The Democrats in 2024: A case study in party dysfunction

Part V in a series on the state of the Democratic party

Over several days we’re sharing a six-part essay on how the Democrats ended up where they are today — as a party that has broken from FDR’s liberal experimentation and change, becoming the conservative party in the traditional sense of being averse to change and innovation. How and why did this happen?

Here’s the outline:

I. A brief review of party history up to 1964 (published 4/14)

II. The Democrats from 1964 to the new century (published 4/16)

III. The aughts were a hopeful time, but problems lurked under the surface (published (4/18)

IV. An electoral deadlock develops between the parties, to the Democrats’ disadvantage (published 4/21)

V. The Democrats in 2024: A case study in party dysfunction

VI. The party establishment has its head in the sand, and concluding thoughts

To this point in the series we’ve seen how the Democrats have evolved, particularly in the last 60 years. While the parties get roughly equal shares of the popular vote these days, Democrats find themselves out of power and without a plan. 2024 tells us a lot about why that is.

The 2024 campaign
It was perplexing to many commentators that Kamala Harris was in a pitched battle with Donald Trump. This view was perfectly represented by an op-ed in the Washington Post in the fall of that year penned by Eugene Robinson. As he put it: “It is absolutely, completely, totally ridiculous that this election is even close.”

That perspective on the election was widely held and understandable from a certain perspective. After all, Trump was like no other major party candidate in our history. He extolled the virtues of autocrats around the world but not leaders of democracies, he spread a massive lie about Democrats stealing the 2020 election – an election he was trying to steal, and he arguably incited a riot and proceeded to sit on his hands while the mob tried to disrupt congressional proceedings to ratify the results of that election.

Consider also that while running for reelection in 2020 Trump’s response to the emerging and then raging pandemic might charitably be described as chaotic, and really was worse than that, as he recommended on live television various untested and potentially dangerous remedies. The economy was tanking as well. Yet he still almost won that year.

In previous times of chaos, economic distress, and/or flaunting of basic democratic norms presidents and their parties have suffered political ruin. Herbert Hoover and the Republicans were crushed in the 1932 election during the Depression. McGovern and Goldwater (and their parties) met similar fates for being outside the mainstream of that era’s political thought. And Nixon’s malfeasance and subsequent resignation in 1974 led to a catastrophic midterm that year for the GOP.

But Democrats simply couldn’t break away from Trump, no matter the scandal, no matter the economic conditions, no matter the mishandling of a major crisis. So why couldn’t they exploit his record and evident weaknesses?

Trump’s base of support
Trump got over 46% of the popular vote both in 2016 and 2020 and seemed poised to do even better in 2024. The fashionable explanation in the mainstream media amounted to hand-wringing about the anti-democratic and even fascistic impulses of some Trump supporters. Thomas Byrne Edsall’s piece in the New York Times that year captured that view.

His academic sources maintained that Trump support was tied to “‘animus toward minority groups,’” opposition to societal change, and a lack of commitment to democratic processes.

In general, Edsall’s and similar analyses boiled down to some version of: “What is wrong with these people?” And make no mistake about it, many legitimate points were made. There are indeed people out there who long for an authoritarian strong man. And others for whom democratic niceties are, well, nice, but come second to other things — forcefully addressing crime, dealing aggressively with illegal immigrants, etc.

Be that as it may, no one seriously suggests that people with anti-democratic tendencies encompassed all or even most Trump supporters. For one thing, many younger poll respondents seemed unswayed by the Democrats’ view that Trump was the danger they said he was. Furthermore, apparently a lot of voters maintained that Democrats are the real threat to democracy. Apparently many people, and especially some key swing voters, believed the purported threat Trump posed was overblown. In addition many voters “believe[d] that the guardrails in place to protect democracy would hold even if a dictator tried to take over the country.”

One finding really stands out and was particularly galling to any Democrats who were paying attention (although most shielded their eyes): many people believed Trump to be the more moderate candidate in the race. How could that be?

The response from establishment Democrats insofar as there was a response was that Democrats just “need to do a better job of messaging to win over voters who see Trump as the more moderate candidate,” as one party strategist suggested. Actually there were underlying reasons for the party’s failure to break through that were not widely recognized or acknowledged by partisan Democrats.

Why Democrats don’t reach voters who “should” vote for them
For decades, going back at least to the Dukakis ‘88 campaign, Democrats haven’t been able to fathom why voters don’t see the light. How come they (whites of modest means) don’t vote their economic interests? Thomas Frank’s 2004 book on this topic, What’s the Matter with Kansas? became a sensation arguing that Democrats were not effectively messaging the economic concerns of the working class, instead falling into the trap of engaging Republicans on cultural questions on which they (the Republicans) had the upper-hand in many parts of the country. Apparently these voters are easily duped, going along with the GOP even as the party pivoted to the tax agenda of the rich and corporations while in office.

One of the curious things about this take, which amounts to the Democratic party line, is that liberals themselves (many of whom are quite wealthy) vote against their economic interests in supporting the Democratic social welfare agenda. But don’t expect What’s the Matter with Vermont? at your local bookstore anytime soon.

