Move past the progressive v. moderate framing

Voters thought Democrats were too… both. Today's elections are less about policy than authenticity and reading the room.

By now you have access to as many “this is why Democrats lost and what they need to do moving forward” posts as your heart could possibly desire. If you practice enough self-care to not doomscroll all of them, congratulations. If not, you may be so bored of the subject by now that you desperately wish I’d shut up. My apologies.

Still, I think this is the right moment – after everyone’s made their case, but before Trump’s return diverts our attention – to zoom out and take stock of the competing narratives. Here’s a summary of the debates I’ve seen, followed by my own thoughts on what each side gets right and wrong.

The consensus is that Democrats are too elitist, condescending, and head-in-the-clouds for normal voters. But predictably, analysts disagree about how, and their diagnoses fall into three main categories.

1. Team Moderate / “Be Less Woke.”

Team Moderate includes center-left liberals like Matthew Yglesias, Noah Smith, Ezra Klein, Ruy Teixeira, and Josh Barro. They argue that Democrats lost because they represent an educated professional class that’s out of touch with normal Americans on social and cultural issues, and was held responsible for inflation. They argue that voters associate Democrats with radical “wokeness” and pie-in-the-sky idealism that doesn’t represent their values or bread-and-butter concerns; that identity politics aren’t working, and neither are climate catastrophism, growth-phobia, or techno-pessimism. They say the online culture of the 2010s made Democrats seem haughty and detached, and that the party’s image remains damaged by the excesses of 2020’s BLM riots, “defund the police” rhetoric, and an influx of migrants. Finally, they argue that places where progressives hold the most power – major cities like New York, DC, Los Angeles and San Francisco – are failing in crucial respects such as crime, housing policy, and the cost of living, causing residents to flee to more livable red states.

Of the three teams, I think Team Moderate has the strongest empirical evidence about voters’ policy preferences, but is also least able to read the room on messaging tone. Insofar as Team Moderate is associated with popularism – a strategy that targets the “median voter” by adopting policies that poll well – it also understates the extent to which charismatic leaders can mold and manufacture public opinion, instead of merely chasing it.

A glance at the polls suggests some truth to the moderate takeaway. Moderate House Democrats dramatically outperformed Harris, while Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren underperformed her. Even on down-ballot races and referendums, voters lurched to the right all over the country. The Democratic electorate got whiter and more educated, while the GOP did the opposite, indicating that racial identity politics may appeal more to educated whites than the people they purport to benefit. Hispanic voters, in particular, swung hard to the right, in part due to concerns about crime and immigration. The furthest shifts to the right occurred in urban areas, suggesting frustration with failures in far-left city governments.

That said, the moderate narrative often understates voters’ frustration with the status quo, and how flexible voters can be about policy for anyone capable of harnessing and directing that frustration.

As I explained in my Trump Steelman, Trump’s appeal cannot be explained without acknowledging people’s anger with “the establishment”—an establishment with which centrist politicians are most associated.¹ This newsletter was founded on concern that things are not going well in America, and 75% of Americans seem to agree with me. Trust in government hovers near 20 percent, while “public confidence in major U.S. institutions [has] been falling since the debacle of the Iraq War and the financial crisis of 2008.” In the face of mounting problems, our politics are paralyzed by polarization. Congress struggles to pass a budget, pick its leaders, or even stay open. All these trends sharply penalize figures seen to represent business as usual.

Our dour national mood was central to the vibecession and to Biden’s unpopularity. However pro-labor he may be, Biden has a well-earned reputation as a centrist. He’s spent 50 years at the highest levels of American government and is innately representative, and habitually defensive, of U.S. political institutions. Everything about him screams “status quo,” including his age. If voters agree on anything, it’s that the status quo is not working.

Signaling the need for major change overall may be more important than agreeing with voters on individual policy issues. As well-versed in the polls as Team Moderate may be on an issue-by-issue basis, they risk missing the forest for the trees without bold suggestions to shake things up. Shedding association with the woke left will not suffice unless Democrats can find ways to speak to the anti-establishment mood, and to their credit, only one tribe of the left has put forth a way to do that.

2. Team Progressive / “Be Less Neoliberal.”

Team Progressive includes further-left voices like Bernie Sanders, Robert Reich, Freddie De Boer, and Chris Murphy. They argue that Americans voted mainly on the economy, and that the blame for their discontent lies with “neoliberal” policies that benefit the wealthy but leave everyone else behind. They cite a stagnation of wages in recent decades despite major economic growth, argue that record inequality has “corrupted our system,” and suggest embracing economic populism as the solution. Specific policy proposals include “paid family leave, Medicare for All, free public higher education, stronger unions, higher taxes on great wealth, and housing credits,” as well as limits on CEO pay, stock buybacks, and corporate handouts.

