This article first appeared in our weekly Hackwatch newsletter on media accountability. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox every week, and check out our Hackwatch website.
Hey folks, welcome back to Hackwatch! I think it’s fair to say that this has been one of those decade-long weeks. Tuesday was a bad night for progressives, though a worse one for Democrats—economic populists and corporate critics tended to outperform their peers (watch out for more on this later).
(Ed note: Fair warning, today’s Hackwatch is definitely on the longer side. Also, if you want something to listen to before, while, or after reading, I think “Blame It On Me” by George Ezra would pair well with today’s column.)
Everyone has inevitably seen a bevy of recriminations, stark assessments of what comes next, and noble clarion calls that all ring as hollow as an echo growing a bit fainter each time it’s heard. We all needed a beat to gather our wits, but our political discourse has become a prisoners’ dilemma where all sides are motivated to lay out grand new ideological cases in hastily written op-eds and underbaked tweets, lest they miss out on a first-mover advantage.
That’s not what this is. RDP’s theory of change has been the same for years and we aren’t going to pretend it’s some new staggeringly insightful plan tailor-made for this exact outcome in the last 48 hours. Our mission is to oppose corporate influence that creates incentives to disserve the public interest. We organizationally do not engage in electoral politics, even as we do educate people about them. But we do want American policymakers to take note of when ideas are popular with the American public.
Our theory of politics is that it revolves around narratives and that controlling that narrative is all about defining the central animating conflict. This is something that was done by Biden appointees like Lina Khan,Gary Gensler, Jennifer Abruzzo, Jonathan Kanter, and (eventually, after two years of being pushed) Pete Buttigieg. Others have as well, and sadly most of them will be cleaning out their offices come January. We don’t know exactly what the new administration will bring, but based on the last Trump administration we can expect a lot of gladhanding, kickbacks and political cronyism. And we will be here to vocally call it out just as we have for the last two administrations.
We made the case that Vice President Harris could own this type of corporate crackdown to her political benefit. And while she flirted with this idea at the outset, she opted not to run that kind of pugilistic campaign in the end.
Despite this, the business wing of the Democratic party and right-wing pundits continue the insipid “heads we win, tails progressives lose” game they play after every election. When Dems win, pro-corporate pundits always applaud and say that it was because of savvy appeals to centrists and running as a moderate. If Dems lose, it was because they were too lefty. This reaction is so common that it has become instinctual. Within hours of Harris’ defeat, this analysis emerged from the same pundits who were praising the Harris campaign’s moderation just days or hours before.
The Very Serious People crowd of pundits have made clear that they think any time Democrats move left, no matter how small, it’s too much. And any time Democrats pivot right, no matter how hard, it isn’t enough. Where have Dems moved to the left? That’s for you to intuit, since these same pundits refuse to explain how Harris had moved the party left since 2020 (she in fact moved it back to the center; this Osita Nwanevu thread is brilliantly done, as is this from Daniel Finn).
Harris did not run a progressive campaign, although she did run some populist ads. That campaign’s failings cannot be pinned on progressivism. In the waning days, Ritchie Torres, Liz Cheney, and Bill Clinton were the ones dispatched to Michigan. The idea that any campaign doing that wasn’t pivoting right is laughable. Again, read this Osita Nwanevu thread or this one from Daniel Finn.
Just read this reporting from The New York Times:
“When two of Vice President Kamala Harris’s closest advisers arrived in New York last month, they were seeking advice. The Democratic nominee was preparing to give her most far-reaching economic speech, and Tony West, Ms. Harris’s brother-in-law, and Brian Nelson, a longtime confidant, wanted to know how the city’s powerful financiers thought she should approach it.”
“Over two days, the pair held meetings across Wall Street, including at the offices of Lazard, an investment bank, and the elite law firm Paul, Weiss. Among the ideas the attendees pitched was to provide more lucrative tax breaks for companies that allowed their workers to become part owners, according to two people at the meetings. The campaign had already been discussing such an idea with an executive at KKR, the private equity firm.”
