The rejection of the Biden-Harris team in the 2024 election is so easy to explain that it makes every thumb-sucking think piece, every statistical-regression analysis, and all efforts at national psychoanalysis that seek to pathologize the United States for returning Donald Trump to the White House seem ridiculous. Simply put, Kamala Harris lost an election in which her sole qualification was being the second-highest-ranking person on the national political org chart when the voters didn’t like the org.
The Biden-Harris four-year employment contract came up for renewal on November 5. The board was by no means unanimous. Consider the Electoral College the analogue to the board of directors with its 538 members; she garnered 226 in support, or around 42 percent. Still, the result was unambiguous. The board said, in no uncertain terms, “We’ve decided to go forward another way.” And Bob-Iger-at-Disney-like or Steve-Jobs-at-Apple-like, they brought the previous guy out of retirement to take over.
The voting public thought the Biden administration had done a bad job, and that is pretty much the all of it. It’s no surprise; this has been the general opinion in the United States for two years. The bedrock fact, which persisted from 2023 through 2024, is that between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. That feeling was validated on the Friday before Election Day with the release of the October jobs report. It was awful. A mere 28,000 jobs had been created in an economy that employs 162 million people.
Most telling, on Election Day itself, Joe Biden’s approval rating stood at 40 percent. In every previous election involving an incumbent president in the past half-century, his Election Day approval rating ended up matching his percentage of the vote. George W. Bush edged up over 50 by the weekend before the 2004 election and got 51 percent. Barack Obama rose from the low 40s in the summer of 2012 to 51 the weekend before…and got 51. The first George Bush was around 38 in October 1992, and that was his number when he lost; Jimmy Carter was in the 30s in October 1980 and got 40.
Now, it is true that Kamala Harris was running and not Biden, and perhaps she could have done more to highlight that fact to escape the sinkhole of the nation’s disapproval of the man who chose her as his running mate and chose to anoint her as his successor. She did the opposite. The most significant statement she made during the 107 days of her campaign was that she couldn’t think of a single thing she would have done differently from Biden. In the end, her vote total did come in significantly higher than Biden’s 40 percent, but I suspect one can add those points to her total because she is not senile. Certainly, she offered no particular reason she should have been president other than that she is a Democrat and she is not Donald Trump.
That wasn’t nothing, and Trump supporters should take account of it. Not being Trump was enough to garner her something like 75 million votes, and Republicans would be wise to keep in mind that the incoming re-president remains unpopular and that neither he nor his party won anything close to a landslide. The American people threw the bums out, that much is certain. But they did not, as they did in 1980, realign American politics for generations.
However, the contours of a possible future realignment are very much present in the exit polls. They show shifts that are demographic (especially with the Latino vote), but not exclusively so. We can also see them in the way the Republican vote cut into overwhelmingly Democratic states like California (from a 29 percent deficit against Trump in 2020 to 19 percent in 2024), New York (from 22 down to 11 down), and New Jersey (losing by a mere 5 percent compared with 16 percent in 2020). But the shifts are only outlines in chalk as yet.
So, at minimum, as Democrats contemplate where their party needs to go from here, they ought at least to have a negative road map. They should not promise to do what the Biden administration did. They should not offer to fund the college educations of the well-to-do by providing debt relief that would be paid for by those who don’t go to college. They should not say that they will implement new programs by borrowing unprecedented sums of money at a time when payments on the national debt are becoming the largest item in the federal budget. They should not open the border once Donald Trump closes it, and they should not release millions of illegal immigrants into the United States.
They should not propose or effect wildly risky moves on the international stage without gaming out the negative consequences, as they did in Afghanistan in 2021. They should not be describing any future policy as a “New Deal,” either Green or otherwise. They should not talk about phasing out successful elements of the private sector that power our industrial economy, from gas-powered automobiles to natural-gas extraction. They should not say that the very redefinition of what it means to be human—in openly advocating the scientifically and morally psychotic idea that gender is “assigned at birth” rather than created when the zygote is—is the fundamental civil right of our time.
