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.
Before you click off of this for being the seventeen-gazillionth election post-mortum, let us reassure you. This isn’t another one of those, it’s about the type of country and the type of government that we need to build.
(Ed. Note: Like last week’s Hackwatch, this is on the beefier side, just fyi. We’ll be going back to shorter and quippier next week. If you want song accompaniment, I’d recommend “America” by Tracy Chapman, “I See America” by Joy Oladukun, “American Oxygen” by Rihanna, or “Talking Bout a Revolution,” another one by Tracy Chapman. Or, if you want something more upbeat, “Footprints on the Moon” by Emerson Drive. Also, if you have thoughts on including these song recs with Hackwatch, I’d love to hear them.)
Setting the Scene
Since last Friday’s Hackwatch, the election results discourse has only intensified, with a mixture of great, interesting takes and some more akin to bovine excrement.
In particular, we’re starting to get more information about the inside operations of the Harris campaign. We now know, for instance, that one of Harris’ biggest Super PACs funneled some $8 million to firms owned by the PAC’s leadership. The campaign itself also gave $15 million to celebrities to overshadow the Vice President perform at events. It somehow spent over a billion dollars, despite some staff reportedly not having been paid for past work yet. We’ve also gotten more reporting on the campaign abandoning its progressive economic platform being a move to satisfy corporate executives and the donor class. Oh, and the Republican House majority is official now.
Even the media landscape has shifted in the last week. The Guardian has left X (nee Twitter) in opposition to how Elon Musk has been running it. And, in lighter news, The Onion now owns InfoWars.
But for the most part, things stand more or less where they did a week ago. The blame game continues apace as Democrats and liberals search for new leadership and direction. The biggest question in the immediate term is who will take over the Democratic National Committee.
Searching for a Spine: A Brief History of Democratic Cowardice
Two and a half years ago now, I wrote with my colleague Toni about Dick Durbin’s refusal to hold Clarence Thomas accountable after ProPublica’s bombshell reporting on Thomas being lavished by gifts from Harlan Crowe fit into a broader trend of “Democratic fecklessness.” A lot of what we wrote then rings truer than ever now. (For what it’s worth, there are now concerns that Durbin doesn’t have enough fight in him to oppose Trump’s judicial nominees.)
In particular, read this passage:
Democrats are scared: scared of losing, scared of rocking the boat, scared of recognizing the gravity of the situation, scared of doing something about it. For the party that claims to be the “mature adults in the room” who sanctify American institutions and laws, Democrats have, in practice, settled for hand-wringing and symbolic admonishments as they clutch the tatters of long-lost norms and congressional cordiality.
Democrats have long waited for a day—one that will not come—where Republicans simply and suddenly discover some semblance of a moral compass. Joe Biden declared on the campaign trail in 2019, “[We] will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends,” after Donald Trump leaves office. We’re still waiting.
We’re not only still waiting, but Donald Trump left office without causing a republican epiphany and is now returning to office with a vengeance. Democrats don’t even seem any better prepared to take on the task of fighting the Trump administration than they were 8 years ago. Long ago we pointed out that Chuck Schumer could solve Senate gridlock on Presidential nominees by reforming Senate rules. If he had, we could be living in a world with all judicial vacancies filled and every independent agency seat Democrats are entitled to staffed until at least 2026. Some could have guaranteed majorities for longer. The Federal Labor Relations Authority—the National Labor Relations Board’s public sector cousin—could have 2 of 3 seats filled by Democrats until 2029. But it hasn’t happened. It isn’t too late to get a number of critical appointments done in the Lame Duck, but limited floor time means that number will be low, handing the incoming Trump administration even more vacancies to fill.
This isn’t just on Schumer; he had to manage a caucus reliant on Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. But now we’re in crunch time and he’s still scared and being cowed into letting opportunity pass by. One of the most critical appointments still on the table is the Chair of the NLRB, Lauren McFarren, whose renomination has been languishing in legislative limbo for 6 months after clearing committee. If McFarren is reconfirmed, the NLRB would have a Democratic majority until August 2026.
