The Time-Honored Tradition of Blaming the Left for Democratic Defeats
It’s entirely possible that Harris still wouldn’t have won if she’d listened more to progressive interest groups’ messaging advice; she might even have done worse. That’s partly because the Democratic Party’s problem isn’t messaging so much as the fact that its highest-profile leaders (including Harris) don’t seem to believe anything they say—centrist, progressive, or otherwise.
In the lead-up to this election, Harris and other leading Democrats decried Trump and MAGA Republicans as an existential threat to American democracy; now, newly elected House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has pledged to find “common ground” with them. That waffling and incoherence is less of a comms issue than a structural one. The “Democratic Party” isn’t a distinct entity to be won but a somewhat random collection of politicians, staffers, and consultants aligned behind the loose goal of their own gainful employment, either via winning elections or telling people how to do so. Even if Democrats did have more institutional integrity, they would still find it challenging to simultaneously be a party of big business and organized labor, as they’ve long aspired to be. They would still struggle to turn out Arab voters in key swing states while sending Israel weapons to bomb their families in the Middle East. More often than not, these constituencies’ interests are fundamentally opposed to one another; no amount of smart messaging, or berating voters, can fully solve that.
On some level, then, Jentleson is right to point to coalition management as a problem for the Democrats. But the solution isn’t to box out left-leaning constituency groups and leave politics up to supposedly more sober-minded pollsters and consultants, who have an obvious material interest in this argument. Debates over Democratic Party messaging obscure a thornier, more substantive one over who it is that party ought to represent. Campaigning on economic populism to appeal to the voters feeling the pain of high rents and insurance rates would piss off big donors in the finance and real estate sectors; actually enacting that agenda would require electoral majorities big enough to withstand the wrath of the country’s most powerful industries, which might be difficult to attain without those big donors.