Written by Matt Brunig, who writes about politics, economics, and political theory, with a focus on issues that affect poor people and workers. He is currently the president of 3P, a think tank founded in 2017. 3P’s primary mission is to publish ideas and analysis that support the development of economic systems aimed at serving the many rather than the few and filling the gaps left behind. Due to the current state of think tanks with a particular focus on socialist and social democratic economic ideas. Mr. Brunig previously worked as an attorney at the National Labor Relations Board and as a policy analyst at the Demos think tank. It was first published in his website.
For me, this election differed from the previous two in that it lacked my particular policy interests: a universalist welfare state, mass unionization, and the socialization of wealth. It was different. The Biden administration has not achieved any significant results on these fronts. No primary campaigns featured candidates championing these causes. Harris didn’t run over them.
This absence left me quite intellectually detached from the election. Not because the results weren’t important, but because I had no real stake in what I was promoting in the discussion.
Other elements of the centre-left world did not have this luxury.
of macro person Democrats are still grappling with the reality that although fiscal and monetary policy helped achieve high employment, good GDP growth, and some wage compression, they lost.
own style populist They can run relevant parts of the administrative state, such as Lina Khan at the FTC, Jonathan Cantor at the Justice Department, and Rohit Chopra at the CFPB, and have significant influence beyond them through a “whole of government” approach. was able to obtain. Government agencies from the Copyright Office to the DOT to the NLRB are all taking actions aimed at supporting this broad agenda. All of these institutions took actions that are championed and praised by this group. Self-styled populists were highly influential in shaping even a fraction of the policies Harris actually announced. But Democrats still lost.
of foreign policy advocate He spent the year leading up to the election in the unenviable position of having to defend the Biden administration’s provision of money and arms to the Israeli government to help carry out atrocities in Gaza. They argued this was necessary because unpopular policies would cause some voters to stop supporting Democrats. To the extent that Biden’s actual policies have caused some voters to stop supporting the Democratic Party, those voters need to get over that and realize that Trump is inferior to Harris in many ways. That was the claim. Democrats still lost.
of Moderate We essentially had to run a Harris campaign. The group believes the way to win elections is by moving to the right in rhetoric and policy on issues such as immigration, guns, and identity, while narrowing the policy agenda to a few seemingly popular topics such as health care and abortion. He claimed that there was. Harris clearly campaigned this way, but Democrats still lost.
When your party does what you want in a policy or election campaign, but loses, people think that maybe you are also involved, that you are stupid and that your ideas were wrong. It’s hard to escape the feeling that something is happening. This also causes a certain defensiveness in the form of finding other explanations or defiantly doubling down. It’s interesting when you look at it from the outside.
The truth, of course, is that no one has some kind of silver bullet for winning elections, and that people who generally talk a lot about the topic ultimately agree on the best governance and election methods to win elections. This means that you have a view on how to exercise that clearly overlaps with your own. their own individually formed policy preferences, or unrelated conflicts with other factions within the party.
The last time Trump won, there was a convenient explanation that it was because of racism. This is great. Because anti-racism is non-negotiable, it puts the blame elsewhere, and on something you can do little about.
The racism explanation appears to be fading this time around, in part because Trump has made inroads with nonwhite voters, especially Latino voters.
A convenient new explanation has emerged: It all comes down to inflation. Prices have increased by 20% since President Biden took office. Under the Trump administration, growth was only 6% over the same period.
This explanation is convenient. This is because (1) inflation was primarily driven by factors outside of Biden’s control, such as post-COVID-19 supply issues and reduced spending of pandemic savings after COVID-19; ) The extent of inflation was caused by measures such as the American Rescue Plan, which was part of achieving other macroeconomic policy goals such as high employment, GDP growth, and wage compression.(3) The outbreak of inflation was a one-off event related to the unique dynamics that followed. It has little to do with future policy issues. In other words, the explanation for inflation is consistent with “we did nothing wrong” and “nothing needs to change in the future.”
This isn’t to say it’s not true, just that it’s useful in that it can probably absolve all of the above groups who might otherwise be blamed.
For now, I’m not going to make bold claims about why we lost this election or how we can make changes to win all future elections. Instead, as I did in 2016 and 2020, see who will carry the left’s torch in the next Democratic presidential primary and help them build a well-designed social democratic policy agenda. Just think about whether you can help.
