2016 and campaigned on a border bill she hoped to pass the Republicans blocked that would have added to the amount of law enforcement at the border. Worse than that, during the campaign, she had Mark Cuban, a billionaire, do the media circuit as a campaign surrogate and after the campaign it would be reported that the Uber CEO was close to Kamala and her husband and encouraged her to tack hard to court CEOs and the capitalists. The low point for Kamala with labor was only reported on after the campaign. At an earlier point in the campaign when Biden was still the Democratic nominee, the Teamsters asked each candidate, which then also included Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to answer a slate of questions about the candidates’ positions on certain economic and labor questions. As Sean O’Brien, Teamsters president, put it, Trump and RFK Jr. answered all the union’s questions, and then-Democratic nominee Biden answered a select few of them, less than half. After she became the nominee when Biden stepped down, Kamala received the same set of questions from the Teamsters and answered none of the questions. In a private event with the Teamsters, Kamala grew angry with some attendants and on her exit said “I’ll win with or without you”. Reporting on this only came out after the election.
In the final weeks of the election, after all these previous developments, Kamala Harris’ campaign was doing immense outreach to anti-Trump Republicans and touting the endorsements of dozens of Republicans hoping that with a substantially centrist message with certain rightward concessions, a critical amount of Republican support could be mustered that could make up for the progressives the Harris campaign now expected to not mobilize. All of this culminated with the endorsement of Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney. On one hand, many people noticed Kamala was doing so much work to steal Republican votes and very little to repair her own party’s base. On the other hand, even more people still associated Dick Cheney with the lies that started the Iraq War and his profiteering through Halliburton. Liz Cheney was no more repugnant to the average Democrat than any other Republican. In fact, her anti-Trump stance probably made her more popular among Democratic voters, if only slightly, than the average Republican. To the wider public, she was tainted by her father and beyond that, she was another reminder of the old establishment of American politics that much of the American public had come to blame for many contemporary problems. The Cheney endorsement managed to anger everyone. Progressives felt the boot on the rear as they were cast aside as a priority for the Harris campaign. Democratic voters felt the cognitive dissonance of a campaign defined by respect for the rule of law seeking the endorsement of a person who lied to the country, sending us into the Iraq War.
At this point, it was becoming clear to both progressives and working class voters the pragmatist aversion to progressive policies had less to do with electability and more to do with a typical capitalist preference against working class-friendly policies. After all, what is the pragmatism of a Democratic presidential candidate telling the Teamsters their votes don’t matter?
Anyone would think the goal of the Democratic Party during the 2024 Election was to win that election and put themselves in a position to put an agenda into effect. The only problem with that assumption is the agenda they put forward was made to be only marginally distinguishable from the Republican agenda. It went from being the party of Dreamers to a party that had normalized much of the campaign rhetoric Trump used in 2016 about undocumented immigrants. Perhaps the agenda of the party was weaker in informing their strategic decisions that the more pragmatic power calculus—if they could procure the votes to stave off a Trump presidency, than the political establishment stood a better chance of surviving the Trump wave still dominant in the Republican Party and rippling across American society. Rather than take an example such as Bernie Sanders and recognize his popularity, recognize the fact many of Trump’s voter base had once voted for Bernie, and his policies had broad appeal across party lines with voters and among independents, they did the most unlikely-to-succeed thing they could—try to outflank Trump to the right. The Harris campaign courted the CEOs who didn’t truly care who won, the moderate and small business community that was one of Trump’s most politically active pillars of support with talk about cryptocurrency and targeted small business loans, and going in step with the move towards CEOs, she took a visibly disinterested approach to union workers or workers in general, whose economic concerns were driving them more and more intensely towards Trump.
Trump was never supportive of the working class or an agenda that would meaningfully help them. But he has always known how to read the room and say what people want to hear. He did that with a constant focus on American jobs, American manufacturing, and going after “Biden-omics” legacy of inflation attaching it to the age-old right wing talking point on gross government spending at the expense of the public’s long-term financial health. When Kamala took a campaign stance on immigration in 2024 that normalized the Republican position in 2016—that there was in fact a “crisis” at the Mexican border, even though Biden policies on the border had brought border interactions between undocumented migrants and Border Patrol down by 60 percent, and that more forces and finances needed to be directed to the Southern border, it only confirmed what Republicans already believed and made them more confident in their ongoing support for Trump. Kamala passed over the obvious option of running a true contrast against Trump as a left-leaning candidate with a populist economic message as Bernie Sanders did in favor of trying to out-perform Trump on right wing rhetoric. While she did that, Trump applied just the right amount of worker-friendly rhetoric and swept Kamala’s working class base so thoroughly, the Harris campaign wouldn’t realize the depth of the crossover until the Blue Wall of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania shattered as all three went for Trump in the election.
