On Nov. 5, 2024, Democrats were handed their worst defeat in a presidential election since 2004. Donald Trump decisively defeated Kamala Harris, winning the popular vote by around two points and sweeping every swing state. The “tipping point” state in the election was Pennsylvania, which Harris lost by two points, roughly the percentage by which she lost the national vote. This was not a close election and Harris’ loss cannot be attributed to Electoral College bias or depressed voter turnout. On Election Day, American voters sent a loud and clear signal they wanted Donald Trump back in the White House.
The presidential election understandably led many to offer explanations of where the Democrats went wrong. Unfortunately, rather than these explanations being backed by any substantive evidence, many offered explanations with zero evidence behind them and conveniently in line with their ideological priors. Perhaps the most prominent, circulated widely on social media and repeated by notable activists and politicians, is that Harris and the Democrats lost because they betrayed the working class and did not run a left-wing campaign.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, for instance, has claimed that it was “no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” Sanders did not specify which Democratic policies constituted “abandoning the working class.” President Biden was the first president in American history to join striking workers on a picket line; he spent $36 billion bailing out the Teamsters Union pension fund and his appointments to the National Labor Relations Board have been decidedly pro-labor. House Democrats also passed the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations called the “most significant worker empowerment legislation since the Great Depression.” Nevertheless, Sanders feels comfortable castigating Democrats for abandoning the working class, without mentioning a single specific policy or explaining the Democratic positions that are anti-worker. Notably, Sanders’ vote percentage ran behind Harris’ in Vermont, raising the question: If Harris lost because her policies were anti-worker, what does it say about Sanders’ politics if he ran behind her in his home state? I am not making a case about whether Harris and the Democrats’ support America’s working class. I am arguing that Sanders is making claims that suit his ideology, but with zero supporting evidence.
Similarly, many left-wing commentators and politicians on X have garnered tens of thousands of likes by claiming that “[Harris lost due to] … strangling left populism,” “we tried centrism and it lost” and that Democrats should “boldly lean into class warfare.” Notably, they do not present evidence for these claims, and rely on viewers confusing correlation with causality. It is true that Harris ran a relatively centrist campaign and lost the election, but that does not mean Harris’ centrism caused her election loss. In fact, there is some evidence of the opposite. Blueprint 2024 found that most voters didn’t vote for Harris due to high inflation and too much illegal immigration under the Biden Administration, while Harris being “too conservative” polled second to last in a list of reasons voters did not choose Harris. Furthermore, a NYT/Sienna poll conducted two months before the election found that only 32% of likely voters thought Trump was “too conservative” while 47% of likely voters viewed Harris as “too progressive or liberal”.
Though evidence from ballot measures is mixed, there is also some evidence from these results that America was not looking for left-wing policies. In California, one of the most progressive states in the nation, Proposition 33, a measure to allow local rent control, faced a 20 point defeat. California is also likely to narrowly reject an increase in the minimum wage to $18, reject ending forced labor for incarcerated individuals by about six points and support an increase in penalties for drug use and shoplifting by over 30 points.
Let me be clear: This is not an argument for any ideology, or against the Democratic Party shifting left in the wake of this election. Rather, this is a plea for honesty, for serious and non-ideologically motivated analysis of the election results. It will likely take time and substantive analysis to fully understand the factors that led to Harris’ loss. We also will never know for certain: We cannot run a counterfactual, tweaking different factors and seeing the impact on the presidential vote. However, we should distrust politicians and activists who offer explanations for Harris’ loss that fit their ideology but have no evidence to substantiate them.
