How we got here

Democrats are still suffering from their misinterpretation of the 2016 election

In the immediate aftermath of Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election, Donald Trump criticized Mitt Romney for being too right-wing on immigration.

By doing so, he was echoing the media’s instant consensus about the race: Obama, people said, had won because of the coursing tide of demographic change, while Romney had foolishly tried to hold back the tide by abandoning the Bush/McCain position in favor of comprehensive immigration reform. I’m proud to say that I pushed back a little on this immigration-centric interpretation of the result at the time because it never made a lot of factual sense — there are very few Hispanics in Wisconsin. But I only pushed back a little since this whole narrative was unleashed in pursuit of a cause I believed in. Faced with divided government after the election, Obama’s people wanted to nudge Republicans back toward the Bush/McCain view in hopes of getting something done, and they very nearly succeeded.

Which is just to say that while elections have consequences, so do interpretations of elections, and I think that to understand the political dynamics of 2024, you need to understand the interpretative debates about the 2016 campaign.

If you didn’t pay any attention to the specifics of the 2016 race, you would say that in broad terms, what happened is that Republicans considered the option of responding to defeat by moderating on immigration (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio) but ultimately opted to moderate on Medicare instead. Since Romney’s position on Medicare was almost certainly a bigger vote-loser than his position on immigration, this was a very sensible trade. Democrats faced an additional significant headwind in 2016, namely that eight years of Barack Obama in the White House had generated thermostatic rightward shifts in public opinion. That always happens, and it’s why it’s very unusual for a party to win three presidential elections in a row. The one even remotely recent time a party has pulled off a three-peat, Ronald Reagan passed the baton to George H.W. Bush, whose prior identity had been as a factional leader for moderate Republicans.

But Obama did not pass the baton to someone seen as more moderate. Instead, Hillary Clinton ran for office on the promise to be more progressive than Obama. Under the circumstances, it seems obvious that Republicans would win, and the thing about 2016 that’s really in need of explaining is why Trump performed as poorly as he did. To understand that, you bring back in all the details — the scandals, the racism, the lack of discipline — and everything about the race makes perfect sense.

Needless to say, though, “Trump won because he moderated on economics while Democrats moved to the left, and then he dramatically underperformed the fundamentals because he’s a psycho” was not the dominant interpretation of the 2016 race.

Democrats got weird about Trump

Hillary Clinton said, infamously, that about half of Trump’s supporters could be considered “deplorable” because they are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it.”

The other half, she said, “feel that the government has let them down” and are “desperate for change.”

Conservatives did a good job of turning this into a gaffe, but I think the actual analysis here is interesting. In Clinton’s account, none of Trump’s supporters are high-income people who want tax cuts. None of them are managers at Sunbelt automobile plants who don’t like Democrats’ pro-union stands. None of them are private school parents who like the idea of school vouchers because they will benefit financially. None of them own a restaurant in a community that has benefitted from fracking and worry that Democratic environmentalism will be bad for their business.

Everyone is either a really bad racist or else is being crushed by the man and in need of help. Nobody falls into what I think is the classic conservative posture of just, like, a person who is doing okay and is kinda selfish and who thinks that progressive idealists might be bad news. Democrats aren’t stupid, of course. They are perfectly aware that these people exist.

But something about the nature of the Trump phenomenon induced this radical dichotomization of the electorate.

Some people voted for Trump because they were racist, other people voted for Trump due to some kind of economic desperation, and this became a whole weird debate about whether Trump supporters were racist or suffering from “economic anxiety.” Which is just to say that both cultural and economic motives for voting Trump were construed in a very particular — and somewhat odd — way.

In the summer of 2016, Hillary Clinton started talking about “systemic racism,” which progressives acknowledged at the time was new and different from how Democrats had talked about the issue before. And I think it’s to be expected that if you adopt a new message, some of the people who liked your old message might not like the new one. If you want to characterize “liked Obama’s message on race but didn’t like Clinton’s message on race” as a “racist” position, I’m not particularly interested in debating the semantics. But clearly the function of characterizing people that way was to cut off debate about the message as a tactical choice and stigmatize the idea of appealing to the views of people who liked Obama’s cultural message.

On economics, the presumption was that people attracted to Trump for pocketbook reasons were revolting against “neoliberalism” and wanted sweeping left-wing policy change. Nobody was annoyed by Obama’s dishwasher regulations. Nobody was a farmer annoyed by the Waters of the United States rule.

Democrats ran lots of ads like this in 2012 about how Romney’s ideas on Medicare were going to be bad for senior citizens.