Back to the point, let’s consider the possibility that the Democrats’ problem is much more fundamental than simple messaging.

An oft-disregarded reason for Democrats’ failure to break through has two component parts. First, the party at the national level has taken unpopular and arguably extreme positions on some major issues of the day. And second, with respect to those issues, the party seems unable to speak a moral language that large numbers of mainstream Americans know by heart. Let’s take these one-by-one

The issues
It’s axiomatic that parties’ stances on issues change as their coalitions evolve. As different groups become more influential, their particular policy demands begin to take precedence.

As Rey Teixeira and John Judis acknowledged (see part III of the series), there can be electoral costs in making gains among certain groups if a party’s platform moves away from the views of other constituencies. As we have seen, this has happened for Democrats on a range of cultural issues, which has cost them dearly among the white working class and Latinos, as well as among some African-Americans in 2024.

This dynamic applies to Republicans as well, as they lose younger voters and better educated suburbanites, especially women, when they move to the right on cultural issues.

A specific example: for Republicans over the last fifty years, the party line on reproductive health changed as Christian conservatives gained influence. George H.W. Bush would not have been chosen as Ronald Reagan’s running mate in 1980 and certainly not nominated for president eight years later had he not switched from his liberal views (pro-Planned Parenthood, etc.) in the 1970s to a pro-life position in 1980. Today, of course, pro-choice Republicans are few and far between in public life. It’s not an accident Trump’s views on the issue flipped before his legendary escalator ride at Trump Tower in 2015.

For Democrats we can point to evolution on the question of immigration. Labor, a key component of the coalition, had traditionally been suspicious of liberal immigration policies given their view that a glut of workers would drive down wages.

The 1996 Democratic platform represented this view in a way that it is almost identical to the current GOP party line. Here is a passage from that platform (quoted here):

We cannot tolerate illegal immigration and we must stop it. For years before Bill Clinton became President, Washington talked tough but failed to act. In 1992 [under GWH Bush], our borders might as well not have existed. The border was under-patrolled, and what patrols there were, were under-equipped. Drugs flowed freely. Illegal immigration was rampant. Criminal immigrants, deported after committing crimes in America, returned the very next day to commit crimes again.

NPR reported some years later that “[t]he 2008 Democratic Party platform spoke about both the need to secure the country’s border and hire more Customs and Border protection agents, but by 2016, the platform only spoke about immigration enforcement in the sense that it needed to be ‘humane.’” This liberal view amounted to a party line Democratic candidates for president couldn’t cross in 2020 and was reflected in the policies of the Biden administration.

People opposed to those immigration policies surely include those who hold animus toward Latinos, Haitians, etc., but that’s not the only way to look at the issue. After all, as we saw above, liberal Democrats a few short years ago recognized the challenge of being able to assimilate a large influx of illegal immigrants. The bottom line is that Democrats shifted about 10 years ago to a position on immigration that had until that time been outside the mainstream.

A look at the 2024 Democratic platform reveals a litany of other specific progressive policy positions catering to a wide range of groups, including advocates for environmental justice, gun control, LGBTQIA+ rights, women, artists, the disabled, and so on. Apparently the party platform-crafters didn’t recognize any inconsistency in having a section on stopping the influence of special interests.

Another issue that probably was on almost nobody’s front burner was highlighted at the very beginning of the document. It was a Land Acknowledgment recognizing Indigenous people for their superior management of the land where the convention was being held. Now that may be an arguable position to take, but it’s certainly less arguable that it should have featured placement in a party’s quadrennial policy platform.

The fundamental problem is this: specifying policy positions — virtually all progressive — on every imaginable issue is a sure loser. Pew suggests that fewer than 20% of voters fit the profile of having consistently progressive views across the board. Parties, first and foremost, are supposed to be about winning elections. Putting in place what amounts to a litmus test flies in the face of doing exactly that. Winning is about coalition-building, and any ambition to have a stable governing majority (both parties claim to want that) requires a broad coalition. Litmus tests are not consistent with that aim, to say the least.

What they did try was too little too late. They adjusted their message on law enforcement (“we don’t intend to defund departments”) and immigration (summer 2024 border closures), the latter a kind of deathbed conversion as political reality set in in the last few months of the campaign.

The party strategy also focused on issues like reproductive rights in an effort to gin up turnout among women and reducing or waiving more student loan payments in order to excite younger voters. The former wasn’t enough and the latter didn’t work as the Democratic share of the 18-29 year old cohort of voters shrank.

Democrats speak a different moral language
There’s another reason Democrats are unable to reach some voters who might, all other things being equal, be open to their policy prescriptions. The party’s positions and language betrays a blind spot on a fundamental pillar of morality — a pillar that many people believe in.

