In the waning hours of Tuesday, Nov. 5, Chris Wallace of CNN said what I think is the most prescient line of the 2024 election cycle. Watching as the nation’s key swing states began to tilt, lean and finally collapse right, Wallace remarked that this Tuesday, the day when Donald Trump won not just more than 300 electoral votes but the national popular vote, “felt more like 2016 than 2020.”
Indeed, in the results of the 2024 50-state pileup, I am reminded of the 2016 cycle. Kamala Harris/Tim Walz is a déjà vu campaign. Once again, Democrats chased the ephemeral votes of white suburban moderates. Once again, they felt entitled to the votes of the Black and Latino electorate and attacked voters who spoke out about the follies of this entitlement. Once again, they refused to put forward plans and policies that would energize their base. And now, facing an embarrassing defeat, Democrats are once again lashing out: blaming the voters who have made it abundantly clear what they want. Instead, they should be blaming themselves for not offering it.
Let me be clear: Democrats have nobody but themselves to blame. Their political strategy over the last decade is clearly a losing one. In 2016, Chuck Schumer made the infamous statement that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin,” per the National Review. Eight years later, this strategy has proven to be an utter failure. Democrats have indeed made inroads with these types of voters: they have improved three percent with voters with a Bachelor’s degree, and 20 percent with voters making more than $100,000, according to NBC. But in the process, Democrats have abandoned working-class voters. Among people making less than $50,000, Republicans improved 14 percent in the past four years, per the Financial Times. Among voters without a college degree, they improved nine percent, per NBC.
What is happening? In less than 10 years, the party of working people has abandoned working people. With the complete absence of support from the party that once represented them, they have turned to a fascist message of decline and rebirth. Let us not mince words: Trump will do nothing to help the working people of America. But in the absence of a progressive alternative, they will turn to the party that acknowledges their existence and pretends to help them, even if that help never comes.
It is not enough to be the party that opposes Trump. If Democrats ever want to win another election, they will have to win back the working class. I am not talking only about the ‘‘white working class,” those inscrutable blue-collar folks in the swing states who have been alternately celebrated and vilified by the political establishment. I am talking about the actual working class—a collection of people of varying racial identities who have been abandoned by the Democratic Party and are now increasingly turning to Trump, according to Politico. These people, particularly working-class Black and Latino Americans, do not owe Democrats their vote. It is racist to assume they do. The Democrats owe them a slate of policies that will improve their lives and make them want to turn out for Democratic politicians. Anything else is an entitlement, plain and simple.
The road ahead is long and uncertain for Democrats. First and foremost, they must purge their party of the moderate, self-defeating elements—the elements that forced Hillary Clinton onto the ballot in 2016, forced Biden on the ballot in 2020 and refused the possibility of an open primary in 2024. They must, for the first time since 2008, commit to policies that their base is actually excited by. Furthermore, they must recognize the power that a populist, class-focused leader can bring to the party, a leader like Barack Obama or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. To do this, they will have to again purge themselves of the elements of their party that have facilitated their shift right: the moneyed interests and technocratic leeches that have attached themselves to the soft underbelly of the Democratic fundraising base. These billionaire interests are massive bases of money, power, support and influence—and Democrats will have to reject them, despite the vast personal wealth they bring to the entrenched elite of the Democratic National Committee, to build a true party of the working people. These elite interests—the supposed “woke” millionaires and billionaires who set up ineffective Democratic super PACs—are not donating out of the goodness of their hearts: They are buying influence, plain and simple. The sooner we reject them, the sooner working people get their party back.
This is not a time to mourn. We do not get anything done, politically, by mourning. This is a time to be angry—angry at the situation that Democrats put us in. Now is the time to bend the Democratic Party to our whim and force out the elements which have put us in this hole. Get mad! It is time to take our party back!