The Democratic Party is in crisis. In three contests against Donald Trump, it lost one, narrowly squeaked by in another, then lost more decisively than the first time. In Trump’s latest victory, over 90% of counties across the country shifted in his direction. Now people across the left are scrambling to diagnose what ails the party and offer a prescription.
A group of center-left commentators and party operatives have converged on a diagnosis that could be summarized as “the wokes lost it.” This set argues that social justice activists who focus on oppression tied to identity had too much influence on the Democratic Party and helped torpedo Harris’ campaign. Working class people were alienated, they contend, by issues such as defund the police, trans rights, reparations for Black Americans, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, campus “cancel culture,” diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and the ever-evolving academic-sounding jargon that surrounds these issues. The solution, many of them imply or explicitly say, is for Democrats to become more socially conservative and stop opening their arms to “identity politics” or social justice advocacy.
"The wokes lost it" narrative relies on describing a fantastical presidential campaign that never existed.
This narrative is seductive for many veterans in the Democratic establishment, whose instincts have long been to mimic the right when in trouble. But this narrative is mostly wrong. It rests on a fictional account of the past, a handful of indefensible analytic leaps, and easily debunked scapegoating. A more careful reading of the facts helps illustrate how the party would benefit from a wholesale reorientation toward economic populism.
“The wokes lost it” narrative relies on describing a fantastical presidential campaign that never existed. Harris did not run on defund the police or identity politics or any niche social justice issue. Harris brandished her track record as a former tough-on-crime prosecutor. She virtually never mentioned her racial or gender identity. On the hot-button issue of immigration, Harris promised to enact some of the most restrictive immigration and border policies in decades. She also distanced herself from the trans community by refusing to take a clear position when asked if transgender Americans should have access to gender-affirming care in this country. Harris ran mostly on a mix of positive vibes, an anodyne “opportunity economy” program, a pledge to maintain the international order and a promise to defend democracy, civil rights and normalcy. Harris’ efforts came after Biden ran a defensive and visionless campaign that banked almost entirely on fear of another Trump term and never came close to approaching anything “woke”-coded. In sum, there was no evidence of niche activists controlling the party.
Some of “the wokes lost it” proponents say that the right place to start for understanding where Democrats went astray is 2019 to 2020, when Democratic candidates staked out a number of progressive positions in the Democratic presidential primaries, and the George Floyd protest movement spurred new norms of inclusivity. This is a weak line of argument for a number of reasons. First of all, how can one vigorously argue that a 2024 loss can be blamed on events that happened half a decade ago, when we know that most voters don’t even follow current elections closely, voters have short memories, and swing voters are low-information voters?
Second, in that era the Democratic Party did exactly what “the wokes lost it” camp wanted it to. Most Democrats rejected the social justice movements that tried to influence Democrats at the time or took relatively moderate positions on their issues — and ultimately the party rallied behind a septuagenarian presidential candidate whose very value proposition was that he was a centrist uninterested in newfangled progressive goals. Biden opposed decriminalizing border crossings. He didn’t just reject defund the police, he called for more police funding. He told donors that “nothing will fundamentally change” and boasted about having worked with segregationist senators. And while Trump made “cancel culture” a theme of this 2020 presidential campaign, Biden ignored identity-focused debate and ran on promises of defending democracy, taking Covid seriously and investing in infrastructure, clean energy and manufacturing. Even as social justice movements were highly salient in American life, Biden won. How can one argue that years later, Harris — Biden’s vice president and successor who tied herself to his non-identitarian political style and campaigned with neoconservative icon Liz Cheney — lost because of a fading social justice political style she never even embraced?
To be fair, there is one moment from that era that did arise in this election. Harris, running for the 2020 Democratic nomination, in 2019 responded to a questionnaire from the ACLU, in which she affirmed her support for providing gender affirming surgery to transgender people in prison. (This was already the law, which means prisons were able to provide gender-affirming services under Trump, as Harris pointed out during her 2024 campaign.) Republicans ran attack ads against Harris in the 2024 cycle based on that answer. Even though Harris kept trans issues at arm’s length during her campaign and certainly did not run on it as a campaign issue, Republican fixation on it may have affected voter perception of her.
But the evidence that this one issue is what did the Democrats in is impossible to defend. As my colleague Hayes Brown has pointed out, trans rights ranked low on issue priority surveys; multiple surveys and studies suggest that anti-trans ads do not have a significant effect on vote choice; and moderate Democratic Senate candidates such as Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Rep. Colin Allred of Texas were not saved in their 2024 races by swinging to the right on trans issues. Meanwhile, the overwhelming evidence we have from years of pre-election polling, issue priority surveys, international trends and focus groups is that the Democrats, like incumbents across the democratic world, lost the trust of voters on the economy, mostly due to inflation. The pro-Trump swing across tons of demographic groups nationally is consistent with that line of grievance, as political scientist Thomas Wood, a political scientist at Ohio State University, has pointed out: “Secular dissatisfaction with Biden’s economic stewardship affected most demographic groups in a fairly homogeneous way.”
To sum it up, “the wokes lost it” proponents revise history so as to not have to admit that the Democrats just ran their playbook, and that it failed catastrophically. Observing their recommendations would either mean repeating the same plan or becoming markedly more socially conservative. (Notably, this set of commentators typically fails to spell out how, perhaps out of nervousness about personally singling out which marginalized groups shouldn’t make the cut in 2028.) But Democrats have not reaped fruit from their recent attempts to tack visibly to the right, such as their rightward swing on immigration and policing. And this prescription ignores the reality that the election data tells us the party is failing to hear ordinary people's experience of the economy. Polls indicate that swing voters didn't want to hear about technical management of an economic system they think needs sweeping change.
There is a way for Democrats to both tap into universalism and into widespread frustration with the economy: aggressive economic populism. Tap into people’s class identity through class-first left-wing politics that pits working Americans of all backgrounds against billionaires, corporations and the 1%. Under this paradigm, bigotry of all kinds is framed as a tool by which elites distract and divide Americans from their economic exploitation. Conversely, anti-bigotry should be viewed as a war cry of freedom-lovers and a weapon for keeping the citizenry’s focus on class war. Economic proposals would not just be about incremental improvement but bringing down costs and reimagining freedom through the offerings of social democracy and cracking down on corporate greed. This would of course cause a bit of discomfort for an actually influential interest group that somehow the "the wokes lost it" crowd always forgets to mention: economic elites. But it would unite and excite the people and pave the path for a life of greater freedom in every sphere of life.
Democrats ought to stop whining about social movements, which are a fact of political life. They also ought to stop implying that movements and subcultures possess power that they don't, while ignoring how wealthy donors shape the party's economic agenda. The reality is political leaders and parties will always have to manage unruly coalitions and stake out positions that are in dialogue with but distinct from interest groups. Trump fairly successfully distanced himself from the national abortion ban advocates in the Republican coalition, and he successfully deceived many into thinking he would protect Social Security over the instincts of fiscal hawks in his party. Democrats, as the ostensible party of social change and egalitarianism, will always bear this burden of engaging movements even more heavily than the GOP. But a party must have an identity and that identity should be grounded in an economic sensibility. It's time for Dems to wake up and build a real economic centerpiece for a party that has failed to establish a clear sense of self since the Reagan era.