The 2024 Democratic disaster actually started on March 14, 2020

Identity politics. Wokeness. And what's next.

I have been in regular contact with a handful of high-level Democratic strategists over the course of this campaign. I haven’t written much about it — I’ve mostly used them as a sounding board for thoughts I had about Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

But, in the wake of the sweeping defeat for Harris and Democrats on Tuesday, I turned to the one party strategist who I consider the biggest outside-the-box thinker among Democrats.

I asked if this person would be willing to diagnose what went wrong and offer suggestions for how Democrats to fix what ails them. The response — honest, thoughtful and, I think, right — is below.

— Chris

March 14, 2020 – the day that set us on a course to where we are today.

When Joe Biden made the transparently political promise in a Sunday evening debate with Bernie Sanders that he would choose a woman vice presidential nominee, it was a tactical gambit steeped in identity politics. With this transactional appeal to the progressive left, Biden traded his responsibility to choose the most qualified potential heir for, instead, a smoother path to the nomination that was likely his before the promise was even made.

This is not to say that there are no qualified women who could assume the presidency. But when it became clear that Kamala Harris could check two boxes (gender and person of color) rather than one, she became an irresistible choice.

Never mind that she had already run a disastrous campaign for the presidency. Never mind that she had already been all over the ideological map. Never mind that she didn’t have the depth of experience that Vice Presidents Biden, Pence, Cheney, Gore, H.W. Bush and Mondale had at the time of their selections. Never mind that Biden himself likely had doubts about her readiness for the highest office or, at the very least, in her ability to win a campaign against Donald Trump.

It was a choice born in the woke politics of our time (a triggering denunciation, I am sure, with those on the left) that was part and parcel of why the Democratic Party has been shedding voters in middle America over the last decade.

Once Biden chose Harris, it became inevitable that one day Democrats would have to confront the challenge of succession. It was folly to assume he would be able to run in 2024 when he would be in his 80s, yet he made the choice anyway with seemingly little regard for how she would stand on her own.

And did he adequately prepare her for the presidency? One can argue that he set her up to take the arrows on the most difficult issues facing his presidency: Immigration and voting rights reform. These challenges — immigration in particular — did her no favors once he did decide to step aside. They became the focal points of Republican attacks in 2024.

Biden also put Harris into an impossible position by campaigning in 2020 as a moderate and then governing from the far left. The linkage between spending trillions on policies aimed at creating an FDR-like legacy led directly to crippling inflation. It was the ultimate in hubris. This only exacerbated the disconnect with working class Americans who struggle to pay radically higher prices for groceries and gas. Those prices have stayed high despite the Biden-Harris Administration’s protestations that the rate of inflation has subsided. And the disaster at the border only fed a paranoia about the “other” who would take their jobs, commit crime and collect safety net benefits at taxpayer expense.

And Biden ultimately put Harris into the worst of predicaments by waiting until July 2024 before withdrawing. The decision to run, enabled by a small cabal in the White House that included his own wife, doomed the Democratic ticket.

To expect a president of the United States to cede power on his own is to expect the impossible. He is only human, and he felt he had more to give. Granted. But those around him who saw his decline up close had a moral duty to the country and their party to stop him from a re-election campaign.

Instead, in the end, Biden left no time for a primary/caucus campaign to succeed him. Maybe Harris would have prevailed in such a campaign and been a better general election candidate for it. Or maybe someone else would have risen to the moment. We will never know.

But this is not to leave Harris without blame. In 2019, she attempted to move to the left of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in her ill-fated presidential effort. Campaigning on Medicare for All, the end of private health insurance, a ban on fracking, and most notably of late, her support for transgender surgeries for convicted felons, ended up putting herself into an impossible bind in 2024.

When Harris framed transgender rights for felons in her own voice and video as part of a “movement” and an “agenda” back in 2019, she confirmed for the skeptical middle, when that video surfaced in 2024, that she did indeed have an agenda that did not match their own. The ad featuring that soundbite will turn out to be even more of a pivotal moment in our country’s history than the Willie Horton advertising of 1988.

