Can Democrats Break Out of Their Echo Chamber?

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, November 06.2024

 

Ten years ago, another rogue red wave crashed over the country, taking nine Democratic senators and 54 House Democrats with it. As he sifted through the wreckage, President Barack Obama struggled over how to talk to his fellow Democrats about their shocking misfortune, why the polls failed to foresee their peril, and what they should do about it.

 

He could have been honest about the extent to which Democrats spent 2014 talking only to themselves about the supposed scourge of income inequality, the illusory gender-pay gap, or the persistent and animating unpopularity of Obamacare. He might have debuted a humbler tone and refocused his party on voters’ chief priority at the time, “the economy,” which suffered from frustratingly sluggish job growth. He should have taken it on the chin so his party could learn and grow from the experience. But he did not.

 

“To everyone that voted, I want you to know that I heard you,” Obama began promisingly enough. But the contrition was a mirage. “To two-thirds of voters that chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too,” he continued. The implication that the GOP’s surprising victories was a fluke consequence of anomalously low Democratic turnout was deliberate. “I’m the guy who is elected by everybody and not just from a particular state or a particular district,” the president condescendingly reminded his victorious opponents. He refused to dwell on what one reporter characterized as “devastating losses.” Voters “want me to push hard to close some of these divisions, break through some of the gridlock, and just get stuff done,” he insisted.

 

Obama’s Democrats took their cues. They learned nothing and changed nothing. The party forged ahead with Obama’s agenda in defiance of the voters who’d tried in vain to convince it that its priorities were not their own. The message was not received and, two years later, voters delivered Donald Trump into the White House along with a GOP-led House and Senate.

 

Democrats are at a similar crossroads today, but their position is far weaker than it was even in the wake of the 2014 midterms. The GOP will not have the prohibitive House majority it enjoyed in 2015 — it may not have a House majority at all. But the 119th Congress will seat at least 52 GOP senators or as many as 55 depending on how the too-close-to-call races in Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania shake out. And if all that is too ambiguous for Democrats, Trump’s reelection to a non-consecutive second term despite voters’ many reservations about him and his comportment should represent an unmistakable repudiation.

 

There’s no Barack Obama to talk the party off a ledge this time. Democrats are leaderless. The party’s friendly abettors in media will be tempted to salve Democratic wounds, but those self-soothing narratives contributed in their own way to the party’s exile to the political wilderness. The progressive-activist class that led the party down so many blind alleys over the last four years is discredited in all but the minds of its own members.

 

There is no escape from the obvious now. The reserve army of women for whom the only issue that was supposed to matter was abortion does not exist. Degree-holders, already too small a group to make up the backbone of any nationally competitive coalition, did not shift left in a seismic way. Minorities defected to the GOP in droves. Democratic partisans resented Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, Ritchie Torres, and Tulsi Gabbard for reminding them of their own insularity, but those critics were right.

 

And because they were right in the aggregate, there will be a temptation to dismiss the particulars. Democrats would surely like to convince themselves that their misfortunes are overdetermined. Was it the economy that did them in? Joe Biden’s senescence and unpopularity? The border crisis? “Wokeness”? The answer is “yes,” but it’s hardly prescriptive. It’s merely a good place to start. Putting every assumption on the table for debate would impose some humility on a party that struggles to speak to voters like fellow human beings.

 

Democrats should dispense with their belief that they can carve up the electorate into balkanized, mutually antagonistic cantons. They will be inclined to reevaluate only how they appeal to white working-class voters, female voters, black male voters, and Hispanic voters when they should just be talking to voters. The party finds itself in a position akin to where the GOP ended up in November 2012, after which Republicans committed to a grueling examination of how they reach out to Latino voters — a painful process that produced a lot of wrong answers. Trump threaded the needle by dispensing with the notion that there was such a thing as “Hispanic issues.” The GOP has never been in a stronger position with minority voters, not because it focused its attention on the subjects that mattered to them but because it talked about the issues that mattered to everyone.

 

John Podhoretz had it right when he observed last night that, whatever Trump’s many personal shortcomings may be, “he was the only person who leveled with the American people about the mess we are in.” It was too easy for Democrats to escape into the media’s hall of mirrors, in which dissatisfaction with the status quo was a byproduct of rampant “disinformation” and the party’s critics could be dismissed as cranks and bigots. But even that last citadel has fallen. There are no more Obamas left to feign self-assuredness and persuade Democrats that they’re secretly popular.

 

Republicans are not immune from hubris. The party is likely to overread its mandate. New presidents seem always to enter office convinced that they have but two years to enact an agenda before a backlash robs them of the congressional majorities they need to pass it, rarely stopping to consider that the manic passion that conclusion produces is what begets the backlash in the first place. But voters will forgive the governing party’s flights of fancy so long as their representatives seem to share their foremost priorities and can speak to them on a level that conveys sincerity.

 

Democrats lost that sort of fluency. Instead, they thought they could outwit the electorate. Voters proved them wrong. Kamala Harris and her party have no one to blame but themselves for their misfortune. The only open questions are whether they’re capable of that kind of introspection, and whether the cloistered left-wing lotus-eaters with whom they’ve surrounded themselves will let them get away with it if they are.