Democrats Will Not Win By Changing the Subject

Progressive activists can't conceive of a problem that can't be fixed by talking about 'billionaires and corporate greed,' but that's what Democrats have.

Dear readers,

I strongly recommend Simon van Zuylen-Wood’s cover story for New York magazine, in which he talked to voters into New York City’s outer borough neighborhoods that swung hard toward Trump. In neighborhoods with significant Muslim populations, he did hear complaints about Democrats’ positioning on Gaza. But mostly, the message for Democrats was that they’ll need to move rightward to win this rainbow coalition of disgruntled voters back.

Many voters told van Zuylen-Wood that the government was too tolerant of crime and disorder; one man, who said his daughter’s entry into this country was threatened by Trump’s Muslim ban, nonetheless said he was supporting Trump. (He complained about his local public school having students wear colored shirts to form a human pride flag — an activity he asked to have his children excused from — and said he was moving to a neighborhood in Brooklyn where he could send them to a private, religious school.) But most of all, they complained about the migrant crisis, and in a right-wing way: the government had allowed too many migrants in; the migrants caused quality-of-life problems, from illegal vending to prostitution; the government was prioritizing benefits for migrants over programs for those of us who were already here. This being New York City, these complaints often came from voters who are themselves immigrants. “You can see it all, the boobs out,” one Ecuadorean-American woman, a registered Democrat who voted Republican for the first time, remarked to van Zuylen-Wood about prostitution in Corona, Queens. “That is outrageous. That is what I am telling you — especially the Venezuelans, they came with attitude.”

And when these voters looked around at the Democrats who govern them at the federal, state, and local levels, they saw a party that didn’t even appear to be trying:

Everyone I talked to in Corona considered their presidential vote through the prism of local concerns, but it was not hard to see the national implications. The area’s pro-Trump turn mirrored Democratic losses on the U.S.-Mexico border and other predominantly Hispanic areas where the migrant crisis was acutely felt as well as in cities like San Francisco, where voters, fed up with its ongoing mental-illness and drug crisis, ousted the incumbent mayor in favor of a wealthy moderate with no public-sector experience. One theme connecting these geographically disparate regions was the inability of Democratic officials to fix or sometimes even acknowledge problems that were staring them in the face and that residents were imploring them to address. The party of government, predicated on using the state to help citizens in need of it, didn’t seem to be governing at all.

I want to put this article out there because it’s an important corrective to the cope I’ve been seeing from progressives since the election, who are claiming that somehow the increasingly diverse coalition of working-class voters who rejected Democrats can be won back with a larger dose of economic populism. Here’s Greg Casar, a progressive Democrat who represents parts of San Antonio and Austin with sloganeering that amounts to nothing more than trying to change the subject:

My contention is not that messaging against “corporate greed” is unpopular. I know that certain progressive economic messages test well — unlike a lot of centrist commentators, I wrote multiple defenses of Kamala Harris’s choice to run against “price gouging.” My point is that talking about “billionaires and corporate greed” does nothing to address a voter’s concern about crime or migration,¹ and if other Democrats parrot Rep. Casar’s reasoning, they will only reinforce a complaint that so many voters shared with van Zuylen-Wood: that the Democratic Party doesn’t even acknowledge the issues they are focused on. In fact, any time you see an activist or politician explaining that a very visible, obvious problem is “actually” about something bigger, more amorphous, less subject to the control of the speaker, that’s an obvious tell — they just want an excuse not to talk about it.

From the more centrist side of the party, there’s been a lot of talk over the last couple of weeks about the need to abandon “identity politics” and talk in a more plain manner. We continue to hear exhortations for Democrats to stop using alienating language like “Latinx.” This prescription badly understates the magnitude of the problem. It’s easy to not say “Latinx” — in fact, I haven’t heard a Democratic politician say it in years. Dropping the “faculty lounge” rhetorical affectations is easy; AOC even took the pronouns out of her Twitter bio. The hard part is breaking with progressive activists substantively, on policy issues, where the party has gotten out of step with too much of the public.

A ChatGPT-generated image for “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

To take one example from this year’s campaign: Unlike in 2019, Kamala Harris clearly knew that her “cop” image as a former prosecutor was an asset, and she embraced it rhetorically. But when a reporter asked her about an anti-crime ballot measure she’d be voting on as a Californian — Proposition 36, which would raise penalties for drug crimes and retail theft, representing a partial rollback of a 2014 measure — she dodged, saying “I am not gonna talk about the vote on that because, honestly, it’s the Sunday before the election and I don’t intend to create an endorsement one way or the other.”

Proposition 36 passed overwhelmingly — at latest count, it’s getting 69% of the vote, winning in every county in the state, even San Francisco. If Democrats want to rehabilitate the party’s image on crime and disorder, they have to be willing to get on the popular side of 70-30 policy issues, even if they’re going to upset some activists on their side. Harris couldn’t even do that.

In spite of all these problems, Democrats continue to have a lot going for them, issue-wise. They’re the party with the more popular stance on abortion. They are the party that defends popular old-age entitlement programs. Even the Affordable Care Act is popular now. And yes, there are definitely ways that Democrats can get mileage out of their position as the party that prioritizes programs for the middle class over tax cuts for billionaires. But those advantages are not substitutes for being trusted on crime, immigration, and the cost of living — indeed, the substantial fiscal burden that migrants are imposing in certain parts of the country goes a long way to undermine the Democratic Party’s image as the party that makes the American dream affordable for US citizens.

A lot of Americans looked at Democrats this year and concluded the party wasn’t even interested in the problems they confront in their daily lives. The party won’t fix that problem by talking in a less annoying way, and it certainly won’t fix that problem by changing the subject.

Very seriously,

Josh

1. Or trans issues, if he or she happens to care about that, though this did not appear to be a major theme in the complaints van Zuylen-Wood heard in the outer boroughs.