It’s almost secondary that Harris ran an ineffective campaign with an inconsistent message, pedestrian advertising, a super PAC obsessed with ad testing that churned out similarly ineffective ads, an illusion of a ground game, and a maddening inability to answer straightforward questions with direct answers. Some of this was born of her own insecurities with the news media and exacerbated by an administration that didn’t trust her to deliver a message for three and a half years.

The lack of a consistent and focused message is probably the largest failing of all. Harris began the campaign by pivoting away from Biden’s ineffective “saving Democracy” message to one of fighting for nebulous freedoms.

But, in the end, she still ended up back at fascism and Democracy. In the first post-Dobbs presidential election, she ran surprisingly few ads directly on abortion. And she rarely spoke in her advertising other than in soundbites from campaign speeches.

Nothing turns off information-avoiding voters more than political campaign imagery. Yet that is all that the Harris campaign ever served up. Sometimes it was news stories and Beyonce music video ads filled with screaming supporters at rallies waving campaign signs. Other times it was forgettable advertising with voice of God narrators intoning an economic message rooted in tax breaks, childcare and too-little-too-late efforts against price gouging.

None of this adequately addressed the agonizing pain of inflation nor the sense of abandonment felt by tens of millions of Americans. And, yes, she did win the debate. But so did Hillary Clinton. Three times over. That’s never enough.

Arguably, the biggest factor was the years of middle American voters being assaulted with political correctness, pronouns, transgender rights, endless forms of equity, reparations, various oppressions and blame that led to an environment where the Democratic nominee literally embodied much of what angered voters most about the Democratic Party. And it was also this nominee who offered them the least when it came to answering their economic anxieties with a consistent focus on the challenges they face. When running as a part of and to succeed an administration with failing marks on all things economic, this was a path to disaster.

The ultimate irony is that efforts to include people of color in Democratic initiatives led to a lackluster African American turnout, and losing almost half of the Hispanic vote, a majority of Hispanic men, and 20 percent of African American men. And despite living in a post-Dobbs world, Trump won a majority of white suburban women.

The path forward for Democrats is to strip identity politics from our language, political staff hiring and candidate recruitment, focus like a laser on economic anxiety, and promote policies that produce economic results in the near term rather than only some far-off hypothetical future that can be too easily derailed by the next administration.

Take advantage of openings like inflation-causing tariffs and the inevitable right-wing effort to scale back the social safety net. And find a new generation of leadership unburdened by decades in Washington that has led to stagnation in office and political attacks for being part of the swamp.

Recruitment of new candidates has never been more urgent, and we should look toward veterans, farmers, teachers, doctors and nurses, union members and those in law enforcement as a starting point for rebuilding our bench. They are the bedrock of the middle class and a place to grow from.

Also, stop with campaign gimmicks like ad-tested appeals that lead to milquetoast results, text-based campaigning that burns out targeted voters, and preaching-to-the-choir outreach that emphasizes base mobilization over true persuasion and big tent politics. Democrats have to return to their roots of speaking to voters on their terms in a human voice, rather than digital bits and bots, or the lectures of a coastal elite that talks down rather than lifts up.

In the meantime, exhausted Democrats will have to watch Trump take revenge, undo the progress of the last four years, and destroy our country with no branches of government, levers of power, or staff guardrails to stop him.

Right now, a 2017-18 style resistance is hard to imagine. Rallies and marches are inevitable, but they won’t bear the fruit we all hope for until we re-learn how to talk with those we disagree with.

We need to remember that those in government, first and foremost, have a responsibility to keep people safe, to provide opportunity and fairness for all, and to restore a system where merit is more important than demographic checklists. More than anything else, that’s what our fellow citizens are seeking.

Until we can accept that, Democrats will be doomed to repeat this history over and over again. Ultimately, people don’t vote for policies. They vote for human beings, character and resolve. In the absence of that, they will vote their fears. Every time. Like they just did. Again.