Right now Democrats are struggling to push any meaningful legislation through Congress in the face of threatened Senate filibusters. It is common to blame Sen. Joe Manchin (and a few other Democratic Senators) for blocking progress, but the root causes of this stalemate go back to the 2020 campaign.
The Democratic Party failed to propose a compelling future for the country. This was the result of nominating Joe Biden, a known centrist, as the presidential nominee, and his strategy for being elected. The Biden campaign ran on getting rid of Donald Trump and fixing the covid pandemic, a very limited message that didn’t help down-ballot Democrats get elected.
Dumping Trump and fixing covid were noble and essential goals, but they were never going to translate into large Democratic victories in Congress. We can trace the 50-50 Senate (and we should thank our lucky stars we even got that) to this lack of compelling Democratic vision, and we can trace our weak control of the House to that same cause.
Problems With the 2020 Campaign
I mentioned this lack of compelling message both during the campaign and more recently. The typical response is that I’m just wrong because Biden and the party ran on a very progressive platform. But this isn’t borne out by the facts. During the campaign, and more recently, I looked at the actual messaging from the Biden campaign, specifically what the public was seeing as represented by Web search engines.
For example, here are the top ten topics the Biden campaign ran on during the general campaign for President:
- Biden is eager to debate Trump
- Biden would shut down economy if scientists recommended it [appears twice]
- Biden is not a fan of packing the SCOTUS
- Biden blames Trump for the coronavirus crisis and civil unrest
- Biden would use executive powers to force Americans to wear masks
- Biden says President has legal authority to order people to wear masks
- Biden says wearing a mask is more important than being a tough guy
- Biden considering black women for his VP pick
- Biden claims majority of Americans are good people, but 10-15% are “not very good”
- Biden says “hellish” wildfires will be more frequent if Trump wins a second term
In summary, he says that Trump is a bad person and that he will use the powers of the presidency to better handle covid. He says he’s considering a black woman for a running mate.
None of these are topics which a congressional candidate could pick up and run on. An example of that would be, “Biden backs Medicare for All”. Another example would be, “Biden says a minimum wage of $15/hour is essential for workers”. These would provide the foundation for candidates to go get seats in Congress. Voters could see the concrete benefit for them voting for Democratic congressional and presidential candidates.
The ten topics above represent the top Google search results between 7 April (when Sen. Bernie Sanders left the race) and 3 November (election day) 2020 for the phrase “Biden says”. (The Google search term for this is: “Biden says” before:2020-11-03 after:2020-04-06.) This is what the public was actually hearing from the campaign. [One topic, that Biden would shut down the economy if scientists recommended it, appeared twice in the top ten results, so I’ve added the eleventh result as number 10 on the list above. The topics listed are in the order returned by Google, meaning the first one is the one Google’s algorithm thinks is most likely you want to see.]
Lest you think that I’m cherry picking topics from Google, I also ran searches for the months of May through October 2020, and selected the top three for each month. All of the top results by month show more of Biden either attacking Trump or making claims he could handle the pandemic better, or both, and a few miscellaneous other items that wouldn’t help down-ballot Democrats. The lone exception is one article about how a Biden proposal to spend $700 billion would create American jobs. He also says he would be President for all Americans, whether they voted for him or not, which is really a reiteration of his plan to work with Republicans (in Congress, meaning the Senate).
To make sure this isn’t an artifact of using a Google search, I compared results for the campaign period with the results of the same search on DuckDuckGo. There’s no material difference. DuckDuckGo turned up a slightly different list, but that list included such things as:
- Biden says Hunter Biden laptop story is Russian plan
- Biden calls for unity in Gettysburg speech
- Biden says the American idea was never lived up to
- Biden says he made the “stupid bastards” comment in jest
- Biden says he hasn’t taken a cognitive test
- Biden says if Trump had acted sooner on covid, “all the people would still be alive”
- Biden says MLK assassination did not have the worldwide impact George Floyd’s killing did
This list has more items where Biden is defending himself against various charges (like the Hunter Biden laptop story and his claim “stupid bastards” was made in jest). It has his Gettysburg speech call for unity (which is an excellent thing in a campaign, but not actionable by down-ballot candidates).
Perhaps candidates could have picked up on his call for unity, his comment that we haven’t yet lived up to the American ideal (of treating everyone with dignity and respect, let’s say), and his comment that George Floyd’s killing had a worldwide impact to call for police reforms and a more united country, united across race and ethnic barriers. But that would have been them making campaign material on their own, not a unified message from the party that they could run on.
What we see here, across the entire campaign, is a strategy that has no unifying theme that any other candidate could run on. It notably lacks anything that puts the Republicans at a disadvantage. Look, the Republican Party is the party of death and destruction. They are the party of exploiting the people. Surely there’s something we could run on that’s better than that.
Don’t Think of a Republican
As for being “President for all Americans,” this is another problem with the Biden campaign. He ran on working with Republicans. This was a misguided appeal for Republicans (the very people who hate him and want to keep him out of office) to vote for him.