Additional reporting after the election revealed that Kamala Harris’ campaign’s internal polling never suggested she was even ahead of Trump in the polls, let alone meaningfully ahead. Other reporting confirmed what many suspected, that Biden’s mental decline made it impossible for him to work independently without heavy assistance from aides and staffers, and the true extent of his mental health was coordinately kept from the public. So in not one instance but two, the Democratic Party was putting forward a candidate with questionable popularity and “electability”, one of whom had a disaster of a mental health scenario that was one of Washington’s worst kept secrets, with no real primary, and with Kamala, none at all, all the while shutting the door on any progressive regardless of how well they had performed in their elections, regardless of any indication that the progressive wing of the party was where its restoration to “electability” lay.
So we must now ask again what the goals of the Democratic Party and its dominant liberal pragmatic pocket were given the strategy they pursued.
If the goals of the Democratic Party were to win the presidency and legislature to the greatest extent possible for form a governing majority, their strategy was uniquely badly in conception, execution, or both.
If the goal was rather to shut out the progressives and create a hostile environment where their policies would receive no support, where their representatives would have no inclusion in leadership, and where the party would set its machinery against them in primaries, force them out of the party or into silence, and make up any vacancies with Never-Trump Republicans then, perhaps, this strategy could have made that happen if it were to account better for what made Trump appeal to Republican voters. By the end of the election, progressive voters were alienated and disillusioned with the Democrats, and a couple crucial progressive legislators losing their re-election campaigns. Additionally, the pragmatists now had more than enough disillusioned “moderate” Republicans fresh off their endorsements of Kamala they could persuade to run against the remaining progressives. Given those circumstances, one could say the desired outcome was certainly achieved.
Then, finally, we might imagine if the Democrats had resigned themselves to electoral defeat and were doing their best to signal to Republicans a willingness to participate in (or at least to not meaningfully oppose) their agenda, and simultaneously signal to the public something that could possibly be mistaken for an attempt to win (as it remained crucial to keep up the appearance of a two-party system and fight the perceptions of a Democratic-Republican capitalist mono-party). In that case, they might pursue a Weimar style contract where Democrats hoped that by selling out the progressives and working against them, they might escape the more and more naked fascism of the Republican Party. If that was the goal of the party, or at least of the pragmatic pocket that dominated it then this strategy was a clear winner. Rather, it remains to be seen if Republicans will keep up their end of the contract and spare the Democrats from the sort of attack they have in store of migrant workers, the undocumented, gay, lesbian, and Trans people, and more communities that have been the constant target of fascist Republican rhetoric.
As much reporting after the election helped shed light on Kamala’s electoral chances, on her repugnant attitude toward union workers, and the willingness of the Democratic Party to conceal their vulnerabilities from the public and do everything they could to prop up Biden as a candidate until it was just no longer possible, perhaps more reporting in the future will shed light on the discussions within the Harris campaign between the candidate and her strategists. One hopes such conversations being exposed can more deeply explain to the people in this country what such a poorly executed campaign was hoping to accomplish. Perhaps the nobility of their goals, which we as of yet cannot truly confirm, will make up for the ruin brought on families facing everything from a mass deportation to a cost of living crisis that has made home ownership and retirement unlikely fantasies for most.
The Democratic Party and Liberal Media Response to the Loss
The night of her loss, Kamala could not, or would not, face the crowds to hear the concession that was supposed to be a victory speech. Days later, she came out of the shadows to give a paltry address to her supporters about “never giving up the fight” against Donald Trump’s assault on democracy, to use the liberal campaign rhetoric for a moment, and to “hold him accountable”. This sounded particularly hilarious considering how much legal weight was thrown into holding him accountable for his crimes and he managed to use lawyers acting in bad faith with the US legal system, and the courts themselves being the result of four years of intense appointment of judges by Trump himself. And that is to say nothing of the appeals which would be taken directly to a Supreme Court comfortably in the hands of the Republican Party. All this was capped off with a round of emails asking for money to keep the fight going. No doubt a plea to help her campaign pay back the billions of dollars the Never Trumpers of corporate America spent on her campaign.
