Instead of shifting right, Democrats should champion policies that appeal to working-class voters.
Vice President Harris recently lost the 2024 election, and the blame game among Democrats has already begun. Moderates are already trying to pin the blame on the more progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Among other claims, they argue that Harris could have won had she tacked harder to the center and picked Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate.
Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) claims, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” In his view, Harris failed to lay out a bold plan to address the economic woes of working-class Americans, resulting in lost votes. And he’s right.
Rising Inequality, Rising Populism
To understand the Democratic Party’s problems with the working class, we must first examine the conditions that led to Trump’s rise. Since at least the 1970s, the U.S. has decreased the social safety net while lowering taxes on the wealthy and big corporations. Unions and welfare benefits, once crucial to American workers, have been hollowed out. Anti-union legislation has decreased the unionization rate from 28% in 1970 to 10% today, and Bill Clinton’s welfare reform bill led to a 78% decrease in cash assistance to needy families.
Meanwhile, the top income tax rate has decreased from 72% in 1970 to 37% today, with a corresponding decrease in the corporate tax rate. The end result is predictable. The share of income going to the top 10% increased from 34% in 1970 to 46% today. Because more and more income is going to the affluent, the 3 million richest Americans now have more wealth than the poorest 291 million. As wealth becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the working-class is struggling to get by. For starters, 61% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck, and annually, 27% of Americans report not getting medical treatment because they couldn’t afford it.
When people can’t afford basic necessities like medical bills, they become more distrustful of the economic and political elite. As a Pew Research poll demonstrated, voters think the government is more responsive to the demands of lobbyists and special interest groups than ordinary people. And when voters are discontent, they look for someone to blame.
Trump gains support by identifying “the enemy within,” whether it be immigrants, leftists, or other groups, and scapegoating them for the country’s economic and social woes. For example, Trump has claimed that immigrants are largely rapists and murderers and that they are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Trump promises to restore America to its past glory (i.e., “make America great again”) by removing or alienating the cancerous sects of society, such as when he called for the mass deportation of immigrants or when he called for the national guard to be deployed against leftists. Trump’s rhetoric comes right out of the right populist playbook.
Ways to Fight Right Populism
The Democratic Party has two main ways to respond to right populism. The first is the neoliberalism of figures like Bill Clinton and other moderate Democrats. The neoliberals, armed with big donor cash, Ivy League consultants, and overrepresentation in establishment news sources like MSNBC and CNN, refuse to adopt populist rhetoric. Instead, neoliberals promise incremental improvements for Americans, like tax credits for new businesses or a reduction in prescription drug prices.
Faced with the scapegoating of marginalized groups for the country’s economic woes, neoliberals chose to move right on issues like immigration and mass incarceration. For instance, neoliberals have adopted the Republican framing that immigration poses a public safety problem and recently attempted to pass an immigration bill that would have substantially weakened the right to asylum.
Vice President Harris firmly falls into the neoliberal camp. When asked what she would do differently than the Biden Administration, she responded, “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” before reconsidering and saying she would have a Republican in her cabinet. That’s not to say that Harris’ policies wouldn’t help the working-class. Some, like expanding the child tax credit, certainly would. But in an age of populism, her strategy was wholly unsuccessful.
The second way Democrats can respond to right populism is by embracing left populism. Instead of scapegoating marginalized groups for the country’s woes like right populists, left populists condemn the economic and political elite. Left populists blame corporate price gouging and record corporate profits for increased inflation and blame the lack of a social safety net on elite politicians and their lobbyist buddies. Figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez refuse to kowtow to populist right narratives on immigration and mass incarceration and instead attempt to shift anger to the elites who are actually responsible for economic strife.
Research on Populist Rhetoric
The common response to left populism is that it only appeals to a narrow subset of Democratic progressives. However, in an era in which 70% of Americans think the economy “unfairly favors the powerful,” left populism has wide-ranging appeal.
The Center for Working-Class Politics conducted a poll of 1,000 Pennsylvania voters. The voters listened to different sound bites and were told to rank them on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is strongly oppose and 7 is strongly support. The soundbites included attacking Trump for the threat he poses to democracy, pledging to support abortion rights, creating an opportunity economy by supporting small businesses and offering tax cuts for the middle class, and a “strong populist message includ[ing] a pledge to stand up to ‘billionaire crooks and the politicians in Washington who serve them.’” Here are the overall results:
Strong populism was the most popular soundbite overall. Moreover, its popularity was highest among households making less than $50k and households making between $50k and $100k.
Takeaways
I don’t pretend that Harris’ failure to adopt populism was the only reason why she lost. Sexism and racism certainly harmed her campaign, as did President Biden’s decision to run for reelection. But Harris’ most important missteps were her failure to differentiate herself from Biden’s neoliberalism, her embrace of incremental policies, and her inability to speak to working-class Americans.
The rise of right populism is not unique to the U.S.; it is also happening in Italy, the UK, Germany, and France. The rise of right populism in the Global North suggests that Harris’ loss cannot be fully explained by factors unique to the 2024 election, such as Biden’s decision to seek reelection. Instead, an overarching force is at play, and that force is populist resentment of the status quo. Thankfully, Democrats can use left-populist rhetoric to win back working-class voters. Time will tell if the Democrats learn their lesson or succumb to the neoliberal punditry of millionaire elites on MSNBC.
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