Two schools of thought dominate left-liberal understanding of modern American politics.
The most influential, and most widely held among political professionals, emphasizes policy and elite decision-making. Elections happen and serve as referenda on various strategic choices of the recent past. George W. Bush wins re-election flaunting his religiosity and many Democrats reason this must explain why he won. When Republican fortunes turn south just one cycle later Democrats scrutinize the intervening developments and infuse them with meaning. Democrats united to block Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security, ergo that must have explanatory force. Barack Obama becomes president, and though his charisma speaks for itself, Democrats repeat the process: The details of his policy agenda must have inspired people; he captured the center by claiming (unconvincingly) to oppose same-sex marriage.
It goes on like this. Why’d Democrats lose the next election? Because Obamacare hadn’t been implemented yet! Voters didn’t feel the benefits of Democratic policy, and were thus unreceptive or deaf to their message.
Democrats wouldn’t win another landslide again until 2018, and why? Well, according to Nancy Pelosi, “In 2018 when we won, people said, ‘Oh weren’t you lucky that health care emerged as such an important issue in the campaign.’ I said, ‘No, we weren’t lucky. We made our own luck. We had 10,000 events around the country where people told their stories.’ It wasn’t about provisions, it was about personal experience.”
If that were true, of course, Democrats could fire all their pollsters and strategists and spend every election cycle convening health-care events by the thousands. But by 2024 new movers and shakers were making new decisions, and in hindsight it was Joe Biden’s age and the Biden administration’s various governing errors, and things Kamala Harris said five years earlier, that doomed the party.
Some of these decisions clearly matter. Sometimes history tips on a tiny fulcrum. Sometimes James Comey makes a decision that thumbs the scales for fascism, and it proves, inadvertently, to be decisive. I wouldn’t write about politics for a living if I didn’t think influencing people with political power might help make things better.
But in the second school of thought, all this scouring and bickering over strategic decisions produces a lot of wasted effort. Policies and tactics may be determinative in extremely close elections, but obsessing over them is a strange collective enterprise, given larger forces.
For instance:
You can throw out everything you think you know about politics—Obama, health care, Donald Trump, whatever—and draw a more elegant analysis of our entire predicament from charts like this one. Non-college white voters have been drifting secularly toward the GOP for decades, a trend that reversed briefly (and conveniently for Obama) when Bush squandered the trust of a meaningful fraction of them, but then quickly reverted.
This phenomenon has been offset by a counter-parallel drift of college-educated white voters into the Democratic coalition, and re-offset by a drift of non-college minorities into the GOP. But even if this summed to a wash in terms of raw numbers, the effect has been to leave Republicans better-situated to win power under the weird rules of our elections, where every state gets two senators, and presidential candidates must win electoral votes, not ballots cast.
This is what’s making Democrats harder and harder pressed to win elections against an increasingly depraved opposition. I imagine a submarine taking on water from 100 little leaks, and one huge gusher. Sealing off the large hole in the hull might give the crew a fighting chance, but the challenge is staggering, so everyone scrambles to plug as many tiny holes as they can. Everyone drowns.
That’s how I see Democrats in 2025. Perhaps they’re too immersed in their jobs, or perhaps they’re overwhelmed by the enormity of the forces arrayed against them, and (thus) treat them as immutable. Either way, they clamber to address small vulnerabilities without stopping to ask if anything can be done to fix the existential one.
Plenty of people on the left see the problem my way, too, but most of them have complete faith that egalitarian economic policy would re-attract these lost voters. Establishment Democrats may dispute this materialist analysis for wrong-headed and even corrupt reasons, but as much as I’d like the Bernie Sanders agenda to provide Democrats a political panacea, there’s basically no reason to believe it would. Inequality closed fast during the Biden years and the public basically hated it. Plus, vulgar Marxism can’t really explain why economically dispossessed voters would ever flock to the more regressive party. Even if they were right about the treatment, what about the disease?
JELLO SUBMARINE
Here’s what I think happened: