Democratic Elites Blame Everyone But Themselves for Historic Collapse
On the blame list: transgender people, “economic headwinds,” ontologically racist voters—anyone but the powerful people tasked with defeating Trump.
Adam Johnson
The full picture of the Democrats’ monumental collapse in the 2024 election is coming into clearer view. It was a historic loss. Harris will likely fall a few million votes short of Biden’s 2020 total. Democrats lost control of the Senate and are likely to be losers in the House for two election cycles in a row. All in all it was, most everyone agrees, a bloodbath.
Understandably, the blame game for who was responsible for this collapse is quickly underway. But, just like with the post 2016 recriminations, the very same people driving the narrative of who is responsible are themselves largely responsible — or at least in and of the same media and political class as those who are. As a result, with rare exception, those being blamed are not Democratic Party elites, liberal media institutions, or the corporate consulting world they operate in—but outside economic forces, transgender people, immigrants, and a host of either powerless minority groups or vague-to-the-point-of-meaningless generalities.
Put another way: the name of the game for the top Democratic brass is shifting the blame from the powerful to the powerless and whoever comes up with the most ass covering, vaguely plausible scapegoat wins this week’s spin cycle.
First up was a classic in the blame-deflection genre, and no doubt one pushed by the corporate consultants running the campaign messaging: that of the “economic headwinds.” Even before the election, a seemingly savvy narrative began to emerge for Democratic Party elites, and their media conduits, playing the expectations game: that post-Covid inflation was “an incumbent killer,” Harris would be yet another victim, and the fact that the polls were effectively tied was actually evidence of a masterful campaign.
The Harris campaign cited “unprecedented headwinds” that were “largely out of [their] control,” a sentiment that was echoed by the Biden White House and Barack Obama.
“It’s important to understand that almost every post-pandemic incumbent government has lost its bid at re-election,” influential writer Matt Yglesias peppered on X (formerly Twitter) prior to the election. “Those who haven’t run yet (Germany, Canada) are deeply unpopular. Harris is trying to pull off something *hard* not blundering away something easy.”
Never mind that several governments survived post-pandemic inflation — namely Mexico, Spain, Taiwan—this raises the question: Why did the Harris campaign lean into Biden’s record, from the economy to Gaza, and effectively run for a second Biden term? She was not an incumbent, and to the extent she was, this was a choice that was made early on in the campaign. If the “headwinds” were insuperable, why not break from the person associated with the “headwinds,” rather than hiring most of his campaign team and leaning into this incumbency? (That may have been a mistake, several people in Harris’ orbit told NPR.) And if the reason is “VP norms, she can’t break from her boss,” then certainly norms aren’t more important than saving the country from ascendant fascism. Add to the fact that these headwinds were happening alongside the tailwinds working in her favor: namely, running against one of the least popular candidates in modern history, fresh off being convicted of 34 felonies and being found liable for sexual assault.
This isn’t to say that there is nothing to the claim of outside factors working against Harris (including Biden clinging to power far too long, which is fairly being chalked up as contributing to her loss), but this is true of every election. The point is to overcome the “headwinds” and meet voters where they are. This was made more difficult by Harris turning to her brother-in-law and Chief Legal Officer of Uber, Tony West, for campaign advice — a move sources inside the White House mark as a pivot away from economic populism into business-friendly centrist messaging. According to Franklin Foer at The Atlantic:
While Harris was stuck defending the Biden economy, and hobbled by lingering anger over inflation, attacking Big Business allowed her to go on the offense. Then, quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer. (West did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) To win the support of CEOs, Harris jettisoned a strong argument that deflected attention from one of her weakest issues. Instead, the campaign elevated Mark Cuban as one of its chief surrogates, the very sort of rich guy she had recently attacked.
Without re-litigating the nonsensical logic of the Liz Cheney/Mark Cuban strategy, which was doomed to fail from the start, it’s worth noting that the the catch-all “headwinds” excuse is so pro forma that The Los Angeles Times published a mocking criticism of its recent ubiquity in the corporate world last March. In “Why ‘economic headwinds’ are suddenly to blame for everything,” Sam Dean tells us that:
Headwinds have always blown around in business English, but the phrase economic headwinds serves a special purpose: a majestic waving of the hand, an abandon to the fates, an inkling of force majeure.
“It’s a useful term, because we can’t control the wind,” said Thomas C. Leonard, a historian of economics at Princeton University. “If you’re a corporation trying to sell unhappy outcomes to shareholders or regulators, it’s a way of saying it’s a tough environment, but more importantly it’s a tough environment beyond our control.
Put simply: Why would those running the campaign not blame outside forces “largely out of [their] control”? As I’ve noted elsewhere, the politics of Feigned Helplessness are the prevailing ethos of the Democratic Party establishment and this is just the default position of those with tremendous power and responsibility when they fail to achieve the one job they were tasked with doing.
