Did Democrats lose the 2024 election because of “bad” policies?

As leaders scramble to assign blame for Donald Trump’s decisive win on Tuesday, this round of post-election finger-pointing differs markedly from recent cycles. Unlike past elections with narrow margins, Trump’s likely popular vote victory and his uniform swing across states and counties defy simple explanations like a racist electorate or discontent over Biden’s foreign policy. Even chalking the election entirely up to inflation seems rather convenient and incomplete.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, who earned about 6,000 fewer votes in his reelection bid than Kamala Harris did in Vermont, came out on Wednesday with a statement blasting the Democratic Party for abandoning working-class people, who appeared to break overwhelmingly for Trump. This critique quickly gained traction, with commentators arguing that Harris and the Democrats had lost touch with working people’s needs, prioritizing issues like democracy and abortion rights too much. “If voters did not believe that Harris had a real plan to make their lives better, materially, it is hard to fault them,” wrote Matt Karp in Jacobin on Wednesday. “I wish we had enacted the housing, care, and child tax credit elements in Build Back Better so we would have had concrete cost-of-living benefits to run on,” lamented former Biden administration official Bharat Ramamurti on Thursday.

I’m not here to prescribe what politicians should or should not run on next time around, and I do desperately hope that elected officials use their time in office to pass good, well-designed legislation that improves people’s lives. But it seems like the discourse is barreling toward a well-trodden yet dubious place. 

The (appealing) contention is that Democrats could have turned their electoral fortunes around if they had passed the right policies and then campaigned more effectively on those programs. In recent years this philosophy has been dubbed “deliverism” — coined to suggest that voters will elect politicians who deliver on their promises to solve problems. “Deliverism means governing well and establishing a record that the electorate needed to win actually feels,” wrote American Prospect editor David Dayen in 2021.

While “deliverism” as a term is recent, this thinking has long pervaded Democratic leadership. After the 2022 midterms, Sen. Elizabeth Warren argued in the New York Times that voters had rewarded Democrats specifically for programs like pandemic relief and infrastructure modernization. Other policies, like allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices and capping insulin costs for older Americans, Warren argued, were what motivated voters to cast their ballots for Democrats. 

Party leaders particularly favor a more sophisticated version of this theory: that policies will create “positive feedback loops,” building loyal constituencies who enable further policy victories through their continued electoral support. It’s no secret, for example, that Democrats believe making it easier for workers to join unions will not only improve their standard of living but improve Democrats’ electoral position by increasing the number of union members in the US. 

Deliverism’s appeal lies in its intuitive logic, especially for college-educated rationalists drawn to clear cause-and-effect relationships: Good policies will lead to subsequent electoral victories. But there’s not a lot of evidence that policymaking actually works like this.

Decades of scholarship have shown that most people don’t understand how policies work, what policy benefits they’re getting, and which party is responsible for enacting specific policies. And even when a politician designs a program so that it’s easier for them to take credit, that still doesn’t always work out to their benefit. Those who received health insurance through Obamacare Medicaid expansion, for example, showed very little change in voter turnout or party loyalty. 

As Northwestern political scientists Daniel Galvin and Chloe Thurston outline in their essential research on these questions, history should fundamentally challenge the premise that good policy success will most likely lead to political rewards for the party that passes it. 

“Upon inspection, the intellectual basis for thinking that policies are good vehicles for building electoral majorities — or good substitutes for the more tedious work of organizational party-building — is quite thin,” they write.

This isn’t to say that Democrats shouldn’t try to pass good policy. The expanded child tax credit during the pandemic was demonstrably good policy, even if most voters showed only muted enthusiasm for it.  

And it’s of course not the case that politicians are never rewarded for good policy. Many voters even now still credit Trump for the stimulus checks they received in the mail during the pandemic, checks that prominently featured the president’s name. Doing good things and taking credit for those things can be helpful sometimes. 

But as Democratic leaders move to refocus on working-class priorities, they face two sobering realities: Policies alone rarely drive electoral outcomes, and an increasingly stark divide separates non-college voters from the college-educated liberals and socialists who lead the party and its allied progressive groups. Navigating these tensions will be necessary for charting future strategy, and the research suggests that Harris’s loss this week could not have been avoided if she had just emphasized Biden administration accomplishments more clearly. Such thinking oversimplifies a much more complex political reality.