The Democratic Party Deserves to be Punished
“Can Democrats overcome their college-campus branding and reclaim the working class?” Michael Schaffer asked in Politico in November 2023. The answer is a resounding No. Donald Trump won an overwhelming victory on November 5, the first Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote in twenty years.
As the mea culpas come in to explain Donald Trump’s triumph and the success of the Republican Party, attention has focused on the failures of Kamala Harris. Among them: Americans are not prepared to elect a female president. She didn’t have enough time for citizens get to know her. Biden’s unpopularity was too much for her to overcome.
But there is a deeper argument about the reasons for Trump’s and the Republican Party’s triumph. Quite simply, it is that the Democratic Party has lost its historic base. The Democratic Party was traditionally the party of workers and minorities, the true middle class. While many attribute Trump’s surprising results with Latinos, younger voters and Blacks to a general discontent with the incumbent Biden, they miss the element of class.
The class issue resonated on November 5 beyond the issue of Harris’s attachment to the unpopular President Biden. One of the ironies of the last election is that a self-declared billionaire who inherited considerable wealth from his father was able to gain support from the traditional Democratic Party’s base. Middle and lower-class workers found themselves more comfortable with the Republican Party, the party traditionally favored by the upper-class than with Democrats.
How did the Democratic Party lose its base? How did Trump and the Republican Party do so well with workers and the middle and lower classes?
Three simple and immediate answers: First education. The Democratic Party’s presidential candidates since 1988 all went to exclusive private universities except Joe Biden. Biden tried to make the point that he was the first recent Democratic Party presidential candidate who went to a state school. But Scranton Joe, a graduate of the University of Delaware, never really caught on. The Dems’ image of highly educated professionals was never overcome.
Yes the Republican Party had candidates who also went to prestigious universities. But George W. Bush, for example, was known for chopping wood more than for having attended Yale and hanging out with Hollywood celebrities. The importance of his ranch was more indicative of a party’s image than the Clintons hanging out with the jet set and the Obamas summering in Martha’s Vineyard in their $11.75 million dollar home cushioned by a $64 million dollar Netflix contract.
Second, what do you do to reach the average American? How to project a popular image? Although continuing to sell herself as the savior of the middle class, Kamala Harris went on Saturday Night live (SNL) during the last campaign week to try to humanize her image. But what is the SNL audience? It’s predominantly Democratic and politically sophisticated. Harris had super star actress and singer Jennifer Lopez to try to appeal to Latino voters and Michelle Obama – Princeton class of 1985 – speaking on her behalf as well as planetary star Taylor Swift.
Where did Donald Trump hang out? He mixed with the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) crowd; he actually stepped in the ring once, and has a long-standing relationship with the WWE founding McMahon family. Instead of associating with megastars, Trump attended the popular college football game between Alabama and Georgia. To solidify his image as a man of the people, the Wharton graduate had wrestling legend Hulk Hogan rip off his shirt at the Republican Convention as well as a New York rally,
The word class is not often used in the United States. It goes against notions of social mobility, the American Dream from rags to riches. But the inversion of the working class going Republican and following Donald Trump while the traditional Democratic base is turned off by its leaders is a radical shift in party alignments.
Democrats’ attempts to overcome an elitist image have failed. The absurdity of the 1988 photo of Michael Dukakis riding in a tank to try to show his tough position on defense never left the Democratic Party. Oxford educated Bill Clinton unsuccessfully tried to be Bubba Bill by having an office on 125th street in Harlem and playing the jazz saxophone. Obama’s failure to leave Harvard Law School and re-establish himself as a man of the people on Chicago’s South Side is another example of failed rebranding. Kamala Harris’s parents were both intellectuals. The Democrats’ true labor left of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren has been marginalized.
The third element deals with human rights. While Democrats championed civil and political rights such as transgender and LGBTQ+ rights, Republicans were talking about inflation, jobs, and economic and social rights. When Joe Biden said in his speech conceding Trump’s victory that the measures he enacted would help people economically in the next decade – “The vast majority of it will not be felt over the next 10 years…It’s just only now, just really kicking in” – the idea of policies coming to fruition in 10 years certainly didn’t help Harris in 2024.
Schaffer’s 2023 article references a book Where Have All the Democrats Gone? by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. One year before the 2024 Democratic Party’s humiliation, Schaffer says of the authors’ theory: “the 21st century [Democratic] party under-delivered on populist economics for working-class voters. But at the same time, it over-indexed for the cultural style that has jumped from campuses into the sorts of professions where expensively degreed folks predominate…The result is a party increasingly identified with the professional class — and increasingly shunned by the blue-collar voters it used to represent.”
Should the Democratic Party be punished? I first heard the argument about punishing the Democratic Party in 1968 when people who were opposed to the Vietnam War refused to vote for Lyndon Johnson. “Yes we know all he has done for the Great Society, and yes we know how awful Richard Nixon is,” the rational went, “but we cannot bring ourselves to vote for Hubert Humphrey.” That was the reasoning of the abstainers or those who wrote in Pigasus, the pig, on their ballots. “After all,” they said, “Humphrey was Vice-President while the United States waged that ungodly war in Vietnam; the entire Party should be punished for that.”
Donald Trump and the Republican Party dominated November 5. The Democrats lost more than an election; the popular image of Democrats has been lost. For that, the Democratic Party deserves to be punished.
The post The Democratic Party Deserves to be Punished appeared first on CounterPunch.org.