The postmortem of the Democrats and Kamala Harris' campaign will reveal that their core base has been left behind in recent years.
It has been a week since the deja vu re-election of Donald Trump to the Oval Office. While the race was framed as a tightly contested battle which would go to the wire, the sweep from the former President of all the battleground states was a shock to those who expected a protracted vote count like in 2020. Two topics have dominated the discourse since: what will Trump do once he is back in office, and how did the Democrats fail to beat him. The former can be speculated on endlessly, with the optimistic view that it will merely be a repeat of his cataclysmic 1st term, which damaged the global standing of the US almost irreparably. The pessimistic view, sadly more likely, is that this will be the twilight of a formerly great democracy as it enters an autocracy.
However, if there is indeed another election to contest, the Democrats will need to find a way to win it. In typical fashion, there is numerous people who feel they have the answer and are quick to point fingers. I am certainly no better; I will spend the rest of this article postulating my own version of events as if it is fact. But when Nancy Pelosi is primarily focused on blaming Biden, a man she wholeheartedly supported six months ago, the Democrats are proving that infighting will supercede any meaningful reflection.
There is one key demographic that the media seems to have pinpointed in their shift to Trump: Hispanic men. As is often the case in the US, the prism of race is the first through which their commentators peer. Yet in this instance, I think they are missing a crucial detail. These men likely did not vote for Trump with their hispanic background as a driver, but rather with their status as primarily working class men taking the wheel. With white working class men, it seems that this coalition built on class, not race, has delivered the White House to Trump.
This is where Democrat political strategy appears to be sorely lacking. Not only do they fail to look at solving working class issues, rather than racial ones, but they actively have avoided offering white working class men any advantages from their platform. Much was made of Harris' platform reaching out across all sections of American society, but it missed one. One that used to be a cornerstone of the Democrat party, and in fact any left leaning party (which, in the context of the US, the Democrats technically are left).
A Democrat victory would have delivered very little for working class men, particularly white ones. Many will understandably suggest that other groups require greater need for policy intervention, that dealing with the litany of issues that face women, POC, and LGBTQI+ communities takes priority. But there are two key counters to this, in the context of political strategy.
Firstly, there are serious issues that disproportionately affect working class men, including poorer educational outcomes and higher suicide rates. The dismantling of many of the structural issues that damage protected groups would also benefit working class emn and help with these issues to be sure. But why not acknowledge this fact? Why are policies around challenging gender stereotypes put in context of helping everyone, rather than the focus primarily on how it benefits women? By not doing this, the Democrats have consistently chosen to elevate tribalism. Also, just because American society is built from patriarchical structures does not mean that the dismantling of this cannot come with any policies focused on improving educational outcomes for white working class men. Affirmative action is used to help African Amercian students, yet statistically, it is their poor white peers who achieve the worst outcomes. It is often framed as a one or another; a better approach would be questioning why can't we improve everyone's lot.
Secondly, if you want to win an election, working class men is clearly a group you need to win. Many in the Democratic party may not like this and prefer to continue appealing primarily to a broad coaltion of protected groups. But they will continue to lose. Unfortunately, people are self-interested when they vote. There is a moral obligation not to vote for someone like Trump, but people often ignore this in favour of self service. And the reality is, Harris offered working class men very little. She offered small business owners very little. The sad reality is that Trump is promising them the world, but will actually leave them worse off. Trump's policies will cause massive amounts of inflationary pressure in the years to come, and the inflation they suffered recently is due to geopolitical factors and the effects of his first term. But they had a choice between a guarantee of nothing been done to help them, left at the back of the queue, or a candidate who offered to make their lives better. In their minds, a potential upside is better than a certain downside.
So what should the Democrats do in the rebuild? Unlike other analysts, I don't believe that Republicans are talking about the "things that matter to real Americans" and the Democrats are too caught up in political ideology. In fact, I think both are too caught up in political ideology. But the Democrats need to shift their core belief and strategy that has driven their campaigns in recent years, trying to appeal to voters based on ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. These groups do not vote homgeneously, and never have. They need to continue to fight for equality (the Republicans certainly won't with their warped sense of individualistic exceptionalism), but don't leave a core group out in the cold. Not only do they deserve, like everyone else, to have a Government that cares for their needs, but they will be the difference maker at the next election, and the election after that. The Democrats will need to figure out how they are going to make people's lives better, while sticking to principles of fairness and equality. It is a challenge, but one that the party will need to rise to, and quickly.
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