On social issues, some progressives claim it was actually moderate Democrats who seized on woke language and identity politics to appear progressive to the Democratic base and ward off economic changemakers like Bernie Sanders. They argue that despite invoking such rhetoric when convenient, Joe Biden was broadly a centrist on social issues and foreign policy, as were losing Democratic Senators like Bob Casey and Sherrod Brown. They note that Harris ran as a centrist too, including with controversial Republicans like Liz Cheney, whereas Trump clearly drew from the anti-establishment sentiments of former Bernie voters. They suggest Democrats need to be more like Bernie than Hillary moving forward if they want to tap into the sense that the country is on the wrong track.

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut (who I really respect on foreign policy, for what it’s worth) put the progressive case this way on X:

We are out of touch with the crisis of meaning/purpose fueling MAGA. We refuse to pick big fights. Our tent is too small…The left has never fully grappled with the wreckage of fifty years of neoliberalism, which has left legions of Americans adrift as local places are hollowed out, rapacious profit seeking cannibalizes the common good, and unchecked new technology separates and isolates us.

The things that mattered are disappearing. We spend half as much time with friends as a generation ago. Hard work no longer guarantees economic mobility. Institutions (like churches) are delegitimized. Place based identity evaporates as we all become "global citizens." The left skips past the way people are feeling (alone, impotent, overwhelmed) and straight to uninspiring solutions (more roads! bulk drug purchasing!) that do little to actually upset the status quo of who has power and who doesn't…

We cannot be afraid of fights - especially with the economic elites who have profited off neoliberalism. The right regularly picks fights with elites - Hollywood, higher ed, etc. Democrats (e.g. the Harris campaign) are tepid in our fights with billionaires and corporations. Real economic populism should be our tentpole….

I think this argument is best able to read the room. It gets right what Team Moderate gets wrong. But I also think it’s especially prone to the wishful thinking of the pundit’s fallacy. It greatly exaggerates the popularity of progressive economics in practice, which are often inflationary and look a lot like what Biden tried to enact. It exaggerates how clearly voters² can draw connections between economic policies and outcomes and hold the right people accountable. It’s often wrong at the policy level, in part because populism is innately hostile to expertise and careful reasoning. And it actually doubles down on the ideological fervor that makes Democrats seem so elitist and ivory tower to ordinary people.

Jeff Maurer

—a former writer for John Oliver who’s quickly becoming one of my favorite writers on Substack—explains the first point well enough that I’ll just borrow his words:

Joe Biden embraced populist economics more than any Democratic president since FDR. He mostly left Trump’s tariffs in place, including those that were protectionist, not strategic. He appointed a far-left FCC chair, backed “buy America” provisions, supported anti-competition measures like the Jones Act, and was more pro-union than Frank Sabotka on The Wire. He also signed bills like the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act…³ The theory was that Biden would win working class votes by being an FDR-style “transformational” president, which we know because Biden and his progressive allies screamed this theory at the top of their lungs…

Also: Consider Sherrod Brown, arguably the most populist Democrat in the Senate (Sanders and Warren are his only rivals). In his 32 years representing Ohio, Brown earned a reputation as an aggressively anti-trade, pro-union Democrat. He lost on Tuesday to Bernie Moreno, whose “sixteen priorities” include “allow free markets to work”, “massively reduce anti-growth regulations”, and “end Socialism in America”…if anyone could claim to have stuck by the working man by backing populist economics, it was Sherrod Brown, and that appears to have meant jack shit when voters went to the polls.

Economic populism is bad policy that doesn’t work. One week ago, the “doesn’t work” in that sentence meant “doesn’t work as policy”, but now, it also means “doesn’t work as politics.”… What’s killing the Democratic Party isn’t a lack of concern for the working man — it’s adherence to coture ideologies that toss around faux-intellectual buzzwords like neoliberalism.⁴

Maurer also cast doubt on how much trust the progressive “deliverism” theory places in voters to assess their economic interests.⁵ “During Biden’s presidency, wage gains among the lowest 10 percent of earners were substantially larger than any other group;” and “the poor and middle class did well under Biden. Real wages (which factor in inflation) rose, the tax burden shifted towards the wealthy, and the ‘misery index’…was historically low.”⁶

Progressives tend to dismiss these statistics as lecturing struggling people that they’re not really struggling. But there’s good reason to suspect many people really aren’t struggling economically as much as they say they are. Consider this chart:

That’s a lot of very sudden variation, no? People’s opinions of the economy sure seem to fluctuate more based on which party controls the White House than could possibly be explained by real changes to their underlying quality of life. Maybe when a pollster calls or sends a survey to rate the economy, people just use that as a referendum on the tribe in power, which they actually like or dislike due to cultural factors.

