Should Democrats be left-wing economic populists?

Lessons from the candidates who performed best down-ballot

During the 2024 election, a critique of the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party began to form. When the party was swept from power, that critique exploded across the post-election discourse.

The Democrats lost the election because they weren’t sufficiently economically left-wing.

Proponents of this thought argued that Harris doomed the Democratic Party by campaigning with icons of big business, failing to articulate a bracing critique of corporate power in America, and rejecting certain left-wing economic policies. If you look down-ballot, they argued, the Democrats who performed the best were the true left-wing economic populists.

Opponents argued that this framing was a bit simplistic and that the election was decided by a multitude of other factors: the global incumbency backlash, the country’s rightward turn on immigration and social issues, and of course, inflation. They also pointed to data showing that standard bearers of left economic populism, such as Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, actually underperformed the Vice President in their respective states. Either their economic populism wasn’t all that popular, or it was outweighed by the fact that voters moved to the right on other issues.

A problem with the post-election discourse is that peak audience interest occurs in the days following the election, which is also when election data analysts are able to provide the least information about what exactly happened. It takes time to run the numbers, compare a congressional candidate’s performance against the top of the ticket, and really determine what worked and what didn’t.

Now that we have some good post-election data, I think it’s time to interrogate this a bit. The best performing Democrats were almost universally moderate on immigration and social issues, and while the role that played in their electability is important, it’s also separate from today’s question: Were the overperformers left-wing economic populists?

The many shades of economic populism

The term “left-wing economic populism” is amorphous and used in reference to all sorts of policies. These range from the agenda most strongly associated with Bernie Sanders— Medicare for All, significantly higher marginal tax rates on the rich, and national rent control — to a political agenda grounded in a disdain for large corporations (think Google and Amazon, and the role they play in cannibalizing markets). Virtually all Democrats who embrace the Sanders agenda also embrace the corporate power agenda, but the reverse is not always true.

But here’s the most important thing to understand about the candidates who over- performed expectations this election cycle: There isn’t a single left-wing economic stance that tied them all together. Instead, their economic arguments sprang from a wide variety of ideological forms, some that fall under that great umbrella of left-wing economic populism and others that did not.

The best data I’ve come across to evaluate the top performing down-ballot candidates comes from the election analysis organization Split Ticket. They developed a formula to calculate a candidate’s “Wins Above Replacement” (WAR), which controls for certain race fundamentals (seat partisanship, incumbency, demographics, and money) to determine how the average candidate would have performed in the election. Then, they compare that expected performance with the actual candidate’s performance.

The result is a score that quantifies the electoral boost generated by the quality of the candidate.

Freshman Congresswoman Kristen McDonald Rivet’s campaign in Michigan’s 8th congressional district is an instructive place to begin. Her primarily working class constituency stretches from Flint to the tri-cities of Saginaw, Midland, and Bay City.

Trump won those voters by two points, but they also supported Rivet by a margin of nearly seven. She earned those votes by deploying messages like this:

This is an old political lesson, but I think it’s somewhat ignored in our contemporary economic populism debate. Americans tend to be skeptical about how their tax dollars are spent. Individual proposals for stronger public services often poll favorably, but the corresponding tax increases needed to fund them typically do not command the same level of support. In an election that was dominated by rising consumer prices, tax cuts functioned as a direct promise to put more money in voters’ pockets.

That doesn’t tell Representative Rivet’s full campaign story. She also pledged to fight corporate price gouging, take on big drug companies, and “make the uber wealthy pay their fair share.” In short, all language that sounds like it could've been ripped from a Bernie Sanders speech.

These shades of economic populism were adopted by other top-performing candidates too. Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez got extensive attention for winning her rural, Trump-voting district in Washington. Her campaign focused on attacking big companies like John Deere, which prevented customers from fixing their tractors outside of authorized dealerships. She called out this refusal to let people exercise “their right to repair” as clear evidence of corporations infringing on the rights of blue-collar Americans.

But then she extended her critique from big corporations to big government by recounting how a daycare center was unable to serve fresh produce due to a government regulation that mandated a certain number of sinks for food preparation. Several left-wing writers tried to debunk this story, and in turn, argued that attacking government regulation should be off-limits to Democrats. But as Jennifer Pahlka noted, that criticism really misses the point. Wagging your finger at voters and telling them to read government regulations better is bad politics. And Pahlka, an expert at reading such regulations, said they could have been interpreted to prohibit fruit and vegetable preparation in certain daycare centers.

Look at the ads and read the campaign websites of the top WAR candidates, and you’ll see rhetoric that stretches across the ideological spectrum. In a predominately rural New York farm district, Representative Josh Riley called for middle-class tax cuts, while also attacking his opponent’s tight relationship with big agriculture companies. In Maine’s second Congressional District, Jared Golden was the most prominent Democrat to back Trump’s universal tariff policy, but he also criticized the expanded child tax credit for being poorly targeted.

It’s impossible to neatly fit these positions into any particular economic paradigm. But they work because they match the particular politics of the representative’s districts. This obvious, yet frequently overlooked, fact is critical for people on the left and center-left to understand.