Next up is a popular scapegoat reprisal from 2016. After Trump’s last win eight years ago, a pervasive punching bag for pundits was transgender people, whose struggle for civil rights, we were told, was generally off-putting and annoying. As I documented at the time, the list of elites blaming Clinton’s loss on “trans issues” included everyone from Tony Blair to Mike Bloomberg to Mark Lilla to New York Times columnist Frank Bruni.
Now, 2024 appears to be more of the same. “I’m telling you, [Trump’s anti-trans] ad had a bigger impact than any ad that ran,” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough yelled on his show two days after the election. He would go on to insist — without any evidence, of course — trans issues were harming Democrats with rural voters, Hispanics and Black young male voters.
“Democratic strategist” (which is to say highly paid consultant) Julie Roginsky blamed “pronouns” and campus protestors in a fairly boilerplate faux populist laundry list of woke scapegoats on CNN Thursday.
Anti “woke” crusader Bari Weiss predictably blamed “gender fluidity.” As did Matt Yglesias who posted “principles for Common Sense Democrats to reform governance” and, in doing so, insisted that it’s important Democrats affirm that “biological sex” is not a “social construct.” Included in his list of implied culprits were also fussy pronoun monitors, academics, and nonprofit types. Left unmentioned by Yglesias is that the Harris campaign was about as consistent with his worldview as possible. Indeed, the Harris campaign’s Super PAC messaging was shaped by David Shor, Yglesias’ “popularism” confederate.
The vice president almost never mentioned her identity, discussed housing in Yglesias’s preferred supply-side YIMBY rhetoric, and turned right on police and border policy. Yet, she still got blown out of the water. Rather than engage in some self-examination as to whether or not this brand of micro-targeted, capitalism-friendly consultancy-speak had any flaws, Yglesias instead doubled down on his priors. This is the beauty of blaming woke: It’s an unfalsifiable vibe — there will always be an obnoxious pink haired nonprofit caricature to bash every time the Democrats fail.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) would join the anti-trans pile-on, telling the New York Times, “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” As did Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY), who told reporters Wednesday: “Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left…I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.”
Blaming “trans issues” for elite failures is quickly becoming the free space in Bingo of responsibility-evasion. We may look forward to high status Democrats citing trans people to explain away their losses to Barron Trump in the 2048 election.
It, of course, wouldn’t be a scapegoat frenzy without immigrants. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews blamed migration and Democrats’ supposed “open border” policies for the Democratic Party implosion on Tuesday. Ignoring the fact that this didn’t seem to factor into Democrats’ over-performance in the 2022 midterms when immigration was much higher, and the fact that Democrats have veered hard right on immigration in the past 18 months, Matthews insisted that “working people especially” feel “betrayed,” and they “feel their country has been given away.” Despite polls showing anti-immigrant attitudes distributed evenly, Matthews enjoys speaking on the Working Man’s behalf and wants us to know he can’t be appealed to with Medicare for All or free college or stronger union protections — but only with more anti-migrant demagoguery.
The other side of the blame-shifting coin from scapegoating minorities is the rise of the Racial Whodunnit, where specific demographic groups are blamed for the loss, whether it be Latinos or white women, the general idea being that demographics are collectively responsible for Democrats’ failure to cross a 50 percent threshold. While this is true as far as it goes, it doesn’t go very far, and still ultimately serves the purpose of deflecting blame from the powerful people in charge of the campaign.
There is no doubt that Harris was subject to racism and sexism from the electorate. But Trump has been gaining with Latinos each presidential election, and white women also backed Trump 2020 when he ran against Biden. So it’s not clear what one is supposed to do with this analysis. In any event, under the esteemed advice of David Shor and Anita Dunn, the Harris campaign decided to de-prioritize the Democratic Party’s base and focus on trying to win barely existent moderate white Republican voters.
The important thing to remember is that the blame for Trump winning cannot be laid at the feet of specific powerful people with billions at their disposal, who occupy positions of wealth and influence. The three popular elite explanations for Trump’s win — (1) a vague, moving target of “wokeness,” (2) even vaguer “economic headwinds,” (3) intractable, ontologically bigoted voters — all, conveniently, get powerful politicians, donors and consultants off the hook. They sound kind of true, but have little empirical basis and, most important of all, omit the glaring fact that Democrats continue to lack a coherent vision to offer struggling working-class Americans, one that clearly distinguishes them from Republicans rather than continuing to co-opt their right wing policies.
That Democrats are bleeding working-class voters from all demographics is indisputable, so a guilty party has to be found. Obviously the solution cannot be a sustained discussion of economic left populism, as this would challenge the class interests of donors and corporate consultants. So the only culprits that will be discussed in our discourse, again fueled by the very same people responsible for the historic collapse, will be “headwinds,” faceless cohorts of voters who we are told can’t have their minds changed, and vulnerable groups without the political or economic power to defend themselves.
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Adam H. Johnson is a media analyst and co-host of the Citations Needed podcast.
