As MAGA Republicans unite, Democrats spar over 2024 failures

The 2024 election has sparked fierce debate about the future of the Democratic Party. Much of this debate has focused on how Democrats can improve their communications and messaging. Some commentators offer useful insights, but so far most analyses have been shallow.

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear highlighted his own success as an example of how the Democrats can triumph. Beshear is a Democrat who has managed to win multiple elections in Kentucky, a deep red state. From Beshear’s op-ed:

 I won re-election 12 months ago by five points in a state that Donald Trump just carried by 30 points. And I did so at a time when inflation and illegal border crossings were higher than they are now. So how was it possible? Because the people of Kentucky know I care about them personally and, most important, that I am focused on what matters most in their daily lives. That’s a trust leaders must earn not only in their messaging but also in their everyday actions.

It's hard to argue with Beshear’s success. I know Kentucky well, having spent formative years there, and I consider his ability to win in the Bluegrass State quite impressive. Yet Beshear has advantages that would be hard to replicate.

For example, the Beshear name is highly recognizable in Kentucky because Beshear’s father, Steve Beshear, also served as the state's governor. Before that, Beshear's father served as a state legislator, as state attorney, and as lieutenant governor. The Beshear name has been associated with Kentucky politics for five decades (Andy Beshear also served as state attorney general prior to his election as governor).

This does not detract from Beshear’s success. But not every politician has the advantages of a long political lineage and a small state. These have bolstered Beshear’s exceptional performance. Yet he suggests that reorienting the party is simply a matter of policy:

The focus of the Democratic Party must return to creating better jobs, more affordable and accessible health care, safer roads and bridges, the best education for our children and communities where people aren’t just safer but also feel safer...

The Democratic Party must show the American people that it cares about creating a better life for each and every American and re-earn the public’s trust about its focus and its direction.

Yet the Democratic Party is the only party focused on health care, infrastructure, education and a pro-worker economy. As for public safety, crime rates tend to be higher in Republican states than in Democratic ones.

In addition, we know that policy lists alone don’t win elections. Just ask Hillary Clinton. If every election were a question of whose policies actually work better for the majority of people, Republicans would never win again. Unfortunately, the reality of winning is a bit more complicated.

Democrats must study Beshear's success. But they must also remember that he's a special case – a homegrown politician with a well-known name. There’s a certain authenticity and credibility Beshear has in Kentucky because of who he is. It’s not clear this can be replicated on the national level – except, perhaps, by Beshear himself. Click here to read Beshear’s entire op-ed: “I’m the governor of Kentucky. Here’s how Democrats can win again.”

Blaming progressives

Adam Jentleson, former chief of staff to Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, has a different take. He blames leftists and progressives, describing the Democratic Party as “crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power.”

 Writes Jentleson:

Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win. Collectively, these groups impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win not just to take back the White House, but to have a prayer in the Senate.

Interest groups tend to be nonprofit organizations dedicated to advancing a single issue or set of related issues that they often hope to get on the Democrats’ agenda. At their best, these groups can be productive partners in building power and legislating. But many have grown too big, adopted overly expansive mandates and become disastrously cavalier about the basic realities of American politics in ways that end up undermining their own goals.

Such arguments have gained traction among so-called "centrists" looking for scapegoats. But these verdicts tend to oversimplify the problem and, worse, to widen Democratic divisions (which only helps Trump).

Kamala Harris did not run as a progressive. She embraced Dick and Liz Cheney, promised to bolster the nation’s “lethal” military and sought to create a distance between herself and the party’s most progressive positions. She flip-flopped to support fracking – a destructive fossil fuel extraction technique she had previously opposed – in an effort to win conservative votes in Pennsylvania.

Jentleson, who regularly spars with progressives, clearly has a bias. His overall remedy is to abandon progressive activism and ideals in a race to out-Republican the Republicans. His attack on progressive non-profits mirrors Republican attacks on those same organizations. It’s a short-term strategy with a nasty long-term consequence: If the Democratic Party simply becomes GOP Lite, what’s the point?

