Yves here. This piece tries to explain why the Democrats are favored in 2024 as shown by Kamala’s defeat. But IMHO, even though the Democrats are doing some kind of corpse-stuffing for various losses, they still haven’t got the real story. The reason they avoid having messages beyond “Orange Man/Republicans are bad!” that any ideas that would unite their long-suffering base would be fighting for the interests of ordinary workers. Since this group has come to celebrate the ruling class as the apotheosis of what Americans should be and is funded by squilloinaires who get rich eating cheap food, they have set themselves up for relegation to the dustbin of history.
By Sam Rosenthal, political director of RootsAction. Originally published on Common Dreams
As the debate over the Democratic National Committee’s autopsy report continues to rage, many Democrats in the party’s establishment wing are offering their two cents. The latest offering is a column in the Bulwark, written by Rob Flaherty, former deputy manager of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.
Flaherty’s episode “Here’s What the DNC Autopsy Told You” discusses his conversations with DNC staffers tasked with writing the unreleased report. He then continued his analysis of what went wrong with Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign.
To his credit, Flaherty is willing to do what few mainstream Democrats have done since Harris’ 2024 loss: take a long, and public, look at the campaign’s flaws. But, as with many other analyzes from the party’s establishment wing, he believes that an overhaul of the campaign’s messaging strategy and media resources could have won the race.
Promoters working within the party, have been arguing that there was no messaging intelligence that could be seen over Harris’ campaign pitch: a complete lack of popular policies. (At RootsAction, where I am the political director, we have written ours after 2024 autopsy (that’s right at the heart of this issue, and where Harris’s campaign got out of step with popular sentiment.)
Flaherty, by his own account, was largely responsible for the digital dimension of the campaign (social media, content creators, etc.) so his analysis continues through that lens. You spend a lot of time worrying about message alignment—the alignment between earned and paid media, between campaign and independent spending, and so on. What is missing from that analysis, however, is what that message is it was.
In the wake of Joe Biden’s presidency, the nation has been in a lot of trouble. The recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic has been uneven, with many at the bottom of the labor ladder still struggling to find stable work and keep pace with inflation. Americans at all income levels, in fact, have been struggling due to higher costs of basic consumer goods. And, while Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza happened to anyone with a social media account, Biden and his administration continued their unreserved support for Israel. Above all, the unpopular Biden broke his promise to “the bridge” president, ignored polls showing that most Democrats wanted a different candidate, and unwisely chose to run for a second term—exiting after a disastrous debate and intense pressure from within the party.
His vice presidency was then plunged into the unfortunate situation of having only 107 days (as he often remind us) to mount a presidential campaign that could defeat Donald Trump. This included major logistical challenges, of course—but it also meant counting down to Biden’s presidency. Would Harris have continued to argue, as the Biden administration has, that Bidenomics has been a boon for the working class? Will you continue to support Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he dismantles the Gaza Strip? These questions needed answers. Harris and his campaign, however, seem unwilling to provide them.
Flaherty seems to understand that this was a big problem for Harris. He laments the campaign’s laxity with its core message, comparing it to Trump’s admonition: “Trump’s message was very clear: The economy feels bad and Harris says it’s good.
He is very focused on the vibes: “When there [BidenHQ] The account switched from Biden to Harris, the campaign conveyed a change in vibe that was reflected in the polls. We needed to rally the base, make the campaign cool, and have a campaign tone that was more flexible and patient than the candidate’s.”
Putting aside how the “vibe shift” is showing up in the polls, it’s clear from the start that Flaherty’s level of analysis is a sign, nothing. He gets into the weeds of social media accounts and their influence in relation to key constituencies. Is KamalaHQ’s online presence also for “girls and gays” coded? Did the account close the men? For someone who uses a footnote to scold the “DC crowd” for believing that Biden is unpopular, Flaherty seems to have drunk the Beltway insider Kool-Aid when it comes to examining the impact of a social media account in an election in which more than 152 million Americans voted.
Vibes should not be the basis of a campaign. Yes, the sour mood on the electorate requires a certain approach, but it does not mean that the Democrats are completely incapable of the difficult task of creating a political message that resonates. Communication and messaging between social media influencers, private expenses, surrogates, and official campaign accounts is worthless if those voices don’t make a compelling argument. In 2024, the Democrats’ biggest political debt was that voters didn’t know what four years of Democratic administration would entail. It was like Harris running away from Biden’s bad name campaign promise to donors in 2019: that “fundamentally nothing will change.” Such an approach could not be implemented in 2024, due to all the discontent and public concern.
When Flaherty dives into the arcana of digital strategy, he seems to understand the problem well. He points out that the Democrats, in focusing on getting relatively well-off, urban voters, wasted too many votes elsewhere. “The result [Democratic] the coalition, which includes a shrinking portion of working-class voters of color, especially men, is not large enough to outshine the MAGA-inspired base.” He even goes on to write that Democrats should embrace “economic populism by the teeth.”
Progressives in the Democratic Party can agree with the last point. Poll after poll confirms that this is a popular policy: Most voters support taxing the rich and distributing wealth more evenly. Flaherty understands enough to pay lip service to this idea, but he is unwilling or unable to pursue this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion: Democrats should I hugged you this fact, they have integrated it into their political platform, and let it be heard in all their campaign messages. Like many in the Democratic Party establishment, Flaherty demonstrates an uncanny ability to diagnose the party’s political ills without being able to cry out for a cure.
This trend continues. Flaherty briefly touches on the rift between Harris and abolitionist activists, but is determined to avoid any negative impact it may have had on his campaign. He writes that the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza hurt the campaign “but not in the way people think.” He then goes on to quote another campaign worker who portrays Biden’s support for Israel (and Harris’ inability to create sunshine between himself and Biden) as “a big fish, rotting all around.” [the campaign’s] neck.”
This is exactly how progressives think Gaza has hurt the campaign. Those of us who supported the ceasefire, and who complained that Harris rejected the policy of unquestioning support that the Biden administration had rejected, worried that the stain of America’s morality in Gaza would not be washed away, even as the Democrats changed the common carriers in the middle of the river. We were worried that sensitive constituencies—young, Arab and Muslim Americans—who had been attacked on social media by the relentless carnage from Gaza would not be able to hold their noses at the ballot box when it came time to vote for the Democratic ticket, even for Trump. Harris’ campaign was weakened because the 6.8 million Americans who supported Biden in 2020 did not support him. With such a large drop in support, it makes sense to focus on an issue that the Democratic Party’s policy was completely inconsistent with. popular feeling among the Democrats’ base. This disconnect cannot simply be pushed aside.
Flaherty admits that, when Harris’ campaign began, “they were playing on the edge.” That is, campaign staff were only allowed to make minor changes to the campaign that had already begun; the time for grand strategy had passed. Postmortems from insiders about the 2024 election sometimes read like the accounts of natural disaster survivors. But this was a self-inflicted tragedy for the Democrats; Flaherty himself was the deputy manager of Biden’s 2024 campaign.
Donald Trump’s political career is coming to an end, but the effects of Trumpism will be felt for decades to come. If Democrats want to present themselves as a convincing alternative to the post-MAGA Republican Party, they will have to articulate their political differences. Progressive policy is increasingly popular among Democrats and the American electorate in general: universal health care, debt-free community college, The Law of AIas well as the end of endless warall count as attractive policy planks with majority support. Any candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028 should have this policy at the core of their platform.
Otherwise, no amount of consulting, product management, outreach, or media shaping can sustain a campaign that has no message at its core. If Democrats can’t internalize the real lessons of Harris’ campaign, they may be doomed to repeat their failures.