This set up the dynamic we see today. Now, Biden has to contend with Sen. Joe Manchin, who is promoting bipartisanship in the Senate. Biden’s campaign provided the exact talking point Manchin needed to launch his stubborn resistance to Democratic legislation passing Congress. Manchin says he will only support bills that have Republican support.
How is this supposed to work in practical or political terms? In practical terms, the Republican Party is not a legitimate political party. They don’t have the good of the country at heart. To the degree you “work with” them and have them provide any input to bills, those bills will—by definition—be bad for the country. The worst thing for the country is to work with Republicans and let them be part of any resulting legislation. Their whole raison d’être is for people to look out for themselves. You can’t expect help from Republicans, just “You’re on your own, sucker!" Working with them is a recipe for weakening the country and allowing the very rich to extract more wealth and power from the politically weak.
And in political terms, getting Republican votes in the Senate means watering down legislation so much it is meaningless, or not passing anything at all. Which brings us to today. Republicans refuse to spend another dime on new government programs. They refuse to raise taxes, even though the Republican tax cuts over the last few decades have all proved to be unmitigated disasters. While not helping the U.S. economy in any way (see Recession, Great), they have steadily moved money from the working class and the poor to gated communities, where it is trapped outside the working part of the economy.
A sensible response would be to get rid of all those tax cuts. But do you have a single Republican vote to do so? Sensible people think not.
Why don’t Democrats operate the way Republicans do? Let’s take stock.
- Republicans have armed militant groups backing them.
- Republicans mounted a violent insurrection intended to take over the government.
- Republicans use any rule in Congress they can to get what they want and to stop their opponents getting anything they want.
- Republicans denied a SCOTUS nominee a vote. They’ve denied nominees to federal courts a vote. Neither their Presidents nor their Senators represent the majority of voters in the country, and therefore their picks for the SCOTUS mean it is illegitimate. SCOTUS opinions do not represent a majority of the people.
It’s shocking when you compare Democrats to Republicans. Democrats are deficient in every category. Okay, “deficient” may be too strong, because you can see from this list we don’t want to be exactly like them. But, look, couldn’t we just be strong?
What would it be like if Democrats fought political battles the way Republicans do? I’m not suggesting we raise armed militant groups or launch violent insurrections to put the threat of physical violence behind our positions, but could we actually have some aggression from Democrats?
For example, Democrats have worked with Republicans on immigration reform. No! Don’t do that!
Instead, take the INS to court and demand they stop deporting minors brought here by their parents. Those minors were not breaking the law, and deporting them is unconstitutional. Doing so penalizes them for the sins of their parents, a clear case of attainder, which is outlawed by the Constitution.
Yes, this is a novel theory. Yes, opponents will vigorously oppose it. Yes, the SCOTUS, full of right-wing zealots, is likely to rule against it. I don’t care.
In taking this case to the Court, we are making the case to the public that it is unfair to treat these minors as if they were criminals.
If we do that, we can take DACA off the table. We don’t have to negotiate it as part of immigration reform. This puts us in a stronger bargaining position on immigration reform, to get the parts we want.
This is an example how Democrats should think about and strategize political opposition to the Republicans. You take an offensive position. Defensive strategy is losing strategy. You can’t win every battle. To even stay even, you must go on the offensive at some point.
For example, Democrats want abortions to be legal but rare. No! Don’t do that!
Instead, pass laws in New York, California, and Illinois that define “life” (rights as a person) to begin at birth. That’s an aggressive position. Now, when you have a SCOTUS case on when “life” begins, you argue that it doesn’t begin with a fetal heart beat, it begins with sentience, which happens at or near the moment of birth. You talk about how much the other side wants the rights of the mother to be compromised because people have religious beliefs about pregnancy that don’t stand up to scrutiny. Now you have an offensive position. You make them fight for every inch of position they want to take.
Right now, we are compromising on the terms of not allowing abortion at all. But if we are aggressive about setting rights at birth, then any compromise will come from a position of strength. How much of her rights are they trying to take away? How do they justify that assault on her rights?
Is the Biden Administration a Failure?
Let’s just say I’m not criticizing the Biden Administration. I think of them as a far better alternative to a second Trump term. Each day we have revelations how Trump tried to create a dictatorship. If he’d been re-elected, we’d have a full-on white supremacist dictator stomping out civil and human rights here and around the world.
So, was focusing almost solely on the downfall of Trump a good strategy for Biden? We will never know, but I don’t think so.
In the first place, anyone running a competent campaign could have defeated Trump in 2020. He was destined to lose the moment SARS-CoV-2 entered the U.S., and probably from the moment it escaped into the human population (regardless of source). Republicans are incapable of handling this kind of threat. They don’t want government to act effectively and they don’t believe in science. But the only way to handle a worldwide pandemic is with strong, effective government action based on science.
