Responding to America’s vote of no confidence

The election has been a source of grieving for me. As someone privileged to be both a member of the post-graduate educated class and foreign policy community, I think this vote represents a rejection of my own personal values and the institutions of both American democracy and of the role in the world it undergirds. The possibility space for policies I support has shrunk in a dramatic and lasting way. Lives and suffering are on the ballot in every election, but the stakes were higher for this one, and the widespread anti-system sentiment means that hard-won aspects of U.S. law and practice can no longer be taken for granted. But compared to most of human history, including the generations that won those rights, U.S. citizens in 2024 have far more resources and past practice to call on.

So what the hell happened?

Harris ran ahead of national trends in the battleground states. I personally saw Pennsylvania being flooded with volunteers; it’s not about marginal campaign choices.

* Voters hate inflation, even when it is offset by rising wages, low unemployment, and reduced inequality. Inflation is down but interest rates are only starting to fall. Incumbent parties around the world have been losing post-Covid. In an enormous tragedy, I think the other global factor is that that lower barriers to international travel and the resultant rising migration have fundamentally undercut the political viability of the strong form of present asylum rules and fueled populist backlash in countries part of this legal structure.

* Polarization by education and density are similar global factors, even as we’ve seen reduced racial polarization. Also, (to my surprise) gender polarization shifted right rather than expanding relative to 2020.  Polling quality was a known unknown, but tying into longstanding declines in trust, class combined with the education polarization heightened against the Democrats largely took place within that known unknown. The destruction of the business model and reach of journalism due in good part to technology changes is an important part of this story.

What is to be done?

Henry Farrell had the response that was most convincing to me (and not just a restatement of his prior beliefs):

So we need to experiment. We need to talk to people who we don’t usually talk to, not in the from-high-to-low ‘tell us what you need so that we can get your votes and you can go away again’ mode, but to build solidarity. We don’t just need to learn from the other side, but to coopt some of their coalition so it becomes ours, so that, indeed, it becomes us. That is never comfortable. But its necessity is a fact of democratic politics. Without the capacity to build a majority coalition - for the sake of democracy, an enduring coalition - we cannot win.

He points to the work of Margaret Levi on communities of fate and Hahrie Han on megachurches’ efforts to overcome racial divisions.

Secondarily, I think that state and local governments are going to become more important, as well as protecting the right to free movement within the United States. Related, the quality of blue state governance, especially on housing inflation, needs to be a place the Democratic party proves itself. A big part of the problem here is that many states or cities are dominated by one of the two national political parties. Political parties are an important part of providing political competition that’s more easily parsed by often disengaged voters. Fixing that probably requires electoral reforms that allow for strong parties, strong competition, and more parties, at least at the state and local level. 

Ben Rhodes in the NY Times offers a possible vision of how Democratic party leaders might seek to build a bigger tent, taking a play from a different successful populist:

After he lost an election in 2002, Mr. Orban spent years holding “civic circles” around Hungary — grass-roots meetings, often around churches, which built an agenda and sense of belonging that propelled him back into power. In their own way, the next generation of Democratic leaders should fan out across the country. Learn from mayors innovating at the local level. Listen to communities that feel alienated. Find places where multiracial democracy is working better than it is in the rest of the country. Tell those stories when pitching policies. Foster a sense of belonging to something bigger, so democracy doesn’t feel like the pablum of a ruling elite, but rather the remedy for fixing what is broken in Washington and our body politic.

Meeting the burden of proof posed by voters is hard, especially when trust often comes down more to relationships and stories rather than robust empirical policy analysis (though success in the latter gives opportunity for the former). Identifying remedies to systemic challenges that robust majorities of Americans can support is a vexing problem that is at best only partially solvable and that often requires working with others one vehemently disagrees with while not wavering in defense of both democracy and pluralism. I’ll do my best at that challenge, and welcome any critiques on perspectives or evidence I am missing.