The first wave of reaction from the Democratic Party sphere was the news pundits, party strategists routinely on as contributors, and the world of liberal podcasts, such as Pod Save America. To say this first wave did not seem to be deep in reflection of mistakes leading to the loss is to be charitable. In reality, the first and very loud reaction from this group of people was to blame progressives for not coming out to support Kamala Harris. Just as in 2016 with Hillary Clinton, it was not crucial mistakes the Democratic Party and their candidate made, but rather unrealistic progressives who refused to play ball with moderates to get incremental gains. Pay no attention to the lack of material gains at any point since Obama signed the Affordable Healthcare Act (a low bar) and the pathetically empty gestures roundly recognized as efforts to push important questions of reform under the rug (most notoriously the Democratic Party Congressional leadership taking a knee in Congress after George Floyd’s murder only to have local and state Democratic government increase police budgets across the country). The message was clear: progressives were unwelcome in the party except on the condition that they supported Democrat Appeasement to Republicans—deep rightward concessions on policies that would not even guarantee the votes of the bad faith legislators who talked the concessions into the bills in the first place, and that they never question this status quo. The message from pragmatists in the party to progressives was that they were welcome on the condition they, functionally, cease to be progressives.
Never before was it more obvious to see the conservative and liberal pragmatic Democrats were allied to isolate and remove their progressive party mates to make room in the party for anyone looking to flee the Republican Party under Trump.
If actions during the election didn’t make things clear, perhaps Democrats and their spokespeople immediate and harsh anti-progressive turn in messaging immediately upon the loss did. They flooded the media with messaging about having “gone too far to the Left” specifically naming the issue of Trans rights as an “unpragmatic” issue to run on. More and more liberal commentators were taking on the same right wing anti-woke tone that they would have decried as a poor attempt to mask a bigoted or supremacist worldview four years before. The Trans community absorbed much of the flack here. Even the Uncommitted voters and Palestine protestors who withheld their votes in November were less targeted for vitriol than they were. They did nevertheless get grief for expecting a politician to earn their vote and not use scare tactics to force it from them. But they proceeded to tell the Democrats to “blame themselves”, most justifiably. Many pointed to the flight of black and Latino male voters to Trump as proof that “woke” had ruined the Democrats’ electability, but once more overlooked the major fact that it was economic concerns that drove people most to Trump. The Democrats chose a pro-business campaign message while Trump played to the crowd on cost of living and jobs pulling a core element of the Democrat base into his camp. The Democrats will never grasp how much of an overlap exists between working class Bernie Sanders supporters and working class Trump supporters. They may never grasp that what those two candidates represented was a departure from the status quo and the Democrats commitment to that status quo is never going to be a winning strategy.
In general, the immediate response was a complete lack of self-reflection or self-criticism and the first fight they picked was with progressives who were portrayed as traitors to the party and to blame for Trump being re-elected.
In one brief moment, there was a CNN panelist and Democratic strategist who, in a moment of clarity rare to see in that party, admitted that Bernie Sanders was right to question the institution of the party like Trump did and it was a bad move to get people to turn away from Bernie and towards the institutional norms of the party. This was entirely too little too late; considering how obvious it should have been to anyone calling themselves a strategist for anyone, let alone for a major political party, why should this sudden realization be indicative of better decision making from this party in the future? In any case, this person would go on to join the choir of voices, once again, directing people away from any big changes within the party, to “trust the institution”, and “work together” for incremental change.
One of the developments that did the most to expose the true liberal position on the coming situation under Trump came from Morning Joe. Joe and Mika spent much of the first Trump administration condemning his actions as authoritarian and anti-American. They spent much of the 2024 election season comparing him (rightfully) to Hitler as Trump continually made Sources to the Nazis while keeping prominent white nationalist figures like Stephen Miller close in his circle. So even a great deal of their viewers were shocked when the two co-hosts confirmed that they had visited Trump after his second election win at Mar-a-Lago and they intended to keep an open dialogue with the new administration. They said this was important to properly cover the incoming administration. This made many wonder how seriously these figures in the liberal media took the idea that Trump might be a genuine fascist. After all, many journalists will probably have no problem covering the unfolding of Republican fascism without visiting Mar-a-Lago. Many saw their visit as them bending the knee and kissing the ring of a fascist they had lost the will or interest to fight.
