Democrats PLEASE Try To Fix This Problem

If they ignore the media environment in their 2024 post-mortems, it will be the first major error of the second Trump era.

(Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Several months ago, before Joe Biden dropped out of the race for president, I participated in a forum discussion about the brokenness of the U.S. political system, and one of my co-panelists,

Seth Masket

volunteered a concession. By this point, inflation had normalized, wages were rising, the economy was growing, employment was full…but Biden was trailing in the polls, with seemingly no idea how to improve his own standing. Democrats had counted on fundamentals like growth and incumbency to save Biden, the way lift pulls an airplane into the sky, but it didn’t seem to be happening. If Biden loses under economic conditions like these, Masket said, “we [political scientists] will have a lot of explaining to do.”

I don’t dredge this up as any kind of gotcha. I mention it only in the hope that analytically inclined people—not just political scientists, but including them—will follow through in earnest, and search for an explanation. Less than three days after Donald Trump won the 2024 election outright, I see recriminations falling along the same lines they always do—Dems abandoned the working class vs. Dems didn’t abandon the working class, the working class was just mad about the bad economy—as though the whole theory of politics hadn’t just been dealt a severe blow. Instead of reasoning forward—why did Democrats lose despite the strong economy?—most liberal elites are arguing in reverse: Democrats lost, thus the economy must be bad.

And so this is my early effort to kick off that search. To try once more to get everyone who slips back into this interminable debate to rethink the premise.

Left-of-center politics is shaped heavily by the belief that class-based appeals to members of the working class are the key to building a sustainable coalition. Lose the trust of the working class, good luck to ya.

The latter piece is mostly just mathematics. The working class is huge. The supposition is that the way to align members of the working class into political coalition with one another is by making them “know” that one party is a much more reliable steward of their economic interests than the other. It’s not just for moral reasons that when Democrats gain power, they try to increase working-class wages, enhance working-class benefits, and make gestures of solidarity with the working class.

Because most Democrats and most liberals agree on the premise, internecine fighting reflects factional differences over how to attract the working class. With a specific agenda? Through craftier messaging? By delivering on campaign promises?

My hope is Tuesday’s catastrophe will create space for the smartest people working in broadly left politics to question the supposition.

Because one of two things must be true:

• Democrats need a completely different approach to making members of the working class know in their guts that one party is a much more reliable steward of their economic interests than the other.

• Their theory of working-class politics is wrong.

BRAND, DAMAGED

Now zoom deep into the realm of partisan elites.

Every honest person working in politics, including the remaining few honest Republicans, knows which party is mission-driven to help working-class people directly, and which party is not. Some of these Republicans might claim to believe that the GOP’s austere, plutocratic goals are in the long-run interest of the working class; that catering to the productive rich produces trickle down benefits for those who pick themselves up by the bootstraps, etc. But everyone at the professional level knows the score: When Democrats win power, they reach for levers that direct more economic and political support to they working class. They reach for the minimum wage (though have lacked the votes to overcome a filibuster), for food support, for improving health and child benefits, and so on. Republicans reach for tax cuts and deregulation.

Thus, it should not be controversial to stipulate here that if working-class people without firm partisan attachments studied and understood these two parties and their budgets, they’d view Democrats as the better steward of their interests every time. They’d never drift secularly toward the GOP.

But of course, that’s exactly what’s happened.

So what’s gone wrong then? As I see it, at least one of these things is true:

1. Working Americans either can’t perceive the differences between Democrats and Republicans because Democrats don’t deliver enough, or workers don’t think the Democratic agenda is sufficiently better than the GOP agenda to merit partisan loyalty. The Democratic agenda lacks zhuzh or oomph, or ideal indicators of class-based solidarity. Without radical change, workers will vote on other bases.

2. Too many working Americans don’t know elemental facts about the parties’ economic commitments. The problem is mostly about information. Perhaps a weakness in Democratic messaging or a triumph of obfuscatory right-wing propaganda or a combination of the two.

3. People’s perceptions of the economy don’t form solely on the basis of their material well-being—they can be made to feel insecure or aggrieved even when their standards of living are on the rise.

4. The theory is wrong—working class people do not dependably cast votes on a single-issue class basis. Improving their understanding of the differences between the parties through platform changes, policy reforms, and/or better messaging will not translate into a political re-realignment.

There may be some merit in all of these, but I believe this election strained the first explanation to its breaking point. And if the story is mostly a mix of 2, 3, and 4, the counsel is similar: flood the information zone, ideally with credible messengers. Either you need these voters to absorb the binary truth about partisans politics and the material state of the world, or you need them to like you on other bases, or both. And the only way to do that is to clean up misperceptions with constant reminders. That is, through media.

If voters like soft-drinks, you need them to bombard them with the fact that you own a convenience store and the other party owns a toxic-waste factory; that way, if they don’t actually like soft drinks, or their main indulgence is beer, same story—we have what you’re looking for; they sell swill, and their appeals are full of lies.

In 2012, before the information environment was fully wrecked, the contrast between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on both economic and non-economic issues became clear to most Americans. Working-class voters were unhappy about the economy but they viewed the Democrat, correctly, as more empathetic and attuned to their needs. They also just liked Obama more.

But after that election, the correlation unraveled. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say it began unraveling again. The working-class drift away from the Democratic Party began before Obama, briefly reversed, then resumed its drift, even as the Democratic Party’s economic agenda moved left.

