My simple mind needs to boil things down. Is Bernie a capitalist and is that where this breaks? If he is not (I actually don't know) is that the where it becomes a bridge too far? As in, you can be economically populist as long as you still believe in the basic system. Kind of like how Hickenlooper overshot the runway when he couldn't say he was a capitalist back in 2019 and had to correct back?
It is true that Elizabeth Warren underperformed Kamala Harris, but neither race was in doubt, and Warren's campaign held a number of joint events with downballot state-level candidates, since none of the Congressional races was really in doubt either. I saw ads from the Republican criticizing Warren, but did not see ads by Warrren, pro or con, although theyt may have been out there.
I know from Warren insiders that many people told them they did not want to work on her campaign or donate to it -- not because of animosity, but because they had better things to do. In my case, that meant canvassing in PA and working on a competitive local state rep race.
The point it, it may not make sense to compare candidates going all out in close races to candidates just waiting for the election to be over. Like comparing yards in the 4th quarter when one team enters with a 28 point lead.
One the one hand, anger at elites fuels populist energy. On the other hand, anger may be incoherent. Democrats could handle this by lying, saying popular things they don't believe. But are US elites behaving so well that a progressive Democratic party could not highlight cases where anti-elite energy is justified?
My pet example: Democrats could make an issue of ending tax breaks for endowments of elite colleges & universities. This would open much-needed space between Democrats and a resented elite. It would be progressive, since elite colleges provide advantages to students who are selected before they leave their parent's homes, and consequently draw about as many students from top-1%-income families as the bottom 50%. Reducing the importance of qualifying for elite colleges would reduce incentives for unequal schooling at younger ages. Given the extremely low intergenerational mobility and the tiny talent poll elevated by elite colleges, less unequal educational funding might even have benefits on narrow efficiency grounds.
More broadly, my own country has among highest rates of simple assault & domestic assault in the wealthy world, but I saw this only after I emigrated. Which is to say that we all have blind spots. Failures can spur honest examination, but elite Democrats can avoid such difficult examination by viewing populism as simply pandering to those people's irrationality.
Nothing I said is is intended as an attack on the wonderful individuals I've met who've graduated from elite colleges, and there are lots of other issues that should be discussed. But after recent failures, I believe it is important for Democrats to look for issues where anti-elite energy is justified.
I think why Osborne, Gluesenkamp Perez, and the other unconventional politicians did so well was because they didn't give a shit about which idealogical label they represented. They were real people representing real viewpoints, mostly ignored by the various failed political causes of the last fifty years. Instead of dismissing the MAGA crowd as a bunch of backwater racist idiots, they engaged with them, listened to their problems, and offered up alternative solutions to their Republican opponents rather than simply getting aghast and calling their views anti-democratic.
People want change. It's hard for most of us who have successfully navigated or been part of the current system to understand. What has worked for us, whether we identify on the left or on the right, hasn't worked for a lot of people. When offered the menu of standard political ideologies, they pick "None of the Above". They don't know what "left-wing economic populism" is and, if they kinda do, they'll just call it communism. And, they are kinda right. And, now, they are in the majority. As shocking and appalling the stuff of the last three weeks appears, it represents "doing shit" as opposed to "not doing shit". Democrats need to decide if they want to sit back and be the face of the problem, or get their hands dirty and be part of the solution.
> 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.
Right, too fancy. We need someone folksy, like a billionaire.
I don’t think there’s much to learn from Manchin versus Swearingen. Manchin overperforms fundamentals because he’s West Virginia royalty and WV is one of the few places that kind of thing still matters.
It’s like talking about Schwarzenegger’s wins solely in terms of his policy positions.
My Father in law is a Republican in suburban Flint who loves drinking beer and is a Michigan Wolverines football season ticket holder and he loved Kristen McDonald Rivet because she ran this ad about how she loves drinking beer and hates Ohio lol. For him the fact that she didn't mention policy goals at all but seemed like a normal person who didn't think about politics all the time made him want to vote for her. https://youtu.be/w0XIQxQnGI4?si=9iLEuWmyQg66qZP8
This is a small quibble, but Marie Glusenkamp Perez’s district (WA-3) is hardly rural, unless you’re using a technical definition that I’m not aware of. Speaking as someone who grew up there. It’s a fairly big district, true, but most of the population lives within a 45-minute drive of Vancouver, WA, a suburb of Portland, OR with a population around 200k on its own. The Congressional District Health Dashboard lists it as “sparse suburban” as opposed to “rural-suburban mix” or “pure rural.”
We've had almost a decade of the DSA argument that there's an army of secret socialists out there waiting for Democrats to motivate and it has never manifested.