Even if voters could tell what’s in their interest, populist economics are often not. For example, anti-neoliberal sentiment is a big part of what’s made places like New York and San Francisco so expensive, especially for housing.⁷ And populism’s tendency towards anti-intellectualism is unlikely to appeal to the Democrats’ educated base as much as it does with less-educated conservatives.

It’s fair to call out some moderate Democrats for leaning into the same identity politics they now blame on others. But it’s silly to pretend these mindsets originated in the center. Woke terms and approaches came from academia and entered the public consciousness through progressive sites like Salon, Jezebel, or Huffington Post. And it’s telling that the progressive crowd rarely admits to excesses in those approaches.⁸ As Yglesias complains, some on the left seem to think that “if you’re somehow just populist enough on economics, you can short-circuit people’s brains and they’ll stop noticing that you disagree with them on cultural issues.”

Where progressive election autopsies have addressed social issues, they’ve been naïve about the chance of deflecting public anger over gender or immigration with economic redirection. Race and sex matter deeply to people’s sense of self and perception of threat. Men who swung right have deeper insecurities about their social station than wages can explain. The issues are severable, and Democrats need distinct, relatable talking points for each of them.

Finally, an obsession with economic class is itself a form of identity politics, and itself out of touch with how most Americans perceive their identity and interest. Noah Smith explains how America doesn't really have a working class, nor any clear idea of who qualifies as working class and why:

The vast bulk of the U.S. workforce no longer works in manufacturing… Service occupations are all over the place — cashiers and baristas, sales assistants and servers, customer service reps and personal trainers, sommeliers and receptionists, medical assistants and warehouse workers, etc. Their jobs don’t necessarily have much in common — probably not enough to form a class-conscious proletariat like in the industrial age.

…when Joe Biden became the first sitting President to walk a picket line, the number of people who identified with his action was fairly small. The typical unionized worker is no longer a blue-collar swing voter who works on an assembly line, but a government employee who’s likely to vote for the Democrats already.

…There is still a divide between blue-collar and white-collar work. But so many Americans now do white-collar work that we seem to have collectively decided that it too constitutes “real work” — that as long as you put in the hours, you’re working. And so there’s very little divide between workers and non-workers in America.

…just because America’s educated professional class has a fairly unified culture doesn’t mean that the people who didn’t go to college have any kind of working-class solidarity or class consciousness. College is a powerful integrating institution — it instills a certain culture and certain attitudes in the people who go there, and it teaches them to behave like a single community. But the Americans who don’t go to college mostly don’t have anything like that, unless they join the military or are very religious. Instead, the non-college “class” is highly fragmented and isolated. We can call them “working class” if we want, but that doesn’t mean they’ll behave like one, or care when Bernie gives them a shoutout.

…the idea that lower-earning and non-college Americans can be motivated to rise up against the rich with some combination of pro-union policy, more health care subsidies, higher minimum wage, and fiery rhetoric against billionaires is probably fanciful.

That’s not to say no progressive policies would be popular. Public anger at the wealthy is significant, and things like Medicare for All affect nearly everyone. But given Americans’ lack of class consciousness and ingrained antipathy to socialism, cramming today’s economic issues through a lens of labor politics is unlikely to resonate. Only 11% of Americans belong to a union and only about 14% qualify as blue-collar workers. Many of the latter are among the most ardent Trumpers in the country, and the remainder are not enough to form Democrats’ new base. Most Americans do not see anything pertaining to unions as a top issue facing the country.

Despite recent efforts to reframe wokeness as divergent from economic leftism, the truth is that those two flavors of ideologue inhabit identical social and digital spaces; hold similarly elevated levels of privilege on average; have been popularized by similar forces of social media groupthink;⁹ have similarly grating presumptions to “educate” nonbelievers about their ingroup’s constructed realities; and are seen as interchangeably weird by the American people, who notice few distinctions in the general tribe of progressive political activists.

That’s not to say leftists don’t have some serious ideas. Most genuinely want to help the working class, just as people using the word “Latinx” want to help Latinos. But even if we grant that there is a working class and that it does share common interests, its members do not agree on what those interests are. And they will not be easily convinced, because they find talk about how much power labor has relative to capital little more relatable than talk about microaggressions or living on indigenous land. Hostility to “neoliberalism” belongs to the same genre of political cults that Americans just shoved in locker, and anti-rich rhetoric can only get you so far.