But—as Joe Biden would say—here’s the deal: Democrats are, in fact, likely to continue to support all these policies, and argue for them, and more still to come. Because that is who they are.
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The earnest postmortems explaining how the Democratic Party lost touch with the working class and the everyday concerns of everyday Americans in favor of issues and ideas favored by the (not actually very well-) educated and (the amazingly affluent) well-to-do are fascinating. And they have the inestimable virtue of being true. For example, Democrats have convinced themselves that Republicans are the party of the rich—but in fact, the only income demographic Harris won was Americans who earn more than $100,000 annually.
In the immediate aftermath of the election, we’ve been hearing from Democratic politicians and liberal thinkers decrying the impact of “wokeism” and questioning the stress the Biden-Harris administration placed on issues like transgenderism. Research supports the criticism. According to one study, the Trump ad that said “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you” was the most effective of the general-election season and made voters notably more likely to cast their ballot for the Republican.
But it can’t be that the Trump team alone knew it had a winning issue and then sprung it on the Harris campaign like an M. Night Shyamalan twist. The Democrats likely spent $200 million or more on voter research this year. They did nightly polling and literally spoke to thousands of people in focus groups across the country. They surely knew the trans issue had traction with voters. They simply couldn’t respond. They did not have the vocabulary to do so. “Whereof one cannot speak,” said Wittgenstein, “thereof one must be silent.” The party’s intellectual, policy, and activist elites share a deep, even principled, commitment to expanding rights and increasing the number of population categories protected by law and regulation.
Note that these new anti-woke voices—ranging from Representative Seth Moulton to former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel—must have been concerned about the potentially destructive effects of the Democratic Party’s embrace of radical social policy before the election. But the power of the party’s central ideology caused their tongues to cleave to the roofs of their mouths. They did not dare say what they thought out loud.
Emanuel revealed as much in an interview with Maureen Dowd in the New York Times:
“When the woke police come at you,” Rahm Emanuel told me, “you don’t even get your Miranda rights read to you.” There were a lot of Democrats “barking,” people who “don’t represent anybody,” he said, and “the leadership of the party was intimidated.”
Emanuel is a significant thought leader in his party, a two-term mayor of America’s third-largest city, a former White House chief of staff, and (back in the day) a congressman credited with the strategy that won Democrats the House of Representatives in 2006 for the first time in 12 years. A rather ferocious politician, who does not suffer fools gladly and is well known for his mostly unpleasant outspokenness, he was implicitly admitting to Dowd that he, like everybody else in his party, had been intimidated into silence on cultural issues.
He claims the woke don’t “represent anybody,” but that’s not true, and he doesn’t act as if it is. If it were true, they would have no power, and his own behavior demonstrates they have enormous power. They represent the liberal American vanguard, which speaks through the mainstream media, Hollywood, the world of book publishing, the universities, and most of the nonprofit sector. And the most aggressive enforcers inside that vanguard (as Emanuel notes) have shown how ruthless they can be, in using PR campaigns, boycotts, social-media assaults, even lawfare in the form of civil suits in their efforts to destroy those who open a mouth against them .
That vanguard isn’t going anywhere. In fact, with the party in disarray and engaging in recriminations, it’s going to gain in power because it is cohesive and self-confident about the virtue of its efforts. A window may have opened up for an honest airing-out of the party’s weaknesses, but how long before that window slams shut? Cutting off debate is one of the key tools of the vanguard’s trade.
And how effective will the discussion be anyway when there are scores of state and local officials and hundreds of thousands of party activists who believe they are on the right side of history and will be viewed as civil-rights heroes by future generations? They will not feel restrained by the results of a single election. In fact, they might be empowered by them.
Take the example of November 2020, after the Democrats actually won the White House and retained control of the House of Representatives (they would secure control of the Senate as well in January 2021). Despite that success, the first meeting of the House Democratic Caucus following the election featured Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia pitching an absolute fit about how her party nearly lost her seat due to its advocacy of wildly outré ideas about law enforcement in the wake of the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis cops.