The Biden NLRB has done a lot of good. One of the biggest wins came just this week when it ruled that captured audience meetings (where firms force employees to attend anti-union presentations) are illegal and violate workers’ rights to organize. Already, there’s talk about how this will be overturned in the next administration. Imagine how much of a difference two years of a Democratic NLRB board protecting the right to organize without these meetings could make. Schumer has the opportunity to deliver that, but he won’t because he’s scared it would lead Trump to fire the entire board.
Do it anyway. Maybe Trump will fire the whole board. But the baseline here is a 100% chance of a Trump-majority in the coming months, so any chance that he won’t fire them is worth it. And, if Trump fires them, that still might be better than a Trump-majority. Right now the NLRB has a 3-1 Democratic majority and needs a 3 member quorum. He can’t fire anyone without going below the quorum and in the interim, all of the Biden-majority rulings would stand.
Democrats have demurred for decades in the face of a conservative movement increasingly unbound from norms and procedures. They’ve allowed their agenda to be derailed by a strict adherence to protocol. They failed to pressure RBG to retire when it was obviously long time past for her to go, then hesitated to pressure Justice Breyer to retire when he was creating an unnecessary risk, and have now probably missed the opportunity to nudge Sotomayor the same way. Trump may already have a chance to replace Thomas and Alito with fresh-faced ideologue justices; imagine if Sotomayor is making the same mistake Ginsburg did not that long ago.
Democrats have shown a lack of willingness to play hardball, whether that be by allowing the Supreme Court to get away with murder (of ethics), letting the GOP extract disastrous concessions via hostage-taking, taking an unconscionably long time to de-Trumpify the executive branch, or failing to get through the confirmation crisis. And, both during and after the first Trump administration, our pleas for Congress to actually do their job and exercise oversight authority were ignored. A lot of horrible things happened under Trump; not highlighting them at every opportunity allowed those horrors to fade out of Americans’ memory. Elaine Chao’s DOT was a disaster and helped set the stage for rampant inflation. The handling of Hurricane Maria was abominable. The list goes on and on. And now Democrats just got their clock cleaned. Avoiding the fight didn’t keep them from getting pummeled.
They lost the election. But they don’t have to lose the lame duck. Throw a hail mary; the worst that can happen is getting picked off with the final seconds of the game ticking away.
Did Bidenomics Blow it? (tl;dr- no)
One common subject of finger pointing has been blaming the Biden administration’s economic policy for Harris’ loss. The reason why is obvious: if that narrative sticks it would absolve the campaign, the people who ran it, and the pundits who drove the discourse around it.
Last week, we talked about the mechanics of whether Bidenomics caused inflation and I’ve explained why the demand-side models of inflation and interest rates don’t align well with what we’ve over the last three years in a few different places. But we don’t even need to get into any of that to see that blaming the administration’s economic policies (re-industrialization, onshoring supply chains, investing in unions, fighting corporate concentration, restricting unfair business practices) doesn’t make very much sense.
For a start, voters didn’t hear a real Democratic economic platform. Which makes sense given that neither the Biden administration nor the Harris campaign ever fully leaned into a messaging strategy, despite our very frequent encouragements.
In an election, do people make decisions based more on messaging or what’s happened over the preceding presidential campaign? Obviously, that’s a false binary; they both matter. But they don’t matter symmetrically to voters. Voters who consume a lot of news and political content will inevitably know a lot more about what’s been happening and, ergo, make decisions with that in mind. Lower-informed voters, however, will know less about what governing has looked like, meaning messaging is weighted comparatively higher. Harris likely won highly informed voters by a good margin; the people who are more familiar with what Biden’s been doing are also more supportive of those actions. This matches polling that shows that Biden’s economic policies have been very popular but are not well known.
A huge part of this disconnect is a result of the policies Biden chose to push. A bold agenda like his takes time to pass Congress and even more time to start taking effect in people’s communities. This is fine, parties win office in order to implement good policy. But when many of the jobs Biden’s policies will create have yet to arrive, Democrats must pivot to other messaging that makes voters feel as if they care about their current financial situations. (All of this is why media ecosystems matter.)
Our theory that politics is about grabbing attention by highlighting villains and leaning into conflict accounts for this in a way that just trying to tweak the policy platform to match the median voter theory never can.
