The Agony of the Semi-Switcheroo

Muppet News Flash: Kamala Harris, who doesn’t win competitive elections, didn’t win a competitive election. 

I don’t make my living advising political campaigns or parties, but the Democrats probably should have taken my advice—going all the way back to 2023!—to dump Kamala Harris after dumping Joe Biden and run a fresh slate. I don’t hate to say, “I told you so.” The full switcheroo might have got the job done—the semi-switcheroo did not. Harris shouldn’t have been campaigning for president of the United States—she should be settling in as president of the University of California, having cleared the way for somebody who wasn’t going to end up having to concede to the unholy love child of Augusto Pinochet and Liberace. 

Democrats are, naturally, getting ready to make things a lot worse for themselves. 

One of the problems with being a grievance party for minority interests is that minorities are a minority. If your vision of politics is that what is most important about us is our demographic characteristics—race, sex, education level, etc.—and you understand political life as, essentially, a zero-sum competition between rival groups, then you should probably think at least a little bit about the math, just in case people start to take you seriously. There are more non-Hispanic whites in the United States than every other group put together—about 60 percent of the population. There are a lot more Americans without a college degree than Americans who have one. And, while women make up a small majority of voters, there aren’t that many young, white, liberal, college-educated, unmarried suburban female professionals out there. Progressives should learn to count: Fewer than 1 in 3 American women would identify herself as a “feminist” when asked by National Geographic/Ipsos pollsters. The women who believe that abortion should be legal under any circumstance are a minority among women. Doubling down on minority positions is how you become a minority party—and stay one. 

This is Ruy Teixeira’s revenge. 

Teixeira was the co-author (with John Judis) of a very famous book called The Emerging Democratic Majority. The thesis of the book was that as the U.S. electorate became younger, less white, and more immigrant-heavy, Democrats would be able to assemble a durable electoral majority—provided they held on to the working-class voters who had been the keystone of the New Deal coalition. 

(Teixeira, who has won very little love for himself telling Democrats things they do not want to hear, now hangs his hat at the American Enterprise Institute, which is not famously full of Democrats but is absolutely packed to the rafters with people who know how to count.)

Democrats forgot to do the second part of the Teixeira two-step and keep those working-class voters—which is understandable: Given the outsized role college-educated, higher-income professionals play in their party, Democrats naturally have been tempted to overinvest in things like crusading for transgender interests (and denouncing as a bigot anyone who has reservations about what that does to women’s sports) or preaching their now fully religious approach to climate change (and denouncing as a genocidal nihilist anybody who has reservations about what that does to utility bills) or insisting on a maximalist view of abortion while declaring war on … Spanish grammar. 

Maybe Democrats will come to their senses after the sting of losing the presidency—twice—to a porn-dabbling authoritarian game-show host who has never run for any other office and who has 11 times as many felony convictions on his résumé as Snoop Dogg. At the moment, they seem ready to take a turn for the worse: Over at Salon, Amanda Marcotte has published a to-do list for women distressed by the outcome of the election: “Divorce your Republican husband,” “Never date a Trump voter,” “Put off getting married—or avoid it altogether,” “Get an IUD—or sterilized,” etc. (Marcotte’s recommendations are focused almost exclusively on sex, marriage, and children—apparently, she believes what the average incel does about what it is that women actually have to offer the world. Strange bedfellows, indeed.) Over at Slate, Justin Peters makes an impassioned case against calming down, listening to those with whom you disagree, and getting on with it like an adult: “Stay mad,” reads the headline, “This is absolutely no time for magnanimity.”

Do let me know how that’s working out for you. 

Democrats could go to, say, anti-abortion voters and say: “We don’t agree with you about abortion, but we take your reservations seriously, and, in some cases, we think we could find some common ground.” Or they could say, “Here’s Amanda Marcotte to explain to you why you should get sterilized and adopt a cat and think about ‘quiet quitting from the heteropatriarchy.’” 

(I’m not making up the part about cats, and I am not inventive enough to have dreamt up a phrase such as “quiet quitting from the heteropatriarchy.”) 

Democrats don’t typically take my advice, but I’ll offer a little more: If you want to be a centrist-progressive party in the United States, just go read The Economist and do that. Maybe Monocle if you’re feeling froggy. A liberal market economy with free trade and sensible regulation, a gentle thumb on the scale in favor of labor unions, a more European level of taxation and social spending, generous education and  infrastructure spending, health care subsidies, an assertive climate policy, an active interest in minority rights and women’s interests, a generally liberal attitude toward contraception and abortion, etc.: That’s not my agenda, exactly. But whose agenda is “Latinx” and pronoun wars and whatever in hell it might be that Kamala Harris actually believes, if anything? We have better data on that today than we did on Monday.

The Democrats didn’t lose to Trump. They lost to arithmetic.