Still, if you strip the blame game from Jentleson’s analysis, it contains some useful insights:

 A winning strategy has to be more heterodox than the interest groups will allow. Many candidates who overperformed in swing districts were, simultaneously, economically populist, culturally conservative, anti-regulation and anti-corruption, reflecting the complexity of voters that the groups try to sand down. Working-class people feel cheated by major corporations, yet Amazon has been extremely popular — far more so than the federal government.

Americans blame billionaires for economic unfairness and want to tax them at higher rates, but also look up to them and think they’re good for the economy. By wishing away these complexities, a coalition-first mind-set produces many candidates who are the inverse of what voters want...

There is plenty of complexity and contradiction in how voters think. And those complexities are often missed by certain progressives, who struggle to communicate effectively with people outside of blue coastal cities.

But it would be a fatal mistake to jettison the progressive activism at the heart of the Democratic Party. Without activists pushing “too far,” we would still be in the 19^th century. The right of women and people of color to vote, the Civil Rights movement, LGBT equality – all of these freedom movements (and many others) would never succeeded if the so-called “moderates” had been calling the strategy. True leadership requires having courage rather than just an ability to shapeshift into whatever popular opinion currently holds sway.

Jentleson’s analysis is undone by his single-minded desire to blame progressives. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of the party's progressive wing, but Harris wasn’t following the progressive playbook. She ran to the right while looking for the mythical "center."

As Perry Bacon Jr. put it in the Washington Post:

[T]he center-left Democratic establishment wants to shift blame for a painful election defeat that by most objective measures is almost entirely the establishment’s fault...

Center-left and establishment Democrats unified behind Joe Biden over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) during the 2020 primaries and were largely supportive of him running for a second term until his dreadful performance at a June debate with Trump. Once Harris became the party’s candidate, she heeded calls from the center-left to run a moderate campaign, emphasizing the importance of the United States maintaining the “most lethal” military in the world and appealing to the wealthy and big corporations.

Progressives push back

Sen. Bernie Sanders offered his own diagnosis of the Democrats’ problem:

 It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.

And they’re right.

Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) made a similar point in an MSNBC appearance:

Democrats, very often, in their messaging, they speak in terms and in concepts, and not in the second person: "I care about you." And political races are not about one candidate versus another candidate. Too often it gets pigeonholed like that. It is a race to convince a person about who cares about you more.

Guardian columnist Owen Jones said Trump's victory was "not a surprise" and faulted the Kamala Harris campaign for misreading the moment:

Of all the factors that catapulted Trump back into the White House, one looms large over others. Just a quarter of Americans are happy with the way things are going in their country. Kamala Harris was seen by many as simply continuity Joe Biden, a president who has long had a negative approval rating. When asked last month what she would have done differently from Biden, Harris answered: “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of – and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.”

Jones continues:

There was no clear vision, no shared rage with the American people at the state of the country: if there was anything deeply wrong with the US, her campaign seemed to suggest, it was the existence of the Trumpist movement, and voting for Harris could finally turn the page on that.

Can Democrats find common ground?

Some common themes emerge in these arguments:

1. Democrats need a unifying message focused on the daily lives of working-class voters.
2. Democrats must acknowledge that our economic system is broken and is failing the majority of people. They must build a majority movement by challenging the status quo in ways that unite, rather than divide, the majority of people.
3. Democrats must speak directly to voters in real language, not policy talk. They must connect with voters on an emotional level.
4. Democratic leaders must exude authenticity. Nobody wants a leader created by polls and focus groups – even if that's what voters say in polls and focus groups. Politicians must cultivate authenticity and create direct connections with voters. This means establishing a long track record of consistency and honesty.

Missing from these analyses, however, is any mention of moral values. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that economic policies and magic words will beat Trumpism, a billionaire-led extremist movement that will only deepen the economic anxieties of working class voters.

Just look at the degree to which voters were willing to overlook Trump's bad or non-existent policies, and to simply trust in his strongman declarations. This alone suggests a deeper, hidden element that's never mentioned in most mainstream commentary. The Democrats must play by rules that don't apply to Republicans. Anyone who thinks Trump won because of the price of eggs is cracked.

We're working on a deeper analysis here at FrameLab. But I'll end for now by saying that I think things went wrong on multiple levels in 2024. In order to understand the path forward, we need to look at the entire picture. We must do so objectively and unflinchingly, without seeking comfort in oversimplified excuses or unproductive blame games.