I assume the reason they ran those ads is that they thought this was a persuasive argument to a non-trivial number of swing voters who presumably agreed with Romney about some other stuff (guns or abortion or gay rights). Running a candidate like Trump who didn’t take these positions seems like a good way to win over the votes of some people who voted for Obama previously. But this incredibly boring explanation of Trump’s win — he moved to the center on a key issue — got almost no play.

Relitigating the 2016 primary

If you want to understand Democrats’ somewhat odd interpretation of Trump’s win, I think you have to go back to the weird dynamics of the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.

Bernie Sanders launched what was widely seen at first as a meaningless protest candidacy. But then he essentially tied Clinton in the Iowa caucus, which sent her campaign into a kind of panic mode. Clinton ran against Sanders largely by hitting from the left on different kinds of cultural and identity issues. Sanders in turn kept hitting Clinton from the left on economics. Everyone came out of this battle convinced that the other side’s arguments had been really good and effective but that the intra-party dissension was harmful, so they needed to stitch together a new synthesis that involved moving left on economics and identity.

I think there was just never very much evidence for any of this in the post-election analysis.

Obama beat Clinton in 2008, after all, largely on the strength of criticizing her support for the Iraq War. And we saw from the 2004 primary that even back then, the Iraq issue was sufficient to launch Howard Dean to stardom. It’s not a huge surprise that the kind of highly engaged white liberals who dominate the Iowa caucus would be drawn to an anti-war insurgent candidate like Sanders — that doesn’t necessarily mean they are socialists.

Nor is it a huge surprise that the kind of working class Black moderates who dominate the South Carolina primary would be drawn to the Democratic Party establishment candidate. That didn’t mean they were yearning for tweets about intersectionality.

In fact, Sanders wound up getting lots of moderate/conservative white Democrats votes in places like West Virginia who didn’t like Clinton’s identitarian turn.

But as I say, most Democrats didn’t see it that way. They saw Bernie’s success as evidence of a public craving for left-wing economics, which was then somehow confirmed by Trump beating Clinton — even though obviously Clinton was to Trump’s left on economics.

The groups and the narrative

People sometimes ask me where “the groups” get their power, given their demonstrated inability to actually drive votes or deliver constituencies.

It’s a complicated issue, but one important source of power is epistemic. Organized issue advocacy groups are very involved in shaping media narratives and conventional wisdom. In the wake of the 2012 campaign, there were lots of specific individuals and advocacy groups who had an interest in pushing the idea of a backlash to Romney’s immigration position. By contrast, there isn’t really a comparable Medicare advocacy community whose job it was to shape a Medicare-centric interpretation of 2012 and 2016. What there is, instead, is a dedicated group of Medicare for All advocates who played an important role in both the 2016 and 2020 cycles.

Some of this narrativizing is a question of semantics more than facts.

“Trump won because of a backlash to Obama’s second term executive actions on immigration plus the new influx of asylum-seekers that arose at around the same kind” sounds like it implies Democrats should move to the right on immigration. By contrast, “Trump won by appealing to deplorable racists with xenophobic demagoguery” implies that trying to court those voters would be morally unacceptable. We did get a few really good post-election pieces, like this one from Ezra Klein, that actually framed the issue neutrally and then stated a normative conclusion:

Exit polls suggest Trump’s big issue margins were among voters who said immigration and terrorism — which Trump managed to turn into another form of immigration by focusing on refugees — were their top priority. I see no reason to doubt them. This is a place where Clinton and Trump really did disagree. And that makes this split harder to resolve, as I don’t think Democrats should turn against immigrants, or shut America to those desperately seeking safety.

There’s nothing wrong with advocating for a calculated political risk with eyes clear.

One of the first pieces I ever wrote for Slow Boring criticized Democrats’ post-2012 re-embrace of the cause of gun control. Democrats dropped this issue after John Kerry’s defeat in 2004, and it served them well in the 2006, 2008, and 2012 cycles. But then came Sandy Hook and they felt they had to take it up again. And in the spirit of credit where due, Joe Biden has, in fact, signed gun control legislation. I don’t think the juice was worth the squeeze on this one, personally, but taking a stand can, in fact, get results.

But most progressive organizations didn’t put the choice squarely the way Klein did. They either wrote Trump voters off as irredeemable or else posited that they were gettable if Democrats adopted more left-wing policies. Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign indulged in less of this kind of wishful thinking than its main rivals, and that plus Trump’s clownish handling of the Covid-19 pandemic put Democrats back in control of the White House. Yet a sense that Trump’s win was somehow an indictment of Obama for not being sufficiently progressive — rather than an indictment of Romney for being too far-right on retirement programs — has hung like a weird fog of misperception over Democrats’ interpretations of Trump-era politics.