Democrats after Biden

As more elaborate analyses of the Presidential election become available, it appears that Joe Biden’s Gaza policy was a big negative for Harris that dragged down Democratic voter participation. That doesn’t mean the issue was decisive in itself. But it does indicate it was important, as shown in the results of a poll by the IMEU [Institute for Middle East Understanding] Policy Project and YouGov. (1)

As Ryan Grim notes, “From 2020 to 2024, Democrats saw a staggering dropoff in support at the presidential level, with some 19 million people who voted for Joe Biden staying home (or not mailing in their ballots) in 2024.” (2) And he cautions, “Citing a top reason for not voting is far different than it being the only reason not to vote.”

He talks about it here: (3)



It’s broadly clear that the Democrats need a different approaching to defining their party’s branding, and doing so with substantive policy positions, not just as campaign marketing. One of the ironies of Biden’s Presidency is that he actually did move economic policies more toward a Keynesian approach to business cycles, industrial policy, unionization, and antitrust enforcement. But public perceptions of the economy were seemingly not closely connected to the actual macroeconomic situation, which by all conventional measures were very good by the standards of recent decades.

Adam Tooze reminds us that how economic condition affect voting behavior is not something that can be read off a table of macroeconomic statistics:

Economic sentiment is not an independent cause. If someone declares that worries about the cost of living swung them to vote for Trump in 2024, it would be naive to imagine that if Biden’s economic policy had delivered a marginally lower inflation rate that voter would have swapped back to the Biden camp.

In the United States today, political partisanship and worldview, individual socio-economic experience and macroeconomics are profoundly entangled. (4)

There has previously been a lot of analysis of how inflation expectations among Republicans were particularly high during the campaign compared to Democrats. But after Trump was elected, Republicans suddenly considered inflation to be much less of a problem.

... technocratic policy advocates, especially those in the Democratic camp, who discuss inflation expectations and unemployment-inflation trade offs as though they were non political variables to be optimized by policy maker and on that basis make highly conservative recommendations to the Democratic camp. In America today, government driven by fear of “de-anchoring” inflation expectations is government driven by fear of Republican and “independent” voters whose expectations are far more likely to de-anchor.

The Republican Party has established itself as the party of billionaires and people who see politics as a form of professional wrestling entertainment. The Democrats are stuck with being a messy combination of traditional liberal welfare-state and pro-union sentiments and commitment to civil rights, while trying as hard as they can to chase the flood on wealthy-donor campaign money magnified radically by the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, and constantly tempted to muddle its image even more by pursuing “bipartisanship” that no actual voter cares about, including Kamala Harris campaigning just before the election with Liz Cheney, a rightwing Republicans that Republicans reject and Democrats see as a iconic figure of the Republican Party.

And as we see in the current transition, we see lots of Democrats in Congress trying to find ways to be “bipartisan” with the Trumpistas, while the leadership isn’t clearly defining opposition themes.

The Democrats have to improve their political focus and build up the state party infrastructures. They can’t just muddle along like its 1993.

Notes:

(1) New Poll Shows Gaza Was A Top Issue For Biden 2020 Voters Who Cast A Ballot For Someone Besides Harris. Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, Jan. 2025. <https://www.imeupolicyproject.org/postelection-polling> (Accessed: 2024-17-01).

(2) Grim, Ryan (2025): Kamala Harris Paid the Price for Not Breaking With Biden on Gaza, New Poll Shows. Drop Site 01/15/20125. <https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/kamala-harris-gaza-israel-biden-election-poll> (Accessed: 2024-17-01).

(3) STUN POLL: Gaza COST Kamala Election. Breaking Points YouTube channel 01/15/2025. Breaking Points YouTube channel 01/15/2025. <https://youtu.be/Cty1g5ItBVw?si=Y2ME3MNmW3rugsx1> (Accessed: 2024-17-01).

(4) Tooze, Adam (2025): Against overcorrection. Yellen's Treasury defends the legacy of Democratic fiscal policy. Chartbook 01/17/2025. <https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-346-against-overcorrection> (Accessed: 2024-17-01).