Perceptions of tone deafness and a lack of self-reflection came anew in the form of rumors of Kamala’s political future. Within weeks of her loss rumors began to swirl about a 2028 presidential run. This was seen as the height of arrogance on the part of Harris if true, and a sign the Democrats had no one else in mind to take the lead of their party, that they had no idea of what leadership looked to be when the Biden-Pelosi-Schumer generation was gone. Then other rumors came out about a run for California governor. The conversation among Democrats still behind Harris was it was a one-or-the-other situation. There was little point in her running for governor of California only for her to have to take on a presidential campaign in the middle of her gubernatorial term. The consensus among those in her circle talking about it to the media was Kamala was slow to make decisions and wouldn’t jump hastily into anything. With other words, her advisors were told to “keep her options open”, one might suspect a run, but considering she lost this race and couldn’t even win the primary race in California in 2020, we’ll see what her path to the White House is when a little more than Joe Biden’s declining health stands between her and the Oval Office.
What of leadership positions, and integrating younger, more progressive people into them? Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was in contention for leadership of the House Oversight Committee, and the Democrats instead went with Gerry Connolly. Rather than embrace the younger members of their party to steward more of the party in coming years, they went with a 74-year old suffering from throat cancer. Another day, another snub, from the pragmatists to the progressives. It made no difference to the pragmatists their position in a Trump-led future would be questionable no matter what corners they pushed progressives into, no matter what banishments they imposed on them. For self-described “pragmatists”, they have no grasp over even the obvious points of negotiating with fascists.
The most shocking and simultaneously least-covered reaction from Democrats came from Joe Biden himself. In an interview with CNN, he was asked about whether or not he worried about Donald Trump respecting the rules of democracy. Biden answered quite point blankly that Trump abiding by those rules was “not his concern” and that all he was concerned with was enabling “a smooth transition”. This even more than the Morning Joe incident should have shocked people much more than it did. Was Trump truly the fascist we were lead to believe? Either he wasn’t a Nazi and all this was needless fearmongering over the past year that further weakened the country, or he was a Nazi and Joe Biden has no problem, but rather sees it as his responsibility to hand power “smoothly” over to this Nazi.
So once more, I find myself asking: if the electoral strategy was what it was, if it attained the results it did, and garnered the response from the Democrats that it did, than what was their desired outcome?
Did they hope to win a governing majority to protect and advance a legislative agenda Biden had begun? Did they hope to win the presidency by the margins with a strategy of pushing out progressives to welcome in Never Trump Republicans? Or did they hope that in the face of a likely Trump victory, that serving up progressives was the best bet to make in a Weimar-style contract made in the interest of either self-preservation at best, or shared desired outcome with fascists at worst.
I say the first is impossible unless the Democrats are remarkably stupid, which I do not believe they are. The second is a calculated risk that the Democrats failed to justify when they lost and couldn’t maintain either house of Congress. The third is the outcome that most closely fits the party’s approach if we consider that 1) Kamala’s own people never polled her even ahead of Trump nationally, 2) that she already had lost her progressive credentials and embraced the pragmatists (who themselves never fully embraced her), and 3) that even after the loss of the presidency and the retention of most progressive seats in Congress, the party targeted the progressives, most notably trans people, Uncommitted voters, and Palestine sympathizers and activists, as being to blame for the loss of the White House.
At the end of the day, I think the second option is most likely and the third is less so. The only indication of the truth will be the coming months of Democratic actions during the Trump administration. So far, they have been silent as Trump has moved against Trans people in executive orders defining gender as being either male or female, and more than 40 supported the Laken Riley Act which is admittedly being used by Border Patrol and ICE to detain not only undocumented migrants with criminal history, but also with those they are found. In short, this bill is legal justification for a dragnet operation by police. It has already swept thousands of migrants into jail cells, and into planes waiting to deport them. Mexico has already rejected one plane of deported migrants for landing as of time of writing.
A Message to Progressives from Socialists
Progressives in the orbit of the Democratic Party, there are many of you with many reasons to be within that orbit. This is not the first time you have been burned by the pragmatists of your party obsessed with “electability” who go on to lose all of the most important and supposedly low-bar elections of recent time. Bernie Sanders represented a real contrast to the Republican vision. He represented a direction into the future for the party to take that managed to bring millions of people enthusiastically towards the Democratic Party. The pragmatists preached about the difficulty of aligning fly-over America with a democratic socialist. In their fear of losing in a landslide, they kneecapped Bernie both in 2016 and 2020.