A lot of working people don't want the government to help them as much as they want big business and the government to stop hurting them. The feeling isn't that they need some program to solve some problem they have, but that big business, government bureaucrats, and others are out to get them and holding them back and if someone, let's say a "fighter," would go out there and reign these people in their lives would improve.
Unless I am misunderstanding, the underlying message here seems to be "voters across the spectrum are simpletons so say stuff they want to hear with as little connection any actual policy proposals because specifics turn people off."
I think a problem is an inclination to mix up what we want to be true and what is actually true.
I want a high marginal tax rate, more generous assistance for the poor, and a more forgiving and accepting immigration policy.
But I also recognize that those wishes don’t match the average voters’ in every district, and so I understand why running on that might be a losing strategy.
But others with my same wishes balk at that idea and say there’s no way those ideas aren’t winners
> Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, actually underperformed the Vice President in their respective states
I generally expect this of Senators with obvious national ambitions regardless of ideology. If you’re focused on something bigger, are you really focusing on bringing home the bacon for your constituents? Al Gore didn’t win Tennessee in 2000, after all, even though moderate Dems were still competitive electorally statewide for a decade longer. But people rightly perceived “that he is or ever was a [Tennessee] person is a tenuous political fiction.”*
I think that a message of working-class left-wing economic populism could be effective with the right messenger, but it’d have to be very much separated from wokery and climate concerns. I think for whatever it’s worth that the Trump election did show a craving for a latter day Kingfish. Personally I’d love to see any Democrat that can win nationally at this point, though alternating presidencies of Trump and the Kingfish would be a real roller coaster!
I don’t think there’s a credible one in the pipeline, but probably in 2028, if there’s a free and fair election, everyone will be exhausted with populist malgovernment and hungry for an establishment type to right the ship of state. If recent history is any guide, it will be after Democrats have stabilized everything that people will start clamoring once more for a populist to burn it down, and it would be good to have a Kingfish in stasis ready to be deployed against whatever supervillain the Republican Party comes up with.
Why not impose the carbon tax and rebate all or almost all of it. That would certainly encourage less carbon use and move the consumption to other categories.
By the way, Ben, this is a great piece. I hope you’ll take this in the spirit with which it’s intended and not find it condescending: I think you have a bright future.
Off-topic, but I find it darkly funny that when I go to the SB main page, under "Most popular" I see the headline: "Why Are Young Liberals So Depressed?" And these days I can point at pretty much any random headline on current events and say "That's why!" (I'm not a *young* liberal anymore, but the point remains.)
I agree with all of this and I’m as contrarian as the day is long. I feel like the last liberal who is a fan of “just asking questions”, and playing devil’s advocate. Ideas are supposed to be critiqued, picked at and ultimately refined.
Kamala just had a lot of other baggage and a few weeks of the politics of joy couldn’t overcome it. Frankly it felt manufactured. We’re going to need fresh faces and a fresh start. The Obama’s of the world (as if they’re everywhere, right?) who still have the opportunity to define themselves and align with with more Americans.
I think there has never been a better time or place to be a human being (no matter what an internet meme tells you), and we should say so. No one wants to follow all these neurotic, depressed people. We need a “happy warrior” mentality, I think, even if it’s difficult to summon sometimes.
I want to believe this is true, the happy warrior ethos as being effective, but I just don't think it's correct for the political moment.
Trump and the Republicans messaging has been anything but. It's built on hate of their fellow citizens, and fear.
I'm not saying the Democrats should sink to their level at all. But justified anger at all the shitting on the constitution we're currently seeing is necessary. The civil rights movement was powered by compassion, but also by rage at the status-quo. It's an underrated source of momentum.
Randall, I like you and I agree with you a lot, so sorry for being all contrarian and argumentative, but I'm just gonna say this:
"We need a happy warrior, not a neurotic depressive" has been common wisdom in politics for decades. Ronald "Morning in America" Reagan trounced Jimmy "Malaise" Carter. Makes sense! Being happy and optimistic is better than being miserable and pessimistic! Americans are an optimistic, positive, can-do people!
But, like so much common wisdom, this failed utterly in 2024. Kamala ran on "Joy," she was upbeat and smiling, her memes were cheerful - all those coconuts and brat, Taylor Swift, America's sweetheart and biggest pop star, posting "Childless Cat Ladies for Harris" etc. And Trump? Grumpy, scowling, insulting, Xeeting about how America is going down the tubes and how he's our RETRIBUTION and if we don't elect him America will be destroyed in a godless woke Commie apocalypse. At the debate, Kamala was in control, openly laughing at Trump while he spluttered angrily about "They're EATING THE DOGZ!!!!"
How'd that work out for Kamala?
Ok I'm done. I'm going outside to touch some grass now.
