You Can't Subtract Your Way to a Majority
The inert electorate and other self-defeating myths
The worst is yet to come, but at least we’ve learned something. The Republicans spent this interminable presidential campaign spreading lies, threatening violence, and breaking laws on a psychotic mission to destroy their opponent (or die trying). The Democrats, meanwhile, spent it cautiously triangulating their position on every issue and tactically ignoring segments of their own base in an effort to coax voters away from the other side.
And now we know which strategy worked.
In this wave of the post-election analysis, a common hot take is that the Democrats simply triangulated wrong and leaned too far to the left. Earlier this week the podcast If Books Could Kill helpfully devoted an entire episode to “The Worst Election Takes (So Far)”, including this doozy from Maureen “woke is broke” Dowd. One stinker they missed was this take from the Ezra Klein show: that the Democrats should’ve “just said no” to the nonprofit groups that advocate for the environment and vulnerable minorities. You might call this a betrayal of core constituencies, but Klein prefers the term “ideological flexibility”, while his guest Michael Lind goes further: “party politicians are going to have to emancipate themselves from nonprofit staffers.”
As journalist Jack Mirkinson put it, “What election do these people think we just had?“:
Many Democratic elites appear to have landed on a familiar tactic: blaming everyone’s favorite scapegoat, Big Woke. Everywhere you look, you’ll see someone — often, but not always, on CNN — railing against the far-left extremists that supposedly held the party’s mainstream faction in its vise-like grip in 2024. There’s just one problem with this: the campaign these insiders are describing bears virtually no resemblance to the actual campaign we all just suffered through.
Instead of acknowledging the failure of the strategy they endorsed, these insiders place all the blame on advocacy groups — who also happen to represent the biggest targets of Republican wrath. These pundits and consultants refuse to accept the idea that the Democrats’ triangulation strategy, which served the party so well in the 1990s, is no longer working. They can’t understand why all their tactical subtractions failed to add up to 50.1%
Where to now? Advocacy groups exist because minority populations cannot trust Democratic leaders to protect them; they lobby for their own interests because lobbying is the only language the party understands. If the Democratic Party doesn’t like this method of influence, it has two options. Option one: “just say no” and find a different way to cobble together a bare majority. Option two is more difficult but also a lot simpler: present a moral vision that’s broad enough to protect not only workers and the environment but also every racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual minority. Hell, the majorities too!
How do you do that? By telling voters they don’t have to live short, miserable lives of crippling fear and unending toil, pitted against each other for scraps. Because that’s the biggest majority in twenty-first-century America: everyone whose future is full of insurmountable threats to everything they hold dear.
To contemporary ears, the phrase moral leadership sounds extremely dusty. There are vanishingly few politicians who believe in a better future and advocate for it clearly and confidently. As a reward, they are targeted with death threats, serially mocked on Fox News, and undermined by colleagues in their own party. But that doesn’t stop them from standing up for what they believe in, because they understand that the stakes for most Americans are existential. Moral leadership is hazardous, but it’s the only thing that will save us.
The Republican Party’s monopoly on righteous anger is about to face its first real test. How will working-class voters react when the policies of the new administration end up raising the cost of their food, their medication, everything they need to survive, while lowering their wages and making their jobs more precarious? Or when they’re told they’ll never receive the Security Security contributions already deducted from their lifetime of paychecks? Demonizing immigrants and trans teens has provided a lot of cheap thrills, but maybe not enough to distract everyone from the giant sucking sound of money being siphoned out of their pockets and into the accounts of billionaires.
The Democratic Party has a short runway, but if it wants to survive it needs to transform itself into an anti-establishment party. It can’t continue to prioritize the interests of corporations while claiming to care about employees and other living things, because today those interests are in direct conflict. Pointing this out doesn’t make you a communist. The current Democratic leadership has a hard time understanding this. But look where their lack of imagination just landed us.
Instead of calculating new ways to slice up the current electorate, Democratic leaders could take a lesson from what the Republicans have done: offer a vision so simple, so vivid, and so loud that it inspires voters to realign themselves. This time, though, it won’t be a vision of all against all. It’ll be a vision of universal rights, a vision of standing up to the forces making it impossible to afford housing or access essential health care, the same forces that are setting the stage for a world war while destroying the conditions for life on Earth. This time it’ll be a vision of our mutual survival.
