For nine years, Democrats abandoned all else to focus on one thing: keeping Donald Trump out of office. In the process, they sidelined working-class concerns, lost crucial voters, and still failed — not once, but twice — to accomplish their singular goal.
By Ashely Bishop and Spencer Snyder, Jacobin
For the last three election cycles, the main project of the Democratic Party has been to keep Donald Trump out of office. Advancing policy to improve the lives of working people has been, at best, an afterthought and, at worst, a distraction. Every other aspect of politics has been deprioritized to favor this single goal, with “vote blue no matter who” emerging as the rallying cry.
But despite the elevation of beating Trump over important policy areas like health care, education, housing, worker protections, and so on, the strategy still failed — twice. Not only are working people now set to face the immense challenges of a second Trump term without any palpable progress that might have been achieved during the Joe Biden years, but the Democrats have also dramatically harmed their reputation and lost scores of working-class voters for nothing in the process.
In 2016, Bernie Sanders, running on a slate of policies designed to uplift the working class, faced unique opposition from within his own party and was presented as an unacceptable political risk. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment, rather than learn from the surprising success of the Sanders campaign, blamed it for losing Clinton the general election.
Sanders faced the same interparty acrimony in 2020, with party elites coordinating the dropout of several popular primary opponents to boost Joe Biden’s chances. In the end, when Biden stepped over Bernie into the White House, the best the Democrats could say about him was, “Hey, at least he’s not Trump!”
In this most recent presidential election, Kamala Harris, especially toward the end of her campaign, succumbed to the fantasy that people were sufficiently afraid of Trump’s dictatorial potential and losing democracy that they would look past her party’s complete lack of major proposals to improve their material conditions. As even people close to the campaign have suggested, they were wrong.
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