My simple mind needs to boil things down. Is Bernie a capitalist and is that where this breaks? If he is not (I actually don't know) is that the where it becomes a bridge too far? As in, you can be economically populist as long as you still believe in the basic system. Kind of like how Hickenlooper overshot the runway when he couldn't say he was a capitalist back in 2019 and had to correct back?
https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/hickenlooper-declines-to-call-himself-a-capitalist-1454566467734
It is true that Elizabeth Warren underperformed Kamala Harris, but neither race was in doubt, and Warren's campaign held a number of joint events with downballot state-level candidates, since none of the Congressional races was really in doubt either. I saw ads from the Republican criticizing Warren, but did not see ads by Warrren, pro or con, although theyt may have been out there.
I know from Warren insiders that many people told them they did not want to work on her campaign or donate to it -- not because of animosity, but because they had better things to do. In my case, that meant canvassing in PA and working on a competitive local state rep race.
The point it, it may not make sense to compare candidates going all out in close races to candidates just waiting for the election to be over. Like comparing yards in the 4th quarter when one team enters with a 28 point lead.
One the one hand, anger at elites fuels populist energy. On the other hand, anger may be incoherent. Democrats could handle this by lying, saying popular things they don't believe. But are US elites behaving so well that a progressive Democratic party could not highlight cases where anti-elite energy is justified?
My pet example: Democrats could make an issue of ending tax breaks for endowments of elite colleges & universities. This would open much-needed space between Democrats and a resented elite. It would be progressive, since elite colleges provide advantages to students who are selected before they leave their parent's homes, and consequently draw about as many students from top-1%-income families as the bottom 50%. Reducing the importance of qualifying for elite colleges would reduce incentives for unequal schooling at younger ages. Given the extremely low intergenerational mobility and the tiny talent poll elevated by elite colleges, less unequal educational funding might even have benefits on narrow efficiency grounds.
More broadly, my own country has among highest rates of simple assault & domestic assault in the wealthy world, but I saw this only after I emigrated. Which is to say that we all have blind spots. Failures can spur honest examination, but elite Democrats can avoid such difficult examination by viewing populism as simply pandering to those people's irrationality.
Nothing I said is is intended as an attack on the wonderful individuals I've met who've graduated from elite colleges, and there are lots of other issues that should be discussed. But after recent failures, I believe it is important for Democrats to look for issues where anti-elite energy is justified.
I think why Osborne, Gluesenkamp Perez, and the other unconventional politicians did so well was because they didn't give a shit about which idealogical label they represented. They were real people representing real viewpoints, mostly ignored by the various failed political causes of the last fifty years. Instead of dismissing the MAGA crowd as a bunch of backwater racist idiots, they engaged with them, listened to their problems, and offered up alternative solutions to their Republican opponents rather than simply getting aghast and calling their views anti-democratic.
People want change. It's hard for most of us who have successfully navigated or been part of the current system to understand. What has worked for us, whether we identify on the left or on the right, hasn't worked for a lot of people. When offered the menu of standard political ideologies, they pick "None of the Above". They don't know what "left-wing economic populism" is and, if they kinda do, they'll just call it communism. And, they are kinda right. And, now, they are in the majority. As shocking and appalling the stuff of the last three weeks appears, it represents "doing shit" as opposed to "not doing shit". Democrats need to decide if they want to sit back and be the face of the problem, or get their hands dirty and be part of the solution.
> 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.
Right, too fancy. We need someone folksy, like a billionaire.
I don’t think there’s much to learn from Manchin versus Swearingen. Manchin overperforms fundamentals because he’s West Virginia royalty and WV is one of the few places that kind of thing still matters.
It’s like talking about Schwarzenegger’s wins solely in terms of his policy positions.
My Father in law is a Republican in suburban Flint who loves drinking beer and is a Michigan Wolverines football season ticket holder and he loved Kristen McDonald Rivet because she ran this ad about how she loves drinking beer and hates Ohio lol. For him the fact that she didn't mention policy goals at all but seemed like a normal person who didn't think about politics all the time made him want to vote for her. https://youtu.be/w0XIQxQnGI4?si=9iLEuWmyQg66qZP8
This is a small quibble, but Marie Glusenkamp Perez’s district (WA-3) is hardly rural, unless you’re using a technical definition that I’m not aware of. Speaking as someone who grew up there. It’s a fairly big district, true, but most of the population lives within a 45-minute drive of Vancouver, WA, a suburb of Portland, OR with a population around 200k on its own. The Congressional District Health Dashboard lists it as “sparse suburban” as opposed to “rural-suburban mix” or “pure rural.”
We've had almost a decade of the DSA argument that there's an army of secret socialists out there waiting for Democrats to motivate and it has never manifested.