3. Team Incumbent Penalty / “Don’t Overcorrect.”

The final line of argument I’ve encountered is less cohesive and ideological than the other two. It’s typically made by reporters or moderates providing context for the 2024 election, sometimes with implications for future strategy left unspoken. It’s also compatible with the other two arguments, but distinct enough to warrant independent mention.

This line of reasoning suggests Democrats lost primarily because of a general anti-incumbent mood all over the world, which has been present since the COVID-19 pandemic but was especially apparent in 2024. The same mood tumbled incumbent parties in the UK, France, Germany, South Korea, Japan, India, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania, New Zealand, and Australia. Crucially, these countries have a wide range of social and economic policy contexts. Theories vary on the source of this discontent—is it the phones? immigration? Inflation, or lingering unease from COVID?—but regardless, it doesn’t seem like any campaign message has been able to prevent it.

In the U.S. case, that rough hand was exacerbated by Biden’s selfish decision to run for reelection despite his age and declining oratory, then stubbornly hang on until it was too late for a primary or contested convention that could have identified a more popular standard bearer for the party. It was also worsened by an unfortunate assassination attempt that made Trump look tough and sympathetic. As a result, Democrats suffered a humiliating and chaotic month of terrible press, were dogged by allegations of a coverup of Biden’s decline, and then were forced to run a slapdash campaign behind a mediocre communicator thrown into the limelight at the last minute.

While all of this was terrible for Democrats in 2024, there’s good reason to suspect that none of these factors will handicap them in 2026 or 2028. And despite these rare obstacles, Democrats only lost the popular vote by 1.5%, and were much closer to winning than initially reported. If the incumbency penalty continues, that alone could hand Democrats a win in the next election, to say nothing of the benefits of having a candidate elected through a traditional primary process. Instead of freaking out that the party is fundamentally broken and frantically reinventing its policy platform, perhaps Democrats should avoid overcorrecting in a way that alienates a significant portion of their current coalition.

I think this narrative comes closest to explaining the 2024 debacle, but is also the least helpful about what to do moving forward. Yes, it’s easy for politicos to overweight the importance of campaign platforms, forgetting that very few people are paying close attention. I’ll talk more about this below. But until the world diagnoses what’s causing the incumbency penalty, political parties still need to strategize about how to withstand it once they gain power.

Moreover, the disadvantages Democrats faced this year were partially offset by one major advantage: a uniquely vulnerable opponent. Trump is one of the most detested presidents in American history, and a convicted felon who ended his last term by attempting a coup. He is uniquely unstable, unethical, unlikable, and unserious about policy in ways that drive turnout among educated voters and prompt some #NeverTrump conservatives to vote Democrat or stay home.

Whoever eventually replaces Trump atop the Republican party is unlikely to be quite so repellant. The most obvious successor, JD Vance, is a polished communicator with genuine policy credentials and minimal baggage, who did very well in the Vice-Presidential debate. With Vance atop the ticket, it’s possible Republicans would have won by much larger margins this year.

Running against Trump is playing on easy mode, yet Democrats have found a way to lose two of three elections against him. Blaming this outcome on circumstance underweights the need for change and provides no roadmap to a more resilient and enduring coalition.

My theory/teaser for a future post: Authenticity beats policy.

Still, the irrelevance of policy positions to incumbents’ fates this year is instructive. In my view, the right lesson from 2024 is that presidential elections are not about policy in the first place. To some extent, they are determined by factors outside the control of political parties; but insofar as election outcomes can be controlled, winning probably has more to do with charisma, authenticity, relatability, and responsiveness to the national mood, all of which can be leveraged in service of almost any policy platform.

This can be hard for Americans to hear, in part because we romanticize democracy as something more rational and deliberative than it is. Our grade school model of democratic accountability assumes voters can identify clear and accurate connections between leaders and policies, and then between policies and outcomes affecting their life and interests.

In practice, though, the relationship between policies and outcomes is often so murky that even experts cannot agree on it. Besides, voters don’t listen to experts, are wildly ignorant about government affairs, and can scarcely remember which party believes in which policies in the first place.

This has probably always been a problem to an extent. But the problem is magnified in our increasingly post-truth media landscape. Voters this year thought crime was rising when really it was falling, because there’s no broadly trusted authority to set the record straight anymore. The shared information picture on which collaborative decision-making depends has broken down, and what’s left is confirmation bias and mood response.

Lacking the information or incentive needed to develop accurate models of causality, many voters simply outsource their political thinking to trusted pundits in their media bubbles. Pundits win trust by flattering the audience’s biases, echoing their frustrations, and sounding generally authentic, relatable, and down-to-earth: in other words, more like a podcaster than a politician.

