Since the 2024 election, three distinct explanations have been given for why Democrats lost the White House and both houses of Congress, and why they remain unpopular with voters. Moderates say the party went woke on migration, race, and LGBT issues. A Democratic pollster called the party’s orthodoxy “noticeably... out of step with what was electorally optimal or viable.” His firm found undecided voters broke for Trump 52 to 38, with five of their top eight stated reasons involving immigration. Progressives say the party failed to deliver a populist economic message. A Sanders-aligned autopsy found that the Kamala Harris campaign courted suburban Republicans while ignoring working-class voters, and that strong populist economic messages outperformed democracy-threat messages among Pennsylvania blue-collar voters, 57% to 45%. And fundamentalists blame institutional factors, above all, former President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris themselves. One analyst noted that Biden’s approval in the high 30s and two years of recession-level consumer sentiment put the nominee on track to lose the popular vote by 4 points, and Harris lost by 1.5. Biden ran too long, the party held no real primary, and Harris inherited an inflation-poisoned incumbency. In truth, all three explanations are correct and work together, and a Democratic operative turned tell-all author named Evan Barker explains how in a new podcast with Public. Barker spent roughly a decade raising money for the party’s left flank, from the Bernie Sanders orbit through Justice Democrats-aligned campaigns to figures like Jasmine Crockett and Abdul El-Sayed, before writing the bestselling book Nothing Left. In our conversation for Public, she explained that the party’s elites, the DNC and DCCC world, reached an accommodation with the progressive and DSA wing: the establishment embraced woke culture issues while both sides abandoned progressive economics. “The Democratic establishment was also co-opted,” she said. “It embraced those ideas in exchange for not having to do the actual economic populism stuff that the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 really made their focus.” The ideas the establishment embraced were open borders, defunding police, and “putting identity and race at the forefront of everything.” The donors preferred it that way. “The donors prefer that they focus on cultural issues,” Barker said. “They don’t really want to talk about economics. It’s a good distraction to their wealth, to be just totally blunt.” ... Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigative journalism, read the rest of the article, and watch the full video!show more

Michael Shellenberger

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