In the immediate aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, Democrats and liberals have been grasping at reasons for Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss to former (and soon-to-be again) President Donald Trump. Some analysis suggests that Harris simply couldn’t escape Joe Biden’s unpopularity and his late exit from the race.
“The biggest onus of this loss is on President Biden,” said Andrew Yang, who ran against Biden in 2020 and endorsed Harris. “If he had stepped down in January instead of July, we may be in a very different place.”
Others have speculated that the Democrats’ continued hemorrhaging of Latino support is to blame. “We need a deep reflection about what’s going on Latino voters,” Carlos Odio, a Democratic strategist and co-founder of Equis Research, told Politico.
But soon after Harris conceded the election on Wednesday, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who won reelection on Tuesday, released a fiery statement criticizing the Democratic Party for mishandling the election.
“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,” Sanders wrote. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.”
In the hope of better understanding where the Democratic Party went wrong and what it needs to do to win back the trust of voters, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Jeff Weaver, a political consultant and longtime Sanders adviser.
A partial transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows. Listen to the full conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find podcasts.
Jeff, what were you thinking on Tuesday night as it became clear that Kamala Harris was likely not going to win?
People talk about Kamala Harris and, you know, she did not win, obviously. But this should not be laid at the feet of Kamala Harris.
Whose feet should it be laid at?
We lost the Senate. It looks like we’re not going to regain the House. This is a much deeper systemic problem than Kamala Harris running or not running a great campaign. There are some really deep-seated problems with the Democratic Party’s relationship with voters, and particularly working-class voters. It used to be white working-class voters, but now increasingly, it’s voters of color. And if we keep doing the same thing we’ve been doing, we’re going to be in the permanent minority.
Well, look, this party was the dominant party in America for 30 years when it was the champion of economic populism that came out of the New Deal. And when it started to abandon that, you lost faith with working-class people.
Bill Clinton is who really started this, with NAFTA and “most favored nation” status for China, and going after poor people with this welfare reform bill, which caused some people in the administration to even quit. And since then, neoliberal politics, which has really hurt working-class people in this country with open trade, free trade, and other pro-business policies.
The Democratic Party is no longer seen as the party of the working man. And shockingly, the Republican Party has become the party of working-class people. And that’s very distressing. So we have got to get back to our roots in many ways on economics, and we’ve got to put those front and center and be unabashed and full-throated about whose side we are on. Mark Cuban should not be the face, the poster boy, for the Democratic Party. He’s a bad face for the Democratic Party.
And then on the social and cultural issues, when I first came to Washington with Bernie Sanders back in 1990, there were quite a few “pro-life” Democrats in the Congress. They were economically populist, but they happened to be “pro-life” for one reason or another. There were anti-gun control Democrats, there were pro-gun control Republicans.
These issues have all become part of the partisan makeup of our country now. If you’re a Democrat, you have to be pro-choice. You have to be for this or that. If you’re a Republican, you have to follow the orthodoxy in that particular party. And we need to get back to more of a position, I think, of social libertarianism in the party. There’s a lot of word-checking and virtue-signaling in the Democratic Party, which is off-putting to a lot of regular people. There’s a lot of college sociology terms that have now made their way into the lexicon. And for a lot of people, they’re off-putting.
All right. Let’s dig into what you mean by economic populism, because Kamala Harris tried a version of appealing to the middle and working class, right? She had plans to help homebuyers. She had plans to give parents tax credits. She had plans to cap prescription drug prices. She had plans to raise the minimum wage. Those seem like populist measures to me. Why didn’t they seem like that to voters?
Well, because she’d been part of an administration which had not taken inflation seriously enough. And by that I mean in their messaging. I do think the administration was working to bring down inflation. But when you talk to people in the administration or you saw them on a cable news show and you said the economy is not doing great, you were hit with a barrage of admittedly rosy macroeconomic numbers, but because of the gross income and wealth inequality in America, those numbers are meaningless to many, many people whose lives are not reflected in those numbers.
The fact that Mark Cuban makes three times more money is not helping an autoworker in Michigan who’s making less money than the average wages of working people in this country. The average worker in this country is making less in real dollars than they did 50 years ago. And that’s not Kamala Harris’s fault, but it is the Democratic Party’s fault.
