This round of post-election finger-pointing is markedly different from recent cycles, with leaders scrambling to blame Donald Trump’s decisive victory on Tuesday. Unlike past elections by narrow margins, Trump’s likely popular vote victory and his uniform swing across states and counties defy simple explanations like a racist electorate or dissatisfaction with Biden’s foreign policy. Even driving the election purely up to inflation seems rather convenient and incomplete.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, who received nearly 6,000 fewer votes in his re-election bid than Kamala Harris in Vermont, dropped out Wednesday. with a statement Blasting the Democratic Party for abandoning working-class people who showed up Irresistibly break For Trump. This criticism quickly gained traction, with commentators arguing that Harris and the Democrats had lost touch with the needs of working people by placing too much emphasis on issues such as democracy and abortion rights. “If voters don’t believe Harris had a real plan to materially better their lives, it’s hard to blame them.” Written by Matt Karp at Jacobin “I wish we had enacted the housing, care and child tax credit components of Build Back Better so that we had specific cost-of-living benefits to get us going,” Wednesday said. lamentation Former Biden administration official Bharat Ramamurthy on Thursday.
I’m not here to dictate what politicians should or shouldn’t do next, and I desperately hope that elected officials use their time in office to pass good, well-designed laws that improve people’s lives. But it seems the discourse is heading for a well-trodden yet questionable ground.
The (appealing) argument is that Democrats could have turned their electoral fortunes around if they had passed the right policies and then campaigned more effectively on those programs. In recent years this philosophy has been dubbed “delivery” — designed to suggest that voters will elect politicians who will deliver on their promises to solve problems. “Deliverism means governing well and setting a record that voters feel is necessary to actually win,” wrote American Prospect Editor David Dayne in 2021.
Although “novelism” as a term is recent, this thinking has long permeated Democratic leadership. After the 2022 midterms, Sen. Elizabeth Warren argued the New York Times Voters have particularly rewarded Democrats for programs like pandemic relief and infrastructure modernization. Other policies, such as allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices and capping insulin costs for older Americans, Warren argued, motivated voters to cast their votes for Democrats.
Party leaders especially advocate a more sophisticated version of this theory: that policies will create “positive feedback loops,” creating loyal constituencies who will enable further policy victories through their continued electoral support. It’s no secret, for example, that Democrats believe that making it easier for workers to join unions will not only improve their living standards but also improve Democrats’ electoral standing by increasing the number of union members in the United States.
Deliveryism’s appeal lies in its intuitive logic, particularly for college-educated rationalists drawn to clarifying cause-and-effect relationships: good policies will lead to subsequent electoral victories. But there isn’t much evidence that policymaking actually works this way.
Decades of scholarship have shown that most people do not understand how policies work, what policies they are benefiting from, and which parties are responsible for enacting specific policies. And even when a politician designs a program to make it easier for them to take credit, it doesn’t always work to their advantage. People who got health insurance through the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, for example, shows very little change On voter turnout or party loyalty.
As Northwestern political scientists Daniel Galvin and Chloe Thurston outline In their necessary research In these questions, history must fundamentally challenge the premise that the success of good policy is likely to lead to political rewards for the party that passes it.
“Upon inspection, the intellectual basis for thinking that policies are good vehicles for building electoral majorities — or good substitutes for the more tedious work of organizational party-building — is quite thin,” they wrote.
That doesn’t mean Democrats shouldn’t try to pass good policy. Expanding the child tax credit during the pandemic was demonstrably good policy, even if most voters only showed it Quiet enthusiasm for this.
And it’s certainly not the case that politicians are never rewarded for good policy. Many voters still give Trump credit For incentive checks They received in the mail during the pandemic, checks that mainly featured the president’s name. Doing good things and taking credit for those things can sometimes be helpful.
But as Democratic leaders refocus on working-class priorities, they face two startling realities: Policies alone rarely drive electoral outcomesAnd an increasingly sharp divide separates non-college voters from the college-educated liberals and socialists who lead the party and its allied progressive groups. Navigating these tensions will be necessary to determine future strategy, and research suggests that Harris’ loss this week could not have been avoided if he had simply emphasized the successes of the Biden administration more clearly. Such thinking oversimplifies a more complex political reality.