The campaign pivoted right on immigration, police, crypto, and more. The main talking point on gun control was about how cool it was that both Harris and Walz were gun owners. Harris talked up having the “most lethal” military on the planet. David Shor’s firm got to call messaging shots. In part through Tony West—bro-in-law/campaign advisor/Uber executive—the campaign welcomed input from corporate executives and shifted their economic messaging away from populism in response. Harris received debate prep from Karen Dunn, who was also busy defending Google for (alleged) antitrust law violations while she was also supposed to be one of the central pillars of an underdog campaign’s tone-setting.
It was a campaign made up of centrist strategy, run by centrists, and run for centrists. It failed. And that, at the end of the day, is on the campaign. Pundits have already heavily criticized Harris and Walz for not being able to answer detailed questions well enough. That’s a fair point, but do you know who you should be angry with about it? The leaders of Harris’ communications team, particularly Anita Dunn. But the oh so serious punditocracy won’t blame Dunn or Jeff Zients because they like them.
Not to forget that Dunn, Zients, and co. are also the individuals most likely to have helped hide President Biden’s decline until as late as they could. Were it not for the debate in June who knows how long this charade would have gone on for?
On top of all of that, the lack of a primary actually helped centrists get the party platform they wanted. There was no major block of progressive delegates to negotiate for liberal priorities. This campaign was about as close to a natural experiment on the undiluted ideas of conventional Democratic operatives (David Plouffe, Anita Dunn, Jen O’Malley Dillon, etc…) as you could get. And it failed.
With that out of the way, this is Hackwatch. And Hackwatch is about pushing back on bad media narratives, so let’s play a little whack-a-mole. Here’s something of a grab bag of talking points making the rounds in the establishment commentary world.
The Hot Takes That Need To Go
Progressives are the problem because they keep trying to purge the party.
This is risible. Who has been purged? Sam Bankman Fried? He wasn’t ever on any side, as he himself admitted. For the most part, this is a conflation between trying to force people out of the party and trying to limit the control of a single faction that has categorically misrepresented major parts of the Democratic coalition. It’s not about “shrinking the tent,” it’s about not giving the same ringmasters total top down control. Liz Cheney is welcome to vote for whoever she likes, but it doesn’t make the opportunity cost of wheeling her out on a multi-state campaign tour, rather than hopscotching between the headquarters of the least popular corporations, a good idea.
Some of the usual suspects worried that progressives were alienating Wall Street and Silicon Valley by implementing basic regulations on their industries. While there were prominent billionaires who have become obsessed with Republican “anti-woke” ideology (looking at you Bill Ackman, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos), Democrats did not suffer with well-paid, educated workers. And there is more than enough anti-fascism money* to have run a well enough funded campaign with somewhat less catering to the oligarch class. All Tuesday’s awful results for Democrats were largely as a result of defections among minority groups and working class Americans.
Blame trans people
I was worried that it might take a few days for centrists to start trying to sell out trans people. But they’ve really gone above and beyond this time. Within hours of the race being called, and in some cases even before any results at all were released, takes about how being too liberal on LGBTQ issues turned off moderates began streaming in.
Polling has shown that this is an incredibly low salience issue, so singling it out is not a reasoned reaction to the election—it’s a knee-jerk inclination to scapegoat members of the center-left coalition that pundits view as a liability. Hell, Kentucky’s Democratic governor refused to cave to anti-trans bullshit while campaigning for reelection in his ruby red state. And he won.
Now, for the most part, pundits have been insisting that no, it’s just Democrats need to moderate on trans kids playing sports. That’s a non-factor. It’s so much of a nonfactor that multiple GOP governors have vetoed bans on trans student athletes. It’s so much of a non problem that the ads that Republicans ran at the end of the campaign fear mongered about men in women’s sports by highlighting a cisgender olympic boxer.
More importantly, high school sports are not the real battleground. Trump and Project 2025 only use it as a wedge issue for messaging. Their real LGBTQ agenda is about banning trans people from homeless shelters, making discriminating against trans people legal in both employment and housing, and blocking all non cis-hetero couples from being able to adopt. Some republicans want to ban all gender-affirming healthcare for trans people of all ages. There’s even a possibility that federal non-obscenity laws could be weaponized to criminalize simply existing without conforming to the sex on your birth certificate.