Donald Trump offers a narrative for why things are the way they are and why you may be doing well or not doing well. It’s a false narrative about immigrants and social wokeness, but the Democrats don’t have a counter-narrative. If you listen to President Joe Biden, there are “good Republicans”; business is good; labor is good; the Congress is good; and somehow bad things happen to good people. Well, that’s not satisfactory.
You need to have a counterbalancing narrative which explains what is really happening in people’s lives, which is: Wealth and income is being shuttled to the top in this country. The corporate elites are looting the bank accounts of American consumers. And until you were willing to say that and just say you are on the side of working people against those forces, you were going to continue to have these results.
The truth is, without Covid, Trump might have won reelection. So what everybody viewed as a repudiation of Trump in 2020 may just have been a flight to some kind of safety of normalcy that people wanted in Joe Biden because of Covid. But without Covid, I think there was already a populist trend in America. You saw it in 2016 on the Democratic side with Bernie Sanders, the left populism. You saw it on the right too.
But it was faux populism with Donald Trump on the right. And that instinct has not gone away. Covid interrupted it. But people understand that there are many institutions and powerful actors who are against them or against their interests. And until you are willing to stand up and point fingers and say who that is, you are going to be unsuccessful. You know, Star Wars is not a good movie without Darth Vader. And your story has to have a villain.
The Democrats did have a villain. They had Donald Trump. What did I miss?
What happened was Donald Trump had been president. You know, Donald Trump, because he was erratic as a president, really didn’t accomplish all that much, frankly. A horrendous tax bill, but beyond that, his legislative accomplishments were relatively minor. I think you’re going to see a very different and concerted effort by forces of reaction in this country to try to capitalize on his reelection, to do many of the things that they were unable to do in the first go-round so that they could be much more problematic.
But people said, look, we had Donald Trump. We still have a democracy, even though Donald Trump was president for four years. But the price of eggs is crazy high. Everything’s high. Interest rates are high. And that wasn’t that way when Donald Trump was there. So, you know, we’ll put up with his antics and that’s a price they’re willing to pay to have a bit more economic security. I bristle when I hear some in the party call it economic anxiety, like it’s some kind of neurosis that people are really doing well, but they just don’t understand it. They’re not doing well.
So what do the Democrats do about that? How do they reengage Americans who say, “We are not doing well. You haven’t done anything for us and we have thrown you bums out”? What’s the next step here?
Well, the next step is to retool the agenda, retool the messaging [in a way that is] very clear, full-throated around economically populist issues and against the corporate elite. Inside the party, there needs to be… you know, we can have a four-hour program on what has to happen within the party.
Look, you need to bring new voices into the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party needs to democratize itself. If you look at this election, I feel bad in many ways for Kamala Harris [being] handed the deck of cards that she was handed. Everybody knew Joe Biden was in decline. No one wanted to say it. The party covered it up. And the media was compliant. They circumvented the primary process, like in 2016 when they messed with the process then and ended up with Hillary Clinton as the nominee. And we lost.
Whenever the Democratic Party moves away from democracy and they take the “democratic” out of the Democratic Party, we get kicked in the teeth. The people who are least competent to make decisions about where this country should go, what the messaging should be, are Democratic Party insiders in Washington, DC. Those people could not get elected anywhere other than in a Democratic Party. And many of them are actually appointed by the president. They’re not even elected. Those folks are completely out of touch and unreliable. And we need some new blood in the Democratic Party. We need to democratize the party so that these new voices actually have a role. That’s what we need to do.
You worked with Bernie Sanders for a long time. Bernie Sanders is an older gentleman. In many ways, Bernie Sanders did change the conversation in this country, but he is in his 80s. Do the Democrats need a next Bernie Sanders, or 100 of them?
Well, yes, it would be good if we had 435. We could have one in every House district. But look, I’m a person who believes that leaders don’t make history. History makes leaders. And there are voices out there who are attempting to carry on the political work that Bernie Sanders, by the way, continues to do. He just got reelected on Tuesday. So he’s not going anywhere. So those leaders will rise up.
And the way generally happens in this country is that that sort of new direction comes through the Democratic presidential primary process. So we’re going to have four years of floating around. We’ll see how the midterms go — that’ll be one test.
We’ll have an open Democratic primary process next time and there will be people on that stage who will be articulating different visions for going forward. And a decision will be made about which way the party should go in 2024. We circumvented that process and we saw the result. Now we will have people there [who will be] articulating an economic populist approach to politics that I think would be very popular with working-class people.
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