Given Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party’s loss of both the popular vote and the electoral college, their failed strategy must be placed, studied, and corrected within the context of similar elections in similar countries this year.

Global Context

Across the world’s most affluent democracies, 2024 has been a year of “change” elections–those in which the party in power is unseated. This change has occurred regardless of the ruling parties’ ideology or place within the political spectrum of their countries. Conservatives have been unseated in The United Kingdom and Japan, moderates and the center-right in France and Austria, and now moderates and the center-left in the US. The victors, in most cases, have been populists, often right-wing. Their messages are familiar: “the system” is not working for most people, the promise of financial security for hard work is hollow (for you), societal benefits owed to working people are being given to undeserving others (like immigrants), the elites are out to get you (and aren’t very bright), and fundamental changes are needed.

They are largely correct. “The system” is not working for most people. The promise is broken, but not because of immigrants. While each nation’s change has been caused by country-specific systemic issues, post-COVID economic shocks, especially inflation, are near-universal factors. In many cases, inflation made the cost of living untenable months before it caught people’s wages up. Even in the best case, the “typical psychology” of inflation is unfavorable to incumbents: wage increases are thought to reflect hard work and talent, while price increases are thought to be the government’s fault.

The Harris Campaign

In the US, post-COVID inflation was blamed on the Biden administration in exactly this way, despite the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which helped to secure a soft, non-recessionary landing. But Americans still felt (and indeed were) financially insecure, and while the Harris campaign did emphasize her working-class upbringing (Trump’s a billionaire, she worked at McDonald’s) this was undermined by her refusal to distance herself from Biden, who voters blamed for inflation. Harris eventually chose to abandon such messaging, allegedly at the behest of her brother-in-law, Uber’s chief legal officer. Fundamentally, in the face of a status quo unfavorable to a majority of Americans, the Trump campaign ran against that status quo, while the Harris campaign ran against Trump. The fact that the Harris campaign started so late could have been a benefit if it had noticed the global anti-establishment headwinds and made a populist pivot to capitalize on them.

Crime may have been the same story, which a supermajority of Americans consider an increasing concern, both in their communities and nationally. This has shaky grounding: while rates of some crimes did rise under Biden, others fell. One explanation is that homelessness reached record-highs in this time period, which Americans may associate with local crime. Homelessness rates are generally highest in the bluest states and cities due to rent control, zoning, and environmental protection laws that dissuade affordable housing construction. Insufficient housing supply raises home and rental prices, increasing homelessness, and gradually forcing Americans to move out of blue states and into more affordable red ones. That Americans in this situation, or soon to be in, may resent the Democratic Party as a result should be no surprise.

This economic explanation does not ignore the tremendous growth of non-white support for Trump–it explains it. Before the 2016 election, Chuck Schumer explained what might be called the Democratic Party’s strategy since Bill Clinton. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in Western Pennsylvania,” he claimed, “we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin.” That is–faced with an inflection point between progressive, working-class populism and moderate, highly-educated establishment politics, the Democratic Party chose the latter–exactly the opposite of what Bernie Sanders had run on. Sanders’s approach, it should be noted, was most successful with nearly every demographic that shifted right this year, especially Hispanic Americans. The truth the Democratic elite have denied is that while racial issues are of critical importance, they do not, in national politics at least, truly supersede class. Black and Hispanic Americans are disproportionately working class–there is no way to sideline the White working class without sidelining the majority of Black and Hispanic Americans, too.

This is not to deny that racism and sexism among many White Americans could be a factor behind many votes against Harris, but overall, White Americans were the only racial group to vote for Harris in higher margins than for Biden, driven by a wealthy, college-educated wing–in many cases the left-wing children of Schumer’s suburbanites.

Last, evidence that Harris went “too far left” or “too far right” is as of yet as contradictory as it is scant. There is at least as much evidence to suggest that her campaign was perceived as “too far left” on Transgender athletes and DEI by Democrat-Republican swing voters as there is to suggest that it was perceived as “too far right” on Gaza and labor by Green/etc.–Democrat swing voters. While many have criticized the Harris campaign’s decision to show off support from the Cheney family, any negative impact from doing so (outside of majority-Arab-American cities) seems likelier to stem from the Cheneys being seen as “the establishment” than from being seen as Republicans. There is, after all, a long history of campaigns reaching across the aisle for endorsements, and the Democrat-Republican swing voter population is far larger than its Green/etc.-Democrat counterpart.

Next Time (?)

The Democratic Party must undergo many changes to adapt to the electoral landscape revealed on Tuesday. On policy, Democrats must become the party of YIMBYs–combatting the national housing shortage crisis by constructing new affordable housing. Democrats must also embrace the Biden administration’s pro-worker and anti-monopoly policies. The Biden administration was right, both morally and politically, to improve everyday people’s lives, but they never figured out how to effectively communicate to the American people that they were doing so, and neither did Harris. Whether Harris ever had a shot given the year’s global trends is debatable, but the lesson of this election will hold true for decades: an infusion of left-wing populism–both in policy and rhetoric–is necessary for the Democratic Party’s future, and, indeed the country’s.

The list above is by no means complete, and this piece should not be taken as a complete accounting of the causes of the nation’s rightward shift.