This is part of the reason (or one of many reasons) I think Democrats should look outside raw economics and traditional economic appeals to understand the challenge they face. Championing working-class interests is good for moral reasons, but if you treat it as the skeleton key to all of politics, you run straight into a true Scotsman or question-begging fallacy: No true advocate for the working class would lose. If Democrats lost, it must be because they weren’t working class-y enough.

But those who truly believe there’s a set of commitments that would make Democrats more politically bulletproof should lay it out: What agenda is pro-worker enough that culture-war, divide-and conquer politics stop being effective? What specific agenda, or specific set of accomplishments, would make these voters cock their heads and say, Oh I get it now! Because it isn’t full employment. It isn’t trillions of dollars in health-care benefits, unprecedented support for unions and their pensions, major infrastructure investments, or any number of high-impact pro-worker and consumer rules and enforcement actions.

Or they might explain: if a Biden-esque agenda is good enough, what are the conditions under which it durably drives working-class political support? If voters like the kind of things Dems delivered to them, but threw them out of office because they remain grumpy, more than a year later, over a passing bout of inflation, then the theory is built on sand.

Consider Donald Trump, whose allies constantly bombard the country with boastful and dishonest messages. He presided over the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, after handling a global pandemic more incompetently than any peer leader. He did lose on that record—but he increased his vote share, then rewrote the history of his presidency in the minds of all kinda of workers, and staged a rapid comeback.

APPROVE THIS MESSAGE

I take no view on what policies Democrats should champion if there’s a competitive primary in four years, and nobody else should either. We can’t foresee the state of the world, which may become quite grim. I am skeptical that anyone has a magic agenda that, read as incantation, will spellbind the working class and regain their supposedly lost trust.

But I am confident that winning future elections will be much harder if Democrats abandon those voters to the existing, deteriorating information ecosystem they currently inhabit.

That means raising or rerouting hundreds of millions of dollars or more, year in and year out, to compete in that ecosystem, starting right now. Some of that money may yield a dividend—successful media doesn’t just persuade, it can also generate ROI. But a lot of it will end up in the pockets of content producers—on television, YouTube, podcasts, and multiple other platforms—for the labor of spreading message. And ideally, for the loss-lead to be worth it, those messengers would have to be credible with audiences well outside the Democratic core.

In my mind these are charismatic but truthful broadcasters, savvy social media promoters, and (if new platforms are needed to compete with those already overtaken by Elon Musk and other Trump loyalists) accomplished web developers. They would raise the profile of authentic influencers—that is, people who have good communication skills but are of the communities they mean to influence—who would do this work as a vocation, paid well to drive home the stakes of elections, the differences between the two parties, and the depravity of GOP elites, day in, day out, indefinitely.

Most of today’s liberal politics influencers are schooled in or imitate the argot of elite punditry. When I began in this line of work, political ideas flowed down from elite discourse much more than they do today. Liberals should understand that we’re not just arguing with National Review writers for the hearts and minds of CNN producers anymore. We’re battling directly for the heartstrings of large swaths of the population, and struggling because meatheads like Joe Rogan and grifters like Tim Pool and Benny Johnson and so many other charlatans got there first. They have radicalized people before they could ever be presented with something like a fair-minded contrast between center-left and far right.

We need fewer people like me who say things like “stipulating that…” or “contingent on…” and more local validators willing to tell their peers, “fuck these lying dweebs who think you’re stupid…”

The voters who delivered Trump the presidency again are not going to subscribe to my Substack (though they are welcome to). But they will watch strident right-wing horseshit from many scores of mediocre propagandists, and even if they don’t, algorithms will feed it to them.

Democrats should try to steal those audiences. First with compelling content, then through public accountability. Think of the non-political actors who wielded their clout to promote this election outcome. I don’t mean power mad Richie Rich types like Peter Thiel, I mean the people whose footprints are principally cultural, and whose motives are tied to cultural dominance: Rogan, Ben Shapiro, and David Portnoy. Remember them. And when the sky falls, as it may, take it directly to their audiences: You put your faith in these guys, and look what it wrought.

Celebrity supporters, cross-party validators, paid ads and the other fleeting, pop-up media campaigns Democrats use to generate support during elections are fine, but they’re no substitute for a drumbeat. To return to the soft-drink metaphor, what would happen to Coca Cola if it ceded the advertising market to Pepsi altogether?

There may be much for liberals to learn walking in the shoes of working class or rural midwesterners, but few Democratic officials would find the experience shocking. They know, at least on an intellectual level, all the ways working class life can be a slog. The talking points they write don’t misdescribe the struggle. The policies they enact aren’t unrelated to the challenges Americans face: Insulin and hearing-aid costs, insurance premiums, wages, roads, worker leverage, etc. 

What I think would make a lot of these elites go bug-eyed would be to spend a day shadowing working-class or rural midwesterners purely to understand the kind of information they absorb, intentionally and passively, from their earliest moments to when they shut off their televisions, phones, or computers at night. I believe they’d be disturbed. I believe they’d be so alarmed that they’d convene the most powerful people in the party and declare an emergency.

I hope they try an experiment like that. And then I hope they act. Because my experience over the past eight years tells me they won’t believe it when someone like me pleads with them.

Being a successful party requires more than just competent governance and legislative success. It requires understanding all the country’s major challenges—including homegrown ones—and addressing them directly. Democrats needed to create a cure for the fascist mind virus circulating in America. Instead they created a sedative, hoping that, with sufficient bedrest, Americans would neutralize the virus themselves. If they don’t revisit that decision, the sickness will keep getting worse, and may lead us to ruin.