A key part of Trump’s advantage has been how unfiltered and unscripted (and therefore, blunt and honest and different) he sounds compared to traditional politicians. Ezra Klein wrote about this in his piece on political “disinhibition:”

“Politicians are inhibited. Before anything comes out of their mouth, they are running their response through this internal piece of software. Some of them are really good at it. Pete Buttigieg, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama — the software is so fast and efficient as to be almost seamless.

The politicians we sense to be inauthentic — it’s often that the software is slower and buggier. You can see the seams. You can watch the calculations happening in real time. But what that software is doing is inhibiting. It is running their words through a filter of what they shouldn’t say, given who they are and what they are doing and the weight their words carry.”

My main advice for Democrats moving forward is to loosen up the settings on this software. Americans increasingly distrust politicians, the mainstream media, and elite ideologies. They may not understand policy details, but they can tell who’s speaking to them through a filter: who’s putting a feel-good gloss on difficult subjects, or hiding from actual answers behind poll-tested buzzwords and fake smiles. In other words, who’s speaking to them like Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton.

Winning back voters’ trust requires a new candor, casualness, and willingness to confront and validate the emotions barring people from voting blue. Educated progressives and centrists will still need to hash out their fights on policy, which are ultimately the whole point of campaigning for office. But they should treat the task of winning elections as mostly separate, and mostly a messaging exercise. The most important thing Democrats can do to win future elections is to speak plainly and honestly so they don’t sound so scripted, manipulative, unrelatable, and condescending.

This post has run long enough, so I’ll save my fuller theory of elections for a future one. But to put a bow on the thesis here, one implication of my theory is that the eternal flame war between progressive and moderate Democrats after every election loss is a big waste of time.¹⁰ The whole fight is predicated on the idea that one pole of the spectrum has policy positions that voters find relatively popular, while the other has positions they’ve rejected, at least in some narrow respect like economic or social policy. But if elections aren’t really about policy in the first place, that whole spectrum is moot, and we’re all just talking to ourselves.

So if you’ve doomscrolled all the way to the bottom of this screed, I’m afraid the news is mixed. Not only is Trump going back to the White House, but most people who’ve weighed in on how we can prevent this tragedy next time are approaching it from the wrong angle, which does not inspire confidence in Democrats’ ability to get their acts together.

But I’ll try to start the holidays on a more cheerful note. Elections not being about policy does give policymakers more wiggle room to do what they think is best once they’re in office, without being so fearful of political fallout. They just need to know how to sell those choices in the values and terminology ordinary Americans understand, instead of running from the fight and letting Republicans write the narrative. This is easier said than done, of course, and is not the same as giving a free hand to radical ideologies. But if leaders are honest, plainspoken, passionate, relatable, and attentive enough to broad sentiments, I suspect they’ll find voters highly persuadable on policy specifics.

1. Unpopular as “woke” ideas may be, they’ve never really held much sway in Washington. Like conservatives, moderates too often scapegoat radical leftism as the cause of failures actually caused by something else.

2. Or even experts!

3. Jeff forgot to mention that he also embraced student loan forgiveness, another progressive priority.

4. Murphy’s Tweet thread tries to associate neoliberalism with everything from declining friendships to the collapse of churches, demonstrating that term’s infinite stretchiness.

5. An example: progressive Hamilton Nolan claims that “Messaging is easy if you have actually fixed people’s problems,” which I find very naïve about political complexity and human psychology.

6. Even before Biden, many progressive arguments about poverty and inequality are exaggerated or founded on myths.

7. Similarly: stronger labor rights, higher minimum wages, protectionist trade and licensure policies, and more environmental protections all increase businesses’ production costs. Those costs are typically passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices, which is exactly what many of those upset by Biden’s economy cited as their biggest complaint.

8. The one exception, to his credit, is Freddie de Boer.

9. Socialism’s rise in popularity among young Americans owes largely to the radicalizing effects of online echo chambers. My generation was the social media guinea pig, unwittingly incubated in algorithms custom-tailored to fire us up and confirm our biases. We were normally progressive—as progressive as our parents had been at our ages, probably—by the standards of the Bush era. But then Facebook and Twitter made us way more progressive than we had been. Some of that was good, some of it was excessive—but there’s no reason to think the excesses applied only to social issues. The online trends that buffered Bernie Sanders ran perfectly parallel to those that shot Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Ta-Nehisi Coates to brief intellectual stardom. And the people most enamored with Bernie today remain those most tempted to defer to ingroup authorities on things like “how many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck?”

10. At least insofar as the progressive v. moderate spectrum is defined by policy positions, rather than other messaging styles.