On the question of immigration, it is compassionate to evince concern for those trying to get in the country by whatever means from Latin America and elsewhere. But many of the millions of people who weren’t born here and reside in the U.S. on a legal and permanent basis — a process that takes years in most cases — have a different perspective on the issue. They may quite reasonably view liberal amnesty and open border policies as a free pass that is unfair to the experience of those like themselves who played by the rules.

Large scale student loan forgiveness raises a similar dilemma. Some voters’ sense of fairness is offended when they had to pay off their loans while others are getting a free ride. Even people who didn’t get a student loan or didn’t even go to college pay taxes, taxes that subsidize the student loan program. The liberal position is big-hearted and perhaps can be defended on other grounds. But it should come as no surprise that crowing about the Biden policy offended many folks on the grounds of basic fairness.

Crime and punishment of course also raise fundamental moral issues. Do you stress rehabilitation and alternatives to incarceration, or justice for the victims and the larger community? Most people see value in both approaches, but veering too strongly in the direction of rehabilitation/alternatives to incarceration, as progressives have, has not worked and is off-putting to people for whom justice is the equal or primary moral driver. It’s no mystery that even bastions of progressivism like Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco have experienced a backlash against progressive approaches to crime.

Other issues fit this paradigm. For example, it’s one thing to be concerned about the individual experiencing gender dysphoria who, having been born male now identifies as a female. But there can be an impact on the larger community if that individual decides to engage in, say, girls high school sports where they may have a genetic advantage. Progressive Democrats embrace a morality that focuses on the individual, but a lot of people also consider the impact on the girls who have striven their whole lives to succeed in swimming, tennis, or another sport.

What to make of all this
Democrats have spoken a language of compassion on some of the hot button issues of the day, which, as noted, is admirable as far as it goes. But the party at the national level, in taking positions favored by its progressive wing, isn’t fluent in a competing moral language that focuses on proportionality and fairness to the larger community. This has been no small problem when the task at hand is stopping Trump.

Democrats opposed Trump on the basis of his manifestly anti-democratic tendencies. Of course that message was not going to reach the racists and authoritarians who form a part of the MAGA core. But there are many other Trump supporters and wavering voters who theoretically could have been reached.

But there’s a problem Democrats faced in trying to do so — people who speak a different moral language aren’t inclined to trust those who have pursued unpopular policies and don’t acknowledge the legitimacy of their perspective. Progressives have a blind spot when it comes to this, not seeing that opposing their compassionate policies can be defensible on moral grounds. This trust deficit goes a long way toward explaining why many voters didn’t believe the claims Democrats and some in the mainstream media made about Trump.

As for the 2024 election, policy tweaks on immigration and crime were too little too late. Democrats had made their bed, as it were, and had to work with the situation as it existed. To stop Trump they relied on the political grunt work of getting out the vote in a few key states. As it turned out Republicans were better at that.

Confusing policy and principle
Yet another problem for Democrats is confusing policy and principle. Race-based preferences and Diversity-Equity-Inclusion (DEI) efforts are good examples.

Race-based preferences are treated as an inviolable matter of principle by progressives, when in fact they are merely a specific policy meant to promote opportunity for certain groups. A key question should be: do they work? Are there results? Is opportunity actually expanding? Policy solutions are a means to an end — if that end isn’t being achieved, then you talk about it and consider other solutions.

DEI programs present a dilemma for policy analysts — sometimes it’s not entirely clear what problem they’re meant to solve. But to the extent there has been clarity, the programs have been examined for their effectiveness in improving work conditions for so-called marginalized minorities. The results have been decidedly mixed¹ even as the programs have expanded in recent years.

Similarly, if lenient policies on crime and homelessness are damaging the livability of communities, then re-think them. As we have seen, voters are forcing that issue in some of the bluest parts of the country.

The bottom line is that too often on the Democratic side policy positions amount to virtue-signaling — you’re not compassionate if you want violent criminals in jail or support strict limits on immigration. To put it bluntly, policies in place should be assessed rigorously for their efficacy without letting emotion cloud the picture. And, as Democrats have learned the hard way, sticking with unpopular policies that aren’t working is bad politics.

It's interesting to compare all of this to one of Republicans’ perennial favorites: tax cuts. Over the years these have been sold as promoting growth, making the tax code more equitable, even for reducing deficits (all evidence to the contrary). And they are always sold in comparison to Democrats’ allegedly “high tax, anti-growth” policies. Actually it is impossible to point to evidence that Democrats’ policies on taxes have been worse for the economy or deficits than Republican tax-cutting. In fact in specific cases the opposite seems to be true – large tax increases in 1993 were followed by strong economic growth (despite full-throated warnings by GOP politicians) and large tax cuts in 2001 weren’t.

But one thing you can say about the GOP and tax cuts: even if there’s no evidence that they work as advertised, they generally are popular and serve other political purposes. That can’t be said about Democrats’ policies on crime, immigration, and some other things.

In the LAST INSTALLMENT in the series we will look at the state of the Democratic party establishment, and share some concluding thoughts.

1. There are a lot of places one can look for overviews of research on the impact of DEI training, including this from the NIH and this from the Harvard Business School.