In 2016, it was the DNC colluding with the media to shut Bernie out while putting Trump on the air as a “pied-piper” candidate. In 2020, it was all the primary candidates backing out of the primaries and backing Biden to blunt the momentum Sanders built up after primary victories in the first handful of 2020 Democratic primaries. One of those resulted in Trump’s first victory. The other resulted in a president and vice president who could never meaningfully command the support of the American public with a forward-looking policy vision that was a real alternative to what the Republicans offered.
In 2024, they have lost again and you are once again the scapegoat. You, who could truly revive your party are routinely robbed of the chance to do that. If you are Trans, the Democrats are talking about how discarding the fight for your rights is the key to their party’s survival. If you believe genocide is wrong and the people of Palestine deserve justice, you have spent a whole year and more being called a terrorist and an anti-Semite, or worse. If you believe workers’ rights have to be fought for consistently and equal rights for all means precisely that, you are called a dreamer and unrealistic by people who can’t even win an election against a convicted rapist.
So often, socialists have this conversation with you. The Democratic Party is not only unfriendly to you. It is plainly hostile! On a good day, the pragmatists water down your policies to please Republicans. On a bad day, they bury them never to see the light of day. You are barred from leadership. Your concerns are never addressed. Your ideas are never followed. And all the pragmatists have to show for it is more poverty, more homelessness, less healthcare coverage, more police brutality, and now they have handed power over to the fascists who have put their mass deportation rhetoric into immediate effect. After this election, there is substantial evidence they are taking decisive action to remove you from their party, to court moderate Republicans, and have them take your place in a new Democratic Party that has purged its progressive wing.
The simple fact is when you are looking for true and reliable allies in political struggle, progressives and working class people only have one true friend—the socialist movement.
The true difference between us is magnitude, not direction. You want universal healthcare. You want nationalization of certain key industries. You want strong, healthy unions numbering in the millions of workers. You want regulation of financial institutions. You want green energy and a 21st century infrastructure. Socialists want all of these things. Many want also to follow the logic of these things to their natural conclusion. We don’t simply want green energy and modern infrastructure, we want to free people to travel as they please without obstacle the way capital does. We don’t just want healthy unions, we want them to be the bedrock of a class conscious working class that has all the tools it needs to lead the world it built. We don’t just want the regulation of financial institutions. We want to ensure that capital is restrained and its political and economic power liquidated into the hands of the working class. We want to deconstruct the institution of capital thoroughly enough to never fear its resurgence. We want the needs of life to be human rights in a way capitalists will never allow. We want employment to be a choice, a fulfilling addition to life, and for economic exploitation to be unimaginable to minds of people in the future.
We want what can be done when you stop negotiating with capitalists. After all, you cannot do very much at all negotiating with people who want to see you fail. Capital doesn’t want to see workers get stronger as they get richer. They only see a threat to their production of wealth, to the political power it has brought them, and the world it has laid at their disposal.
What we want is that which can be done when you realize you cannot negotiate with people who lack basic morals. We have seen them cover up a climate disaster for decades. We have seen them reap fortunes from medical debt and student debt when healthcare and education should be human rights. We have seen them start wars of profit that destabilize entire regions. Now, having run out of world markets to exploit, the American exploitation machine is now turned on its own people after years of Keynesian working class protections have given way to Carter and Reagan era neoliberalism that continues to this day.
We are done being told what to do by people who want to see us fail. We are done being told that unless we vote for a Democrat, we are handing over democracy to fascists. Anyone who thinks they can use scare tactics to demand your vote has already lost their grasp of what democracy is. This country is undoubtedly in its era of naked fascism. Democrats think you are to blame. They blame you for the loss they did everything to ensure. They see you as the enemy and time can only tell how they will legislate under Trump: will they protect all Americans as they claim, or will they ride the fascist wave to punish you for exercising your free democratic choice?
Sources
Human Rights Watch. 2024. https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/11/14/hopeless-starving-and-besieged/israels-forced-displacement-palestinians-gaza
Murphy, Brett. 2024. https://www.propublica.org/article/israel-gaza-america-biden-administration-weapons-bombs-state-department
Newsweek Sep 30, 2024 Kamala Harris Hits Best Approval Rating in Two Years. https://www.newsweek.com/kamala-harris-popularity-poll-approval