A lot of working people don't want the government to help them as much as they want big business and the government to stop hurting them. The feeling isn't that they need some program to solve some problem they have, but that big business, government bureaucrats, and others are out to get them and holding them back and if someone, let's say a "fighter," would go out there and reign these people in their lives would improve.
Unless I am misunderstanding, the underlying message here seems to be "voters across the spectrum are simpletons so say stuff they want to hear with as little connection any actual policy proposals because specifics turn people off."
I think a problem is an inclination to mix up what we want to be true and what is actually true.
I want a high marginal tax rate, more generous assistance for the poor, and a more forgiving and accepting immigration policy.
But I also recognize that those wishes don’t match the average voters’ in every district, and so I understand why running on that might be a losing strategy.
But others with my same wishes balk at that idea and say there’s no way those ideas aren’t winners
> Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, actually underperformed the Vice President in their respective states
I generally expect this of Senators with obvious national ambitions regardless of ideology. If you’re focused on something bigger, are you really focusing on bringing home the bacon for your constituents? Al Gore didn’t win Tennessee in 2000, after all, even though moderate Dems were still competitive electorally statewide for a decade longer. But people rightly perceived “that he is or ever was a [Tennessee] person is a tenuous political fiction.”*
I think that a message of working-class left-wing economic populism could be effective with the right messenger, but it’d have to be very much separated from wokery and climate concerns. I think for whatever it’s worth that the Trump election did show a craving for a latter day Kingfish. Personally I’d love to see any Democrat that can win nationally at this point, though alternating presidencies of Trump and the Kingfish would be a real roller coaster!
I don’t think there’s a credible one in the pipeline, but probably in 2028, if there’s a free and fair election, everyone will be exhausted with populist malgovernment and hungry for an establishment type to right the ship of state. If recent history is any guide, it will be after Democrats have stabilized everything that people will start clamoring once more for a populist to burn it down, and it would be good to have a Kingfish in stasis ready to be deployed against whatever supervillain the Republican Party comes up with.
*bonus points to whoever gets the reference
Why not impose the carbon tax and rebate all or almost all of it. That would certainly encourage less carbon use and move the consumption to other categories.
By the way, Ben, this is a great piece. I hope you’ll take this in the spirit with which it’s intended and not find it condescending: I think you have a bright future.
...or, a shorter version is "all politics are local"
Off-topic, but I find it darkly funny that when I go to the SB main page, under "Most popular" I see the headline: "Why Are Young Liberals So Depressed?" And these days I can point at pretty much any random headline on current events and say "That's why!" (I'm not a *young* liberal anymore, but the point remains.)
I agree with all of this and I’m as contrarian as the day is long. I feel like the last liberal who is a fan of “just asking questions”, and playing devil’s advocate. Ideas are supposed to be critiqued, picked at and ultimately refined.
Kamala just had a lot of other baggage and a few weeks of the politics of joy couldn’t overcome it. Frankly it felt manufactured. We’re going to need fresh faces and a fresh start. The Obama’s of the world (as if they’re everywhere, right?) who still have the opportunity to define themselves and align with with more Americans.
I think there has never been a better time or place to be a human being (no matter what an internet meme tells you), and we should say so. No one wants to follow all these neurotic, depressed people. We need a “happy warrior” mentality, I think, even if it’s difficult to summon sometimes.
I want to believe this is true, the happy warrior ethos as being effective, but I just don't think it's correct for the political moment.
Trump and the Republicans messaging has been anything but. It's built on hate of their fellow citizens, and fear.
I'm not saying the Democrats should sink to their level at all. But justified anger at all the shitting on the constitution we're currently seeing is necessary. The civil rights movement was powered by compassion, but also by rage at the status-quo. It's an underrated source of momentum.
Randall, I like you and I agree with you a lot, so sorry for being all contrarian and argumentative, but I'm just gonna say this:
"We need a happy warrior, not a neurotic depressive" has been common wisdom in politics for decades. Ronald "Morning in America" Reagan trounced Jimmy "Malaise" Carter. Makes sense! Being happy and optimistic is better than being miserable and pessimistic! Americans are an optimistic, positive, can-do people!
But, like so much common wisdom, this failed utterly in 2024. Kamala ran on "Joy," she was upbeat and smiling, her memes were cheerful - all those coconuts and brat, Taylor Swift, America's sweetheart and biggest pop star, posting "Childless Cat Ladies for Harris" etc. And Trump? Grumpy, scowling, insulting, Xeeting about how America is going down the tubes and how he's our RETRIBUTION and if we don't elect him America will be destroyed in a godless woke Commie apocalypse. At the debate, Kamala was in control, openly laughing at Trump while he spluttered angrily about "They're EATING THE DOGZ!!!!"
How'd that work out for Kamala?
Ok I'm done. I'm going outside to touch some grass now.
Going outside always a great idea. I just planted two cherry trees!