Donald Trump won. Unlike in 2016, he didn’t just put together the bare minimum required to eke out an electoral college victory. He became the first Republican in 20 years to win the outright popular vote. 

As with any election, Trump’s win served as the starting gun for the I-Told-You-So Olympics. Everyone is now off to the races, explaining why Trump’s victory is a vindication of their politics, and why, if Kamala had only done [X thing that I happen to already support], she would have won. This is not a bad thing, inherently. I-Told-You-Sos are warranted when you did, in fact, tell people so—and I think you’ll find that many of the warnings that I and my colleagues at Current Affairs made in the months leading up to the election turned out to be prescient. We have argued that Democrats lost due to their failure to adequately champion pro-working class economic policy, their contempt for voters angry about the Biden administration’s destructive foreign policy, and their selling out of popular positions in a futile attempt to win over vanishingly narrow bands of “moderate” Republican support. And I think all of those arguments turned out to be merited.

But not all I-Told-You-Sos are created equal. Just as we have made correct arguments that Harris lost by alienating the left (arguments we were willing to make before the election), those who have taken up the ideological mission to blame Democratic failures on the excesses of the Left are positing their own self-serving theories, which simply do not line up with reality.  

It’s easy to see why these narratives have a surface-level plausibility. In the election’s immediate aftermath, one of the most ubiquitous graphics that circulated among those seeking to excavate the ruins of the Harris campaign came from the New York Times, which depicted a visible shift to the right across virtually every region in the country:

On November 9, NBC wrote that “Trump has been able to engineer a near-wholesale rightward shift in the electorate in ways that he couldn’t in 2016 or 2020, when it seemed as though different constituencies were racing past each other in opposite directions.” The New York Times broke the change down based on demographic and regional categories, marking “the Voting Groups That Swung to the Right in the 2024 Vote”—which included suburbanites, Latinos, young voters, and others believed crucial to a Democratic victory. One post on X with nearly 40,000 likes responded to the map above by concluding, “Idk how you see this and think ‘the answer is she didn't run left enough.’” 

I’ve complained before about the annoying media tendency to use the terms “left” and “right” as shorthands for “Democrat” and “Republican,” and here is an example where it actually seems to be misleading people about what happened in this election. It omits a massive caveat, which is that Trump actually didn’t do that much better this year than 2020. The latest report from the New York Times has Trump with just over 76.1 million total votes in 2024, compared with 74.2 million in 2020. That’s about a 2.5 percent increase from last time in raw vote total. It’s an improvement for him, yes. But is it a thunderous, barbaric yawp from the heart of the American soul in exhortation of the Trumpist vision? I