Republicans think science is a rival political theory intended to defeat them. They are constitutionally incapable of embracing science or basing any decisions on it. Trump, as the epitome of a Republican politician, was never going to be able to handle covid, and his failure was going to defeat him regardless of who ran as the Democratic nominee. Literally, I could have defeated Trump, having no political presence, because he was history as soon as covid made history. (I would have flattened him, too, because Trump doesn’t know things. I know things.)
So, we could have run either Sen. Bernie Sanders or Sen. Elizabeth Warren and won the White House either way, IMHO. But because they were issues-based politicians, it would have meant much wider wins in the House and Senate. That means, they likely would have had working majorities in both houses, making it much easier to pass legislation. It would have had a knock-on effect of improving Democratic presence in the states, which would have had the follow-on effect of making it easier to redistrict without as much disadvantage and would have made it much easier to defeat Republican voter suppression and election stealing bills.
Should we have done that? We didn’t even need to do that. All we needed was for Joe Biden to run on one (or more) progressive issues. That would have been sufficient for down-ballot Democrats to pick up that issue and run for their own seats.
It is important to win elections. But it is vastly more important to convince the American people you are the political party best looking out for their interests, because then they vote for you, and you win elections.
The 2024 Election
Right now, we should be looking for the next progressive candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. We need to avoid the big mistake of 2020, our failure to nominate someone who would aggressively promote the Democratic (i.e., progressive) vision of the future.
Who is going to run against the Republicans? We had someone, Joe Biden, who ran against a single Republican example, but not someone who ran against the Republican Party. In fact, he wanted to work with them. We should never run someone who wants to work with Republicans, until the Republican Party is fully reformed. The proper strategy is to make your deals with the American people, and then tell Republicans in office what they can do to support what the American people want.
So, in 2024, who is going to promote an attractive, progressive future? Who is going to run on single-payer healthcare? Who is going to run on a full assault on climate change? Who is going to run on forcing the police to follow the law? Who is going to protect our communities from corruption and abuse? Who is going to get rid of the war on drug addicts and start protecting the health of the public? Who is going to redress the systemic injustices of the past, like red-lining, racist policing, and voter suppression? Who is going to get rid of hidden money in politics? Who is going to reduce the size of the military and set up proper regional alliances, so that we don’t bear the cost of the world’s security all on our own? Who is going to revise taxes to eliminate the wealth and income disparity? Who is going to raise minimum incomes and get more jobs for Americans?
That Could Have Been Me
If you are following this, you might be Kamala Harris, VP, and you might be thinking, “That could have been me.” Indeed. If we’d run Harris in 2020, she might have run on at least one progressive issue.
How would that have played out? Suppose she had run on Medicare for All. There’s a very clear message there: We would be much stronger dealing with this covid pandemic if we had a full-on public healthcare system. People would not hesitate to go get testing. The system itself would have developed and distributed testing, making it difficult or impossible for that old guy to interfere with its development and deployment. That alone would have saved thousands of lives. Millions of people who lost their jobs would not have lost healthcare coverage, to their great relief. Instead of being hit twice, once by the disease and then again by the financial consequences, they would only need to deal with the getting better. We would have had much better statistics to work from. This is a crushing message against the Republican DIY healthcare proposal. And, of course, it would be even stronger to run on Healthcare for All, because it is an even stronger proposal against Republicans.
So, in 2024, it is entirely possible for Harris to be a progressive candidate. It only depends on what she runs on and what she wants to get done.
What about challengers? I find it hard to think of good, progressive challengers at the presidential level. We have good progressives, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in the House, but it is very difficult to go from the lower house to the White House. A more likely path is from governor, which suggests Gov. Gavin Newsom (CA), as an example. But is Newsom actually a progressive? He could possibly position himself that way.
Another contender would be Gov. Jay Inslee (WA). I like Inslee, and I supported him in his run for governor. While a centrist in many ways, Inslee has a long history of supporting action on climate change, and he opposed George W. Bush in the war in Iraq.
While I would have liked either Sen. Warren or Sen. Sanders to have been elected in 2020, I don’t think they should run again in 2024. They did their part for democracy. They are great Senators, and I want them to continue to be Senators.
The other presidential candidates from 2020 were not very progressive, so it is hard to see how they run a progressive challenge campaign in 2024, especially if Harris runs with a progressive message. I’m open to seeing them prove they have it in them. But I need proof.
The Final Message
What we see now is a hard slog for Biden to get any further legislation through Congress. This is partly because Congress is so politically divided. I think that goes back to a strategy too narrowly focused on defeating Donald Trump.
In 2024, the Democratic Party needs to nominate a progressive to lead the ticket. They must have at least one major progressive issue under them, and the entire party should pick up that issue and run with it. This would be a good time to run on actually fixing the healthcare system, so that we don’t have another plague year like 2020. It would be a good time to run on a full fix to climate change. Or, pick your topic. But have one, candidate.
If you want to win both the White House and the Capitol.