If Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election, Democrats are going to be soul-searching at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Trump is a uniquely vulnerable candidate, convicted of crimes, liable for fraud and sexual abuse, bent on autocracy, and older than 87% of the US population. If Democrats can’t beat him, who can they beat?
The problems with the Democratic Party are evident in Vice President Kamala Harris’s difficulty getting over the margin of error in polls of voters in the seven key swing states: Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada. She has clearly improved on President Joe Biden’s dismal standing since he dropped out of the race in July. But on paper, she should be doing way better. Inflation is nearly back to normal levels, unemployment is low, gas prices are manageable, and crime is falling. Those factors normally pave the way for a decisive incumbent victory.
Of the two political parties, Republicans have morphed into a fractious mob under Trump, animated by anger, grievance, and a primordial urge to burn everything down. If Trump loses his second presidential election in a row, Republicans will face their own reckoning and the prospect that a rabid minority, no matter how passionate, cannot win national elections.
Democrats, however, have hardly stepped into the breach and offered normal Americans a political refuge. Instead, Democrats have gone to the other extreme and left millions of voters feeling alienated by both parties. Here are three mistakes Democrats have made in recent years that will explain what went wrong if they lose in 2024:
The Bernie Sanders effect
The socialistic Vermont senator clearly caught traction when he ran for president as a Democrat in 2016. He energized young crowds by railing against “obscene levels” of income inequality. He proposed heavy new taxes on businesses and the wealthy, which would finance free college and a government healthcare plan to cover all Americans. Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination, but Sanders got 43% of the primary vote, persuading other Democrats that voters were open to radical new ideas for lifting up young Americans and those who were falling behind.
Sanders and other progressive Democrats followed up with ideas such as the “Green New Deal” in 2019, which would have been a sweeping government takeover of the energy and transportation sectors meant to address climate change and rectify widespread social inequities. Most Democrats supported the Green New Deal, even though it failed in a gimmicky congressional vote. Democrats stuck with the idea, viewing it as a winning issue in the 2020 elections.
Same with “Medicare for All,” the Sanders plan for a single-payer government healthcare program. In the 2020 Democratic primaries, many of the most prominent Democratic candidates supported Medicare for All — including Kamala Harris.
Fast-forward to 2024, and it turns out that moderate swing voters don’t want the massive disruptions that would come with these two gigantic government efforts, even if they support the end goals. As the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris has abandoned her earlier support for both the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, because she needs centrist voters who prefer gradual improvements over massive government intervention. Sanders showed how to energize America’s most liberal voters, and many other Democrats followed his lead, including Harris. What they didn’t account for is the blowback: Policies that excite liberals alienate centrists. Harris is struggling with that problem now.
Trashing fossil fuels
During his 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden famously promised to “end fossil fuel.” He seemed to act on that promise as soon as he took office in January 2021 by canceling the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, siding with climate activists on an emotional issue that stood as a litmus test for whether you supported the cause. Biden was clearly seeking to appease progressive Democrats — the Sanders wing — passionate about addressing climate change.
