The left’s comforting myth about why Harris lost

On November 5, Americans elevated a reactionary authoritarian to the presidency — again.

After attempting to overturn an election, fomenting an insurrection, becoming a convicted criminal, and baselessly accusing an immigrant community of eating house pets, Donald Trump not only won a second lease on the White House, but he did so with a plurality of the popular vote — while Republicans took control of both congressional chambers. 

Liberals may be feeling a sense of déjà vu. But this is not 2017 all over again. It is something worse.

Over the past eight years, Trump has remade the Republican Party in his image. In Congress, his intraparty critics have almost all decamped for the private sector or knelt to kiss his ring. In the executive branch, the “adults” are no longer “in the room”: Awed by his own power and unprepared to staff an administration, Trump leaned on many relatively mainstream advisers in his first term. This time around, he and his allies have assembled a cadre of loyalists, some of whom have won cabinet nominations (alongside some more conventional Republicans). 

Meanwhile, conservatives have consolidated their grip on the Supreme Court, slashed the Democrats’ advantage with Hispanic voters, and fortified the GOP’s strength with the non-college-educated electorate, realignments that threatened the Democratic Party’s capacity to wield federal power.

All this amounts to a catastrophe for anyone who values liberal democracy, egalitarian economic policy, and social equality for all marginalized groups. As someone who has spent the past decade advocating for more expansionary immigration policies, a larger social safety net, criminal justice reform, and decarbonization, it is difficult to see my country embrace a man who evinces contempt for all of those causes.

In the face of this calamity, Democrats must develop a clear-eyed understanding of how they got here and chart a plausible path back to the country they want to live in.

This newsletter — The Rebuild — aims to aid in that project. In weekly installments, I’ll try to offer some insight into how Democrats lost their national majority, as well as what we — people who care about advancing progressive change — must do to become more effective moving forward.

Answering those questions will require Democrats to analyze their predicament with open minds. If we seek ideologically comforting explanations for the party’s problems — rather than empirically sound ones — the coalition will march deeper into the wilderness. 

Unfortunately, in the wake of Harris’s loss, virtually every Democratic faction has produced its share of motivated reasoning. In future newsletters, I plan to take issue with some centrists’ analysis of the party’s difficulties. But today, I want to explain why I worry that the left is allowing wishful thinking to cloud its vision of political reality. 

Since November 5, some progressives have drawn a sweeping lesson from Donald Trump’s second victory: Harris’s loss proves that Democrats gain little from “moderation” or “centrism” and must “embrace radical policies” in order to compete. I admire many of the writers making this argument. But their confidence in this narrative strikes me as wildly unfounded.

It is true that Harris pivoted to the center on border security, crime, and, to a lesser extent, economics. There are plenty of sound arguments — both moral and political — against Democrats moderating on specific issues. Yet it’s hard to see how anyone could be confident that Harris lost because she moderated, much less that her loss proved that moderation is electorally counterproductive as a rule. 

To name just a few reasons for doubting those premises:

• Harris actually did better where both she and Donald Trump held campaign rallies and aired TV advertisements than she did in the rest of the country. Thus, if Harris’s problem was her moderate messaging, it is odd that she won a higher share of the vote in the places that were more exposed to that messaging, despite the fact that such areas were also inundated by pro-Trump ads. 

• In a September poll from Gallup, 51 percent of voters described Harris as “too liberal,” while just 6 percent deemed her “too conservative.”

• Some of the Democratic Party’s biggest overperformers in the 2024 election — the down-ballot candidates that ran furthest ahead of Harris with their constituents — were moderates: Jon Tester, Amy Klobuchar, Jared Golden, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.

• Harris had been a liberal senator and took many left-wing positions during the 2020 Democratic primary. She was attacked relentlessly by the Trump campaign on that basis. It’s hard to see how one could determine that it was Harris’s moderate messaging, rather than her progressive background, that was more damaging to her prospects. What we know, however, is that her opponent’s political advisers sought to highlight the latter, not the former. 

• The Biden-Harris administration was, by many progressives’ own account, the most left-wing White House on domestic policy in generations, and Trump’s team portrayed Harris as an extension of that administration. 

• Across the wealthy world, parties that presided over inflation have been losing at the ballot box, irrespective of their political leanings, a fact that raises doubts about whether any grand ideological lesson can be drawn from Harris’s defeat.

My aim here is not to argue that Democrats must pivot to the center on all issues. I don’t think they should. I do think that the party needs to moderate its image nationally, if only to better compete for Senate control. But I’m still gathering my thoughts on how precisely they should pursue that task and will elaborate on them in future newsletters.  

For now, my point is simply that there is little basis for confidence that Harris lost due to excessive moderation, or that Democrats would benefit electorally from becoming broadly more left-wing. The fact that many on the left nevertheless evince such certainty is therefore disconcerting. 

Being progressive, in the best sense of that term, means putting the interests of the most vulnerable above one’s own comfort — whether material or ideological. And right now, America’s most disempowered constituencies have a strong interest in Democrats ousting reactionaries from power. If the party substitutes wishful thinking for unblinkered analysis, they will have a harder time accomplishing that task.