Democrats: Create Working Class Power or Lose
A fundamental assumption which forms the bedrock of our two-party political system may have been broken in this last election. The assumption is that citizens have no choice but to support a terrible candidate because it prevents an even worse candidate from winning. We’re all familiar with the “lesser of two-evils” argument, most of us have never known an election where this was not our assumed choice (mine was Bush V. Gore). In a way, both parties directly benefit from the perception (real or fake) that the “other” party is increasingly insane. Democrats in particular have relied on this assumption for all three of the elections in which Trump was a candidate. Democrats either foolishly disregarded or actively refuted the substantial number of indicators that this assumption was not going to hold forever.
In their defense, I’m sure the Democratic pollsters had indicated that voters were bluffing. Indeed, voters are angry, but when push-comes-to-shove, they simply have to be made to be too scared of a second Trump term to buck the unofficial party mantra: “Vote Blue No Matter Who”. Voters called their bluff though, and in so doing, they may have wrestled control of the party away from the pollsters and the donor class for the first time in our lives. The 2024 election was less about Harris Vs. Trump, and more a game of chicken between the Democrats and voters over the effectiveness of the “lesser of two evils” assumption.
One of the implications of using fear this way, as Milwaukee Democrat Marina Dimitrijevic openly did in her op-ed endorsing Harris, is that people will recognize it as an attempt to coerce them rather than listen to them. Voters do not want politicians to tell them what they should be concerned about, they want politicians that will accept being told what to do in exchange for voter support. After all, why would people trust anyone that shames them for having been foolish enough to consider an alternative to either the do-nothing Democrats or the authoritarian Republicans? Disparaging voters for the choices they consider making is condescending because it ignores the material conditions and personal analysis that may have given rise to those considerations. Democrats lost because they went all-in on the lesser-of-two-evils fear assumption, and voters made them pay for it.
A word of warning to the Democratic party: create working-class power, and run campaigns that do not rely on fear, but on a vision of the future that inspires hope, directs action, and creates unity. Citizens should not be expected to vote obediently for a party whose entire campaign boiled down to: “Vote for us and things will probably get only slightly worse.” Democrats would do well to consider the effectiveness, let alone the morality, of using fear as a motivator after this election, since they failed to do so before it.