And everything I’ve been saying is in line with election results as well. Candidates who leaned into the type of messaging and strategy we advocate generally ran ahead of Harris. Sherrod Brown (US Senate, OH) ran about 7.5 points ahead, Chris Deluzio (US House, PA) ran around 5 points ahead, and Dan Osborn (US Senate, NE) ran 14 points ahead. There are many other examples, and everyone can find some strand of their preferred message in stronger candidates – but we doubt there are overperformers who failed to embrace some populist anti-corporate rhetoric. It’s what the moment demanded, and that’s why the moment was so wrong for a White House run by Jeffrey Zients and Anita Dunn and a campaign run by David Plouffe.
Opinion polling has also continually found all the major planks of Bidenomics to be extremely popular. Trying to blame progressive economics is all about posturing in the left-of-center discourse, not seriously trying to explain anything.
Pundits Punching Down
In a similar vein, ivory tower pundits have been lashing out in their search to prune the party into a shadow of itself. For now, I want to focus on two examples: trans people and campaign staff.
Trampling Trans People
We talked about the inane trans-bashing last week. Since then two house Democrats, Tom Suozzi (NY-3) and Seth Moulton (MA-6) have slammed the Democratic party for being too supportive of trans kids. Longtime friend of the show Matt Yglesias published a list of “commonsense principles” for Democrats to adopt after the election loss, one of which reads: “Race is a social construct, but biological sex is not. Policy must acknowledge that reality and uphold people’s basic freedom to live as they choose.”
Look, “biological sex is not a social construct” is a dog whistle, plain and simple. No one denies the existence of sex; the idea of transness is literally defined through a distinction between gender and sex. And this is actually an improved version of Yglesias’ first take, which didn’t include any “freedom to live” caveat at all.
Is this really one of the nine most important principles for Democrats going forward? These principles have been boosted by other high profile pundits, including Noah Smith, Fareed Zakaria, and Jonathon Chait.
Meanwhile, Republicans are preparing to strip trans people of protections from discrimination in housing, employment, and education. And trans students, already at much higher risk than peers, are flooding helplines.
Not only would this abandonment be a disgusting abandonment of vulnerable groups, but it is not electorally working. Collin Allred ran ads about how he would never want “boys in girls sports” only to lose by far more than Beto O’Rourke had against the same opponent 6 years before. In fact, this year marked the first time an openly transgender person, Sarah McBride, won a Congressional seat. She outran Harris, and everyone else running statewide in Delaware.
Honest question: Does Yglesias think that there are no moderates in Delaware? McBride is a celebrity candidate – what’s the Yglesias explanation for McBride’s success?
Socking it to Staffers
Earlier this week, two journalists at The Financial Times reported that Harris declined an interview with Joe Rogan because of a feared backlash from progressive staffers. Come on. For a start, if you can’t manage your staff, you are a bad manager. This should be read as an indictment of leadership, not staff. But also, there’s no way that this backlash would be more vocal than what they dealt with over Liz Cheney’s heavy involvement. I mean, Bernie world has long embraced going on Rogan, and none of Warren world spoke out against the idea – who is the left to which the FT refers?
More importantly, though, the reporting is simply, demonstrably false. The source they cite, Jennifer Palmieri, literally came out and admitted that the decision was made for scheduling reasons, plain and simple (as Jeff predicted from the jump). Neither reporter has acknowledged that on Twitter and, at time of our publishing, the story has not been edited to reflect that. It’s pretty basic journalism 101 to issue a correction or retraction promptly.
Saying nothing is simply slandering progressive staff for no good reason. It’s also irresponsible and doesn’t reflect well on FT.
In the Wilderness, With a Map
So what comes next? Well, here at Hackwatch we’ll be getting back to a more usual workload with more, shorter pieces on a range of topics. Now, perhaps more than ever, our work of calling out cynical pundits is important. As the new administration comes in, expect new hacks to crop up as devil’s advocates on cable news shows, and for some of our least favorite people to make reappearances (looking at you David Sacks). And the fight over the legacy of progressive economics is just getting started. Some have already counted it down and out, but Bidenomics isn’t over yet.
My colleague Hannah wrote a great newsletter this week that I highly recommend. It lays out the real lessons that need to be internalized from this election.
Hopefully, Democrats find a spine and start standing their ground against the rapacious villains out to loot the country. Hopefully.