In the months ahead, Democratic Party officials and operatives will analyze election returns and voting patterns to try to make sense of what happened on Election Day. There will be a push to identify problems that can be easily solved by the same campaign experts who have allowed one of the least popular politicians of our time to dominate politics for three consecutive elections and rewrite the political order in a way we haven’t seen since the Goldwater movement laid the groundwork for Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
Like Goldwater after 1964, the Democratic Party can seize defeat to establish a new order — but the era of tinkering around the edges is over.
Donald Trump didn’t just win. He won big, including longstanding Democratic constituencies. Look no further than solid blue New York: Vice President Kamala Harris had the worst statewide performance for a Democrat since 1988. In New York City, her margin of victory was 17 points lower than Joe Biden’s in 2020.
The numbers don’t lie: This was a rejection of our party’s leadership.
How did we get here?
The contemporary Democratic Party emerged from the “greed is good” era of the 1980s in part by co-opting pieces of the Reagan agenda. President Bill Clinton built a coalition — part working class, part Wall Street — that led Democrats back to the White House without redefining the political system. The limitations of this “third way” came to a head during the long recession following the financial crisis, when the party was tasked with charting a new direction. The truth is, it never did.
Faced with a global economic crisis, leaders of both parties worked to perpetuate a neoliberal order that people no longer trusted. Rather than create an agenda intimately tied to the people’s pain, the Democratic establishment helped rescue the institutions that had just pushed the economy to the brink of collapse, further cementing the public’s view that our political and economic system was rigged for the rich and powerful.
Tragically, our party has failed to rescue itself ever since. Mr. Trump’s success in 2016 and this month underscored the flaw inherent in the Democratic approach of promising to move forward while looking backward.
To be fair, President Biden sought to reverse decades of flawed economic policy by taking on monopolies, building up our infrastructure, encouraging domestic manufacturing and playing hardball with China. Unfortunately, much of this good work was drowned out by the crisis at the border and punishing inflation. In the end, he was the wrong messenger for the way forward.
President Biden should never have run for a second term. It betrayed our party’s collective will to be bold and fresh. Clamoring to be the savior of democracy, the Democratic Party engendered disdain from the very people it sought to serve — everyday, hard-working Americans fed up with being lied to and squeezed out of opportunity.
Mr. Trump wins over these voters because most Americans distrust both major parties. He campaigns like a populist, even though he governs like an oligarch and couldn’t care less about the fact that the top 1 percent has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.
This presents an opportunity for Democrats, but only if we are willing to challenge the systems and institutions that have caused Americans to lose faith in government. Our philosophy must make clear that the real threat to democracy is widening economic inequality and the colossal power of big money in politics. As Franklin Roosevelt said in 1936, “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”
The Democratic Party must lay out a new vision of economic security and independence for working families. That requires remembering that the interests of labor are the counterweight to the interests of capital and that our role as public servants is to ensure balance between the two. Not all solutions should be based on the market; the market tends to reward greed, and cultivating greed should never be the mission of a democratic government.
This vision also means committing to policies like universal pre-K, paid family and medical leave, expanded community banking, raising the minimum wage and a public option for health insurance. And it means taking on the grotesque concentration of wealth among the very few and price fixing, which fuels the affordability crisis and widens economic inequality.
The prospect of upsetting the donor class, lobbyists and special interest groups must not prevent us from doing right by our principles. Common sense should rule the day. Yes, we have to secure the border and protect American workers from bad trade deals made in the name of globalization.
The challenge for Democrats now is to prove we can govern. Republicans will control Washington, but we control cities and states across the country. Let’s prove ourselves to be the party of competence by improving people’s lives with homes they can afford, quality health care, clean air and safe drinking water, high-performing schools and reliable transportation. Promoting these public goods can be done in partnership with the private sector, but never in submission to the profit motive.
If Democrats lead with a bold, cleareyed vision for the future, voters will support them. I have seen it firsthand.
In 2017, after Mr. Trump won my home district in the Hudson Valley and the Catskills by almost seven points, I challenged the Republican incumbent. He ran a divisive campaign, attacking my former career as a hip-hop artist and using racist tropes and stereotypes to cast me as a threat. No person of color had ever represented upstate New York in Congress, and my district as it was drawn then was one of the most rural in the country and over 80 percent white.
In response, I ran a campaign rooted in love, emphasizing how all of us, no matter our party, want to be able to afford homes and groceries, to send our kids to good schools and to leave behind a safer, better world for them than the one our parents left us.
On Election Day, our campaign won by five points, and we won again in 2020 by 12 points.
The blue wave of 2018 ushered in a crop of new leaders capable of winning in tough red districts with a message anchored in the needs of constituents and not beholden to party leadership or moneyed interests.
We used that winning playbook in parts of New York this year, including where I live in the Hudson Valley. U.S. Representative Pat Ryan was able to hold on to the 18th Congressional District comfortably, and Josh Riley flipped the 19th. Mr. Ryan and Mr. Riley centered much of their campaigns on the economic pain felt by their constituents, caused by a political system corrupted by unchecked corporate power.
In this time of reckoning, Democrats would be wise to pay attention to campaigns and candidates that broke the mold. A new path is both necessary and possible, but we will not chart it with the same politicians telling the same old stories. We are ready for the next generation.
The post Democrats, It’s Time to Let a New Generation Lead appeared first on New York Times.