Clearly, calling for a Green New Deal would kill Jared Golden’s re-election attempt in Northern Maine. But it also wouldn’t be very effective for him to sit down with workers in the state’s lumber industry and tell them to quit crying about imports and embrace the sweet life of free trade. Trump’s protectionist policies, if enacted, might ultimately make life more expensive for Mainers. But we shouldn’t wag our fingers at one of the best performing elected officials in the country — the policy merits of a proposal must, to an extent, be separated from the political merits.

The tricky politics of left-wing economic populism

Bernie Sanders has been preaching the gospel of left economic populism for years, but one of his recently converted disciples is Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut.

Murphy thinks Democrats lost the working-class, in part, because of their failure to move to the left on economic policy. As proof, he shared a post-election memo that highlighted a statement that polled exceptionally well across the political spectrum: “a handful of corporations and economic elites have too much power, and the government is doing too little about it.”

I think this quote underscores some of the misconceptions in the post-election economic populism conversation. As we saw from the top-performing candidates this cycle, this kind of rhetoric was actually fairly common. But notice it didn’t go much further. There were no sweeping condemnations of American capitalism, nor did it veer into the anti-business dogma so common among left-leaning economic populist thought leaders. Not every plank from Bernie Sanders’ economic wishlist appeared; in fact, some of the winning messages—like tax cuts or reduced government regulation—were nowhere to be found on his list.

There’s a reason for this.

Although guaranteeing health insurance for everyone is popular, abolishing private health insurance is not, largely because most Americans are satisfied with their current providers. Free childcare and paid family leave also command popular support, but voters have signaled discomfort with the substantial increases in government spending that would be necessary to fund those programs.

Another core element of the economic populist project is capitalizing on the public’s supposed disdain for big business and wealthy elites. But here, too, the politics are a bit tricky. Voters believe wealth inequality is a serious issue, but they’re also more than likely to say that billionaires are good for the economy and increase the rate of innovation. Large corporations are generally perceived not to have a net benefit on society, with the exception of technology companies — Americans trust Amazon and Google more than they trust the federal government.

Recent polling on Elon Musk from the progressive PAC House Majority Forward really underscores this point. He doesn’t poll negatively because of DOGE or his obscene wealth, but rather because voters are worried that he’ll cut safety net programs to enrich himself. It’s neither new nor particularly exciting, but Democrats best economic argument is still being the party that protects Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

This brings us to another overlooked aspect of this debate. When people claim, with absolute certainty, that Bernie Sandersism would have been the antidote to Trumpism, they rarely reckon with the economic impact of Sanders’s environmental agenda. A fracking ban and higher taxes on fossil fuels are unpopular and, if enacted, would inevitably have drive up energy prices.

Regardless of one’s policy position on decarbonization efforts, it’s important to realize that voters have made it clear they’re unwilling to incur a financial cost to reduce carbon emissions.

Seeing the full populist picture

I’m not discounting the political benefits of certain forms of left economic populism. There’s a reason why Chris Murphy’s quote commanded such high levels of public support, and there’s a reason why some of these high-performing candidates leaned into similar rhetoric. Rather, this is an attempt to add some texture to a conversation that too frequently assumes every Democratic candidate has a big “do left-wing economic populism” button on their desk, and if only they pressed it, the party would finally achieve a durable governing majority.

There’s a reason why people who are obsessed with electing Democrats in red states are obsessed with former Senator Joe Manchin. In each of his two elections in West Virginia, he achieved a far better electoral performance than any other Democrat in his state, and he accomplished this with a relatively moderate economic platform. However, his former primary opponent,¹ Paula Jean Swearengin, ran as the Democratic candidate for the state’s other senate seat in 2020 on an economically left populist agenda. She won 38% of the vote. She checked all the relevant boxes — Medicare for All, a fifteen dollar minimum wage, free public college tuition — yet, Swearengin fared 10 points worse than Manchin did in his last general.

It’s a truly glaring piece of evidence. And it shows that there are other necessary ingredients to being a successful candidate than just being economically left-wing.

In Nebraska, Dan Osborn’s independent 2024 Senate campaign captured the attention of many in the left-populism camp when he nearly beat his Republican opponent. They pointed to his anti-corporate rhetoric as proof that their preferred message could potentially win in a deep red state. But it’s important to note that he also called for reduced government spending and ran an ad calling himself “the only real conservative in the race.” Osborn’s blue-collar background as an industrial mechanic and union leader were also critical to boosting his outsider populist bonafides.

This is the final critical point: Don’t mistake the aesthetics of the populist with the ideology of left-wing populism. Neither are a guarantee of electoral over performance, but some of the candidates who most effectively deployed some left economic arguments were also people with genuine outsider personas. Chris Murphy will likely run for president in 2028 on a platform of “big tent” populism. But it’s worth asking if the lawyer and two-term Senator from Connecticut has the profile to authentically deploy the populist message that can win back the working-class.

The simple answer to that question is likely no. But there is no simple affirmative answer to the question of how Democrats can win back working-class voters either. There are obviously broad principles that the party should subscribe to, but as the results from Split Ticket show, there is not a single economic agenda that has been proven to have all of the answers.

Maybe Trump’s presidency and the rise of the tech-right will sufficiently alienate voters to the point where they’re ready to declare war on the “bro-ligarchs.” But more likely, voters’ nuanced, and at times paradoxical, relationship with left-economic populism will remain the same four years from now. It might be a part of the answer, but only a part of it.

1. Swearengin earned 30 percent of the vote to Manchin’s 70 in their 2018 primary matchup.