If Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election, Democrats are going to be soul-searching at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Trump is a uniquely vulnerable candidate, convicted of crimes, liable for fraud and sexual abuse, bent on autocracy, and older than 87% of the US population. If Democrats can’t beat him, who can they beat?
The problems with the Democratic Party are evident in Vice President Kamala Harris’s difficulty getting over the margin of error in polls of voters in the seven key swing states: Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada. She has clearly improved on President Joe Biden’s dismal standing since he dropped out of the race in July. But on paper, she should be doing way better. Inflation is nearly back to normal levels, unemployment is low, gas prices are manageable, and crime is falling. Those factors normally pave the way for a decisive incumbent victory.
Of the two political parties, Republicans have morphed into a fractious mob under Trump, animated by anger, grievance, and a primordial urge to burn everything down. If Trump loses his second presidential election in a row, Republicans will face their own reckoning and the prospect that a rabid minority, no matter how passionate, cannot win national elections.
Democrats, however, have hardly stepped into the breach and offered normal Americans a political refuge. Instead, Democrats have gone to the other extreme and left millions of voters feeling alienated by both parties. Here are three mistakes Democrats have made in recent years that will explain what went wrong if they lose in 2024:
The Bernie Sanders effect
The socialistic Vermont senator clearly caught traction when he ran for president as a Democrat in 2016. He energized young crowds by railing against “obscene levels” of income inequality. He proposed heavy new taxes on businesses and the wealthy, which would finance free college and a government healthcare plan to cover all Americans. Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination, but Sanders got 43% of the primary vote, persuading other Democrats that voters were open to radical new ideas for lifting up young Americans and those who were falling behind.
Sanders and other progressive Democrats followed up with ideas such as the “Green New Deal” in 2019, which would have been a sweeping government takeover of the energy and transportation sectors meant to address climate change and rectify widespread social inequities. Most Democrats supported the Green New Deal, even though it failed in a gimmicky congressional vote. Democrats stuck with the idea, viewing it as a winning issue in the 2020 elections.
Fast-forward to 2024, and it turns out that moderate swing voters don’t want the massive disruptions that would come with these two gigantic government efforts, even if they support the end goals. As the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris has abandoned her earlier support for both the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, because she needs centrist voters who prefer gradual improvements over massive government intervention. Sanders showed how to energize America’s most liberal voters, and many other Democrats followed his lead, including Harris. What they didn’t account for is the blowback: Policies that excite liberals alienate centrists. Harris is struggling with that problem now.
Trashing fossil fuels
During his 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden famously promised to “end fossil fuel.” He seemed to act on that promise as soon as he took office in January 2021 by canceling the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, siding with climate activists on an emotional issue that stood as a litmus test for whether you supported the cause. Biden was clearly seeking to appease progressive Democrats — the Sanders wing — passionate about addressing climate change.
Whoops. Turns out the whole country remains highly dependent on fossil fuels to get around and power their homes. When gasoline prices spiked in 2022, hitting $5 per gallon for the first time, voters naturally thought about Biden’s hostility to fossil fuels and concluded that he was the reason they were paying more to gas up. That’s not really true, but Biden himself recognized the image problem he faced. Biden released oil from the emergency reserve and called on drillers everywhere to produce more. Energy prices have come back down, but it’s probably no coincidence that Biden’s approval rating cratered in 2022 and never recovered. Harris backs all of Biden’s policy decisions and faces the same voter skepticism on energy that Biden does.
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris departs Air Force Two at Joint Base Andrews, Md., Monday, Oct. 21, 2024, on return to Washington after several days on the campaign trail. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, Pool) ·ASSOCIATED PRESS
Biden finally issued an order this past June that sharply limited entry by migrants. Border crossings have since plunged to levels last seen during Trump’s term. The political question is, what took Biden so long? The answer, once again, is that Biden was catering to the liberal wing of his party, which favors looser migration policies. Harris is now in the awkward position of explaining how the Biden-Harris team went from reversing Trump’s migration policies to basically reimposing them.
Trump has captured the Republican Party by appealing to its nationalistic culture warriors and basically driving out those in the center. Democrats haven’t gone quite as far, but Biden, Harris, et al., have pandered to their own base, the progressive left, veering back to the center only in national elections where they need moderate votes. No wonder many voters view the 2024 presidential election as a choice between terrible and slightly less terrible.
Harris and the Democrats haven’t lost yet. It’s possible Harris will persuade just enough moderate swing voters that she’s one of them, after all. If she wins, she might even govern more to the center than Biden, who won the general election in 2020 as a centrist but then drifted left.
Whoever wins, the lesson for both parties in 2024 is that they’ve left the moderate swing voters whose support they crave during the last few weeks of the election feeling politically homeless during the other 47 months.