Offering up people to be sacrificed when they are at their most vulnerable is just cruel.
Blame Bidenomics
Cost of living was definitely one of the single biggest issues and it’s clear that inflation definitely fueled that. But some neoliberals will try to blame Biden’s economic policies, especially covid stimulus, for that inflation. But that isn’t the cause. The entire anatomy of how inflation rose and ebbed doesn’t fit the traditional demand-side model that they rely on.
I had a piece out in The Sling on Tuesday that discussed how the Fed clearly hadn’t helped matters and had actually made things worse. I like to think it made a compelling point that economic discourse was misunderstanding both inflation and cost of living. If Biden’s stimulus had been the cause, or Powell’s monetary interventions the cure, we should have seen much more of a textbook story. Instead, higher interest rates inflicted needless harm without materially impacting how voters experience the cost of living. For more, read the piece!
Moderate on everything
Strategic pivots can be good but there are caveats. More than anything, they need to be genuinely strategic.
Too many of the issues Harris pivoted on were not strategic. Moderating on crypto was useless. It’s one of the most low-salience issues to the electorate. The number of people who care is pretty low. And on top of that the crypto industry has already made itself into a fearsome Republican ally, to say nothing of the fact that the whole thing is a scam built on pillars of securities fraud.
But the absolute worst pivot we saw from Harris was moving away from economic populism. And it was corporate executives and these same moderate pundits who forced it. Poll after poll after poll found that anti-corporate economics was arguably the single best message across swing states.
Every time a speech went thirty seconds without mentioning RealPage, or oil price-fixing, or Kroger executives admitting to gouging customers, or any of the many other examples of corporations’ exploitation of workers and consumers, was a wasted opportunity. Touting caps on overdraft fees, mandatory refunds from airlines, and taking on non-competes were layups that were never shot.
I mean, hypothetically you decide that Democrats must compete with Trump on the nihilistic, climate be damned cheap gas agenda. Understandable impulse – but couldn’t Harris have focused on apparent price fixing efforts between Trump donor American oil interests and the Opec + cartel?
One parting thought
This has already gone too long, but I want to close out with one final note. If we can all agree on anything about the election, it’s that people were angry about their economic situation. That anger was directed at Harris because people blamed the Biden-Harris administration for the cost of living struggles they were facing. That rage was too powerful to overcome, but it didn’t have to be. And while some will say that blaming messaging is cope, voters really didn’t know what the Democratic economic platform was.
Cost of living was the issue and economic populism was the solution.
The road not taken was for Vice President Harris to point to the (very real) corporations that were harming the American public and say, “those are my opponents’ friends, vote for them and these corporations will have free reign to exploit you more. But they’re my enemies, look at the way they attack me and at how our administration has been standing up to them.” Alas.
Thanks for making it this far! If you’re interested in the intersection of economic discourse and politics, here’s some of our other recent work that may interest you:
The story of the Fed single-handedly taming inflation is deeply out of step with reality. There is no sign of the demand destruction that would have been necessary for monetary policy to slow inflation. I took a look at both the conventional causal path, unemployment, and several other plausible options. A drop in real demand is nowhere to be seen.
The Climate Crisis Is a Cost-of-Living Crisis
My colleague Kenny explains why the changing climate is a pocketbook issue. Kenny walks through why failure to tackle climate change leaves us vulnerable to higher energy, food, and housing costs.
* More in a future piece from Jeff Hauser, but in fact, it seems like if anything Harris wasted money. Her campaign was much better funded than Trump and ran vastly more television ads in August and September as a result. But Trump matched her on ads in October when it mattered–TV ads have little staying power, and sacrificing a populist message in order to run more ads more than a month out from a campaign is an insane quid pro quo.
Correction: A previous version of the post erroneously implied that Anita Dunn represented Google in their antitrust trial. Google’s lawyer was Karen Dunn, who was involved in debate prep but did not lead the communications team. The post has been edited to clarify this.