Progressive Pragmatism is the Democrats’ Only Future

Weeks out from a devastating election loss with no clear path forward, Democrats are in the wilderness – and not just figuratively. Last month, instead of working to install procedural guardrails or issue last minute executive orders, the White House saw fit to tout the fact President Joe Biden is the first sitting commander in chief to wander about the Amazon Rainforest.

The party is grappling with a true and proper identity crisis – and not the sort that tends to be ameliorated by a dye job or a dash of globe-trekking à la Eat Pray Love. Postmortem explanations as to why Donald Trump managed to re-secure the Oval Office are myriad. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders believes Democrats have abandoned the working class. Some feel Vice President Harris’s refusal to break with Biden more explicitly on the war in Gaza kept young progressives planted on the couch. For The New York Times, Maureen Dowd argues in a piece that pirouettes on the cusp of absurdity that identity politics is solely to blame (at one point, Dowd evokes Rahm Emmanuel to assert, “when the woke police come... you don’t even get your Miranda rights read to you.”) Political observers a tad more tethered to reality posit that, in truth, it may have just been the price of eggs.

Global inflationary forces have seen virtually every incumbent leader, party, or coalition that’s faced an election this year experience a loss in vote-share. Indeed, some 70% of countries have rejected their chief executive. Not to get into the weeds, the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party – which has governed almost continuously since 1955 – saw itself booted from parliamentary leadership.

There may be some who take comfort in the notion that Harris was simply doomed from the get-go. But the fact she was pitted against a man who Democratic surrogates have been calling a fascist threat to democracy for several months if not an outright decade gives many others pause.

All things considered, there’s an argument to be made that the Vice President ran a strong race. Taking the reporting of the Pod Save America hosts at face value, Biden’s internal polling indicated he was poised to deliver Trump a 400 electoral vote victory that would have manifested as a generational down-ballot slaughter for Democrats with no true precedent in modern American politics outside of 1980. Harris saved the party and the country from that catastrophe with only 107 days of runway, and for that she’s owed her flowers and perhaps the California Governor’s mansion.

However, she still lost. Democrats are right to ask why.

On his HBO show in mid-November, John Oliver delivered a powerful monologue excoriating Democrats’ 2024 strategy: “ If what you wanted was a centrist campaign that was quiet on trans issues, tough on the border, distances itself from Palestinians, talks a lot about law and order, and reaches out to moderate Republicans, congratulations! That was exactly the candidate we just had, and she lost.” Over the years, Oliver has presented the public with some extremely sharp political analysis. This should not be considered an example of such.

Effectively every single swing district or swing state Democrat who managed to not only outperform Harris but win their race pursued nigh-exactly the strategy Oliver outlines above. On the Senate side alone, consider Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, Ruben Gallego in Arizona, and Jacky Rosen in Nevada.

The tactics of these survivors – on both the House and Senate side – should prove instructive to Democrats. In New York’s 18th congressional district, Pat Ryan cozied up to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at rallies in the Hudson Valley. He also aggressively highlighted his military service in campaign ads. In Washington’s 3rd district, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez touted the fact she co-sponsored a bill to protect medication abortion. She also just so happened to find herself talking about her past life as a car mechanic in most of her TV spots. The aforementioned Gallego never apologized for his tenure in the House Progressive Caucus but aggressively pursued male voters with soccer and boxing match watch parties. Notably, they all spoke proudly in defense of LGBTQ Americans while also never tut-tutting constituents who lacked the language to voice their concerns about certain issues in a politically correct fashion.

To the extent there’s connective tissue between these candidates, it seems they all championed progressive policies while wrapping themselves in conservative cultural coding – and from time to time they weren’t scared to buck the party line or criticize their standard bearer. They coded as authentic, populist-yet-traditional tough-talkers.

Insofar as Harris’s campaign wasn’t merely a casualty of inflation, the case studies above should serve as the foundation of any party autopsy.

Democrats’ overperformance in the 2022 midterms – fueled in no small part by voters’ outrage over the Dobbs decisions – fostered a false consensus among the party elite that the future was female. That is to say, Republican overreach in stripping American women of a constitutional right to control their own bodies would perhaps allow liberals to forever ride a wave of justified outrage into power. Clearly, that was not the case; otherwise pundits commenting on Matt Gaetz’s Attorney General nomination would not be googling the term “ephebophile.”

No, clearly, the future is flannel. The Democratic Party has no real reason to find itself in the midst of an identity crisis. However, it does need a recalibration. It needs to start speaking the language of the working class voters who have historically granted it power. Stop using terms that only appeal to the Oberlin College Humanities Department. Resist the fear of interest groups like AIPAC, the ACLU, and the Sunrise Movement. Trans rights and trans people should not be abandoned, but the party should recognize it's a mistake to champion gender-affirming surgeries for migrants in federal prison. And, finally, for f**** sake start cursing on the campaign trail. Authenticity – or at least the perception of authenticity – is the coin of the realm; how else can one explain the phenomenon of split ticket Trump / Ocasio-Cortez voters?

The utter havoc this second Trump term will wreck is no small thing. But the Democratic brand is not broken. It needs only tweaks.