Democrats Need to take the Left Seriously
As everyone performs a 2024 election autopsy for Democrats, there are going to be many reasons folks attribute to Democrats’ loss. Some of these will be based in fact, while others will serve as a distraction from what is really going on.
One such distraction that has been around forever is that voters for third party candidates are to blame for Trump’s victory in 2016 and 2024. This is especially a distraction in the 2024 election, even if Harris had won all the leftist third party candidates (West, Stein, De La Cruz) in Wisconsin, she still would have been over 10,000 votes behind Trump (at least at the time of publication). But of course the only effort Democrats really made to win over third-party voters was to be condescending and accuse them of essentially supporting Trump. There was next-to-zero effort to recognize that the critiques of Harris had any legitimacy.
Even amongst generally ‘progressive’ Democrats we saw this blame game. In the weeks before the election, Milwaukee Alderwoman Marina Dimitrijevic, generally considered to be one of the more left-leaning Alders, penned a whole op-ed entitled A Vote for Jill Stein is a Vote for Donald Trump. In the article she went through the normal routine of deriding voters for supporting Stein and saying Harris is the real environmentalist and progressive candidate etc… etc… etc… Nowhere did she acknowledge any of the arguable deficiencies of the Harris platform. Nowhere did she recognize the true difficulty that some folks would have in voting for Harris (Dimitrijevic does not even mention the genocide in Palestine). Nowhere did she even recognize legitimate issues with Stein as a candidate (such as some of her investments totally contradicting her values). All Dimitrijevic did in the article was talk down to and shame anyone for not uncritically supporting Harris. This is not the strategy to win over voters and exposes just how uninspiring the Democrat’s platform is.
Did Marina Dimitrijevic really think this would convince anyone? The article most likely just pushed any leftist reader further away from the Democratic party. What does it say about your party that voters have to be shamed into voting for you? Shouldn’t a politician's job be to inspire constituents to vote for them?
Now if you compare Dimitrijevic’s article to how someone like Bernie Sanders addressed third-party voters, there is a stark contrast. Sanders recognizes why folks are struggling to vote for Harris and discusses the direct actions he is taking to address the issue. Rather than trying to move voters to an unpopular platform that hurts us (and pretending that there is nothing wrong with said platform), he is talking about ways to move the platform not just the messaging, but the actual policies, to be friendlier to those voters. He does this all while acknowledging that being hesitant towards voting for Harris is completely fair. This is the blueprint for how to reconstruct the Democratic party, not assuming the role of a scolding parent like Dimitrijevic and so many other Democrats this campaign did. Democrats need to engage in good faith with our arguments and critiques of the party. And most importantly they need to take action to respond to our critiques. They cannot take our votes for granted and need to earn them.
While the analysis of this election is still ongoing, one could make the case that engaging with the left is one of the reasons Biden won in Wisconsin. Regardless of how his presidency turned out, in 2020 the Biden campaign made concrete efforts to bring in the left, even creating a joint task force together with Bernie’s campaign. Compare this to the Harris campaign who, other than the symbolic gesture of selecting Tim Walz, moved to the right on just about every issue imaginable. The endorsement Harris seemed to be most proud of was that of war-criminal Dick Cheney. As Milwaukee Beagle has previously covered, her campaign offered nothing to voters and we could tell.
Angela Lang, Executive Director of the Milwaukee-based Black Leaders Organizing for Community summed up this failed strategy of pivoting to the right on the Recomboluation Podcast.
“I think that Democrats have made a hard pivot to the right where it is no longer easy to kind of paint that difference [from Republicans]…It seems like they're kind of standing for the same things these days…And I think it's specifically in terms of immigration, we're not having compassionate conversations…I think that's a lane that Democrats can step in if we're supposed to be the party of values and showing compassion for everyone and for our fellow neighbor. I would say the same about crime and how Democrats talk about crime. They get backed into a corner and instead of taking the decent side of things, they double-down and then box themselves into a corner on a kind of Republican light talking points. That's not sustainable for a win, and it's also not how you bring people into a party that's supposed to be a big tent”
If Democrats ever hope to win back Wisconsin, they need to start taking critiques from the left seriously. Simply accusing us of supporting Trump and other fascists like Dimitrijevic did, not only pushes us further away, but it also absolves Democrats from having to actually engage with any of these critiques and make change. While electoralism alone will not save us, it does give us access to power. This is going to be even more crucial in Wisconsin as Governor Ever’s will be up for reelection soon and there still is a chance for Democrats to eventually retake the Assembly and Senate. The strategy of constantly compromising with fascist Republicans that Evers and Wisconsin Democrats have taken has clearly not worked. Being fascist-light is still being a fascist. When given the choice between the two, as we just saw with this election, people will choose full on fascism. Instead, Democrats need to present a bold new vision to inspire us to vote for them. Then they need to deliver on their promises.
So we must continue to criticize and push Democrats. And we must be ready to act when they finally start to listen. And if they do not listen and follow through, we push them out of office and replace them with those who will.
