What went wrong: Part 1

I’ve been quiet the last couple of days, not because I’ve withdrawn, but because I’ve been trying to make sense of Tuesday. I’ve been looking at the data as it comes in, reading all the hot takes, and processing. Some of the hot takes have been pretty darn dumb, and I didn’t want to add to that pile. 

So here’s what I got. 

This country’s electorate, like that of literally every single other country in the world, was angry. It has been a universal truth this year that whether the party in power is on the right, left, or in the center, voters are punishing governments for inflation. 

The message has been sent: In times of cataclysmic disaster like the COVID pandemic, voters would rather some people suffer or even die than have the government provide stimulus aid. Inflation is the new global third rail of politics. 

But that’s just a piece of it. The answer to this question, no matter how much people want to dumb it down, is always more complicated. 

Sen. Bernie Sanders claimed Democrats’ loss on Tuesday was because the party abandoned the working class. Yet President Joe Biden was the most pro-labor president since FDR. He bailed out union pensions to the tune of $36 billion. He was the first sitting president to walk a picket line. 

Heck, he froze out Elon Musk and Tesla from his electric vehicle summit in 2021 because the auto unions were upset at Musk’s anti-union efforts. That began Musk’s radicalization toward the right, and what did Democrats get in return? Many of them voted for Trump. 

The old alliances have to be rethought. The teachers and service unions (more female, more college educated) delivered for Democrats; the trades (white, male, non-college) are gone. Democrats need to adjust their focus accordingly. 

Not for nothing, Vice President Kamala Harris appears to have done a tad better in Vermont than Sanders did, and there was no greater champion for the working class than Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown. How he’d do? Oh yeah, he lost. So much for that theory. 

Meanwhile, a disproportionate amount of infrastructure spending was in red states and districts. Republicans, including the ones representing those states and districts, opposed that investment. How did those areas reward Democrats? By voting for Republicans in even greater numbers. Again, everything needs to be rethought. 

Some people claim it was Gaza! The exit polls actually show that Harris won voters who thought the administration was balancing the crisis fine (59-39), won those who thought U.S. support for Israel was “too strong” (67-30), and lost those who wanted to do more for Israel (82-17). The reality is that the pro-Palestinian side was on the wrong side of public opinion, just 30% of the electorate. Green Party nominee Jill Stein, a darling of this crowd, barely got a half point. 

These next two theories land better with me. 

Some are pointing to the vast right-wing noise machine, marveling at how Republicans were able to push their agenda into the mainstream with nothing remotely comparable on the left. That capability was exponentially amplified when a radicalized Musk bought Twitter and turned it into propaganda central. 

I spent two decades begging Democratic donors to invest in liberal media, but they bought into the notion that the media was already liberal, so why spend money on new liberal outlets if The New York Times and NPR already exist? 

Meanwhile, Republicans looked at their wildly successful Fox News and all of AM radio and said, “We want more.” They built and funded Drudge Report, Breitbart, and Daily Caller, and then said more, more, more. They started two more cable networks, Newsmax and OANN, despite Fox’s dominance, because why not? More was better! They expanded aggressively into podcasting, and that was so successful that the Russians decided to fund it.

Donald Trump participates in a Fox News Town Hall with Sean Hannity on Sept. 4 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

And Republican Party leaders, from members of Congress to Trump himself, have regularly appeared on and promoted all of those right-wing media outlets, from the most prominent to the obscure. Democratic leaders, on the other hand, stay away from progressive outlets instead of helping to build a progressive media infrastructure of their own. 

Meanwhile, the entire so-called liberal news establishment downplayed Trump’s threats and sanewashed his dangerous gibberish. In an internal meeting, New York Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn explicitly told staff upset with their sanewashing, “What [the critics are] interested in is having us be a mouthpiece for their already predetermined point of view.” 

That’s not what we’re interested in, but regardless, he’s right. The Times’ job is not to promote liberalism. Maybe now the party donor class will wake up and build that media infrastructure. Maybe. 

I also think that some far-left activism was a serious liability. The Trump ad about Harris supporting taxpayer-funded transition surgery for prison inmates ran more than any other Trump ad because it worked. 

“Kamala is for they/them,” the ad said. “Trump is for you." It was so patently absurd that it cut through the clutter and validated claims that Harris was too radical. 

Discussions about defunding police, land acknowledgments, and pronouns—all of those come from a genuine place of trying to right historical wrongs and build a society built on tolerance, equality, and respect. 

Yet rather than build public support over time, like the gay rights movement did with marriage equality—strategically, intentionally, and gently bringing people along—activists tried to berate and shame the public into agreement. “Latinx” is so idiotic, I can’t even—and neither can most Latinos. The new version, “Latine,” isn’t any better. Pretending that the border isn’t a problem was … a problem. 

In Arizona, Harris won Latinos 55-42, while Rep. Ruben Gallego, en route to winning the state’s Senate seat, won them 61-37. Yes, he’s Latino and male, and that likely helped. But he also has been a vocal critic of Latinx and has been a border hawk. He knows how to focus aggressively on things that people are worried about, rather than try to make certain groups of people merely feel better. We can go on and on. 

Ruben Gallego speaks on Aug. 22 at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois.

There is a mass center of the American people struggling to get by, wondering why the Democratic Party is focused on things that feel irrelevant to them. Most Americans aren’t in a union, but a majority use Apple products, so great, let’s have the Justice Department sue Apple because of its closed ecosystem, and let’s push the PRO Act that punishes independent contractors who like the flexibility of working for themselves. 

All that talk about going after Big Tech? Big Tech is overwhelmingly Democratic. It’s the San Francisco Bay Area. So great, let’s burn that bridge too, why don’t we? 

It doesn’t matter how much Harris bought into any of this, if at all. The loudest voices in our party brand our party. Just like we didn’t believe Trump when he distanced himself from Project 2025, people aren’t willing to give our politicians the benefit of the doubt when they assign a policy to a candidate. That’s why Trump’s prison ad was so powerful; it communicated to voters, “Oh, she’s one of those.”

FDR was brilliant at boiling everything down to a simple core message. Check out his Second Bill of Rights: 

Trump’s genius, though far more destructive, is that he does the same thing. The conversation we need to have—and I will have more to say on that in part 2—is how Democrats today need to learn how to do the same thing.  

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