“The number-one concern in things that people brought to me in my [district], that I barely re-won, was defunding the police,” she said. “And I’ve heard from colleagues who have said ‘Oh, it’s the language of the streets. We should respect that.’ We’re in Congress. We are professionals. We are supposed to talk about things in the way where we mean what we’re talking about. If we don’t mean we should defund the police, we shouldn’t say that.”
Spanberger’s argument gained purchase; we did stop hearing about defunding the police from candidates for high office in Washington. And she was right politically too; Harris was bedeviled during her run by her support for weakening law enforcement during her presidential bid in 2019, and this November a Republican incumbent in a tight House race in New York won reelection by highlighting the support of his Democratic rival for “defund the police.” The Democrat, Mondaire Jones, tried to escape judgment by claiming he had been “a kid” at the time, and the Republican, Mike Lawler, observed in response that Jones had said what he had said a mere four years earlier.
But the national electoral consequences will not change many minds inside the institutions and local offices held by members of the party vanguard. The ideas that Mondaire Jones espoused in 2020 remain prevalent in blue states and cities, including Emanuel’s Chicago, whose latest mayor, Brandon Johnson, was elected in 2023 with an explicitly anti-enforcement agenda. District attorneys in New York, backed by actions of the state legislature, doubled down after 2020 on their determination not to enforce laws against misdemeanor offenses, in part based on the racialist thinking behind Black Lives Matter. Progressive prosecutors across the country, elected through the financial support of vanguard donors and foundations, have continued to pursue anti-carceral agendas without letup. Things got so bad in California that voters had to enact a referendum on Election Day reclassifying some offenses as felonies just to ensure that some activities destructive to the quality of daily life, like shoplifting and illegal drug possession, are punished rather than tolerated. That result makes the case for the newly anti-woke Democrats, but the vanguard will ignore it. In the first place, most states do not have a referendum process that allows voters to write laws. More important, the logic of the vanguard worldview is that it must always do battle with the unenlightened masses and the evildoers who hypnotize them into retrogressive fear. The vanguard fights on behalf of the arc of history, which by definition bends toward their view of justice.
And it possesses the energy and enthusiasm that more moderate political types do not. Moderation cools passions, it doesn’t heat them up. What drives the seekers of radical justice is concentrated passion with the power to explode outward and destroy roadblocks in their path.
The Democratic Party relies to an astonishing degree on public-sector unions and the nonprofit world.
Here’s what’s going to happen: These two forces, which employ millions, will fan out as they have been doing with increasing effectiveness over the past 15 years. They will man local party-organizing offices, run for and win low-level elected positions in the party hierarchy, and will show up in unexpected places to enhance the prospects of the most radical voices working within the system. If there are primary contenders at every level in 2026, you should expect the loudest voices—voices inspired by and echoing Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—to drown out those who counsel prudence and care and outreach to more tentative Americans in an effort to persuade the swing voters that the Democrats have learned their lesson and will do things better next time.
As the Trump administration and the Republican congressional majorities get to work, the activists will too—harnessing the daily outrages they will discern, create, and amplify through social media to keep their troops motivated and at the ready to move. The implicit idea will be that the Biden-Harris team lost not because they enacted too many left-liberal policies in a country that leans right, but that Biden and Harris did too little and were too tentative.
They will argue that the outgoing administration lacked the courage of the vanguard’s convictions. Biden and Harris could have packed the Supreme Court, could have passed a national pro-abortion law, and could have banned fracking outright. Instead, they chickened out, fearing the wrath of voters it turned out they had alienated anyway. What is needed, they will say, is a combination of AOC’s vision and Trump’s ruthlessness—the kind of ruthlessness Emanuel evoked in his comment about the “woke police” who don’t even read people their rights before crushing them.
The fortunes of the Democratic Party will not depend entirely on the behavior of Democrats. If Trump’s new presidency proves successful, the party’s journey further left will only hasten the ideological and partisan realignment we now see in chalk outline. But if Trump fails, or his misbehavior proves disqualifying in the eyes of the electorate, we may find ourselves lurching from MAGA to woke neo-socialism without a moment to catch a breath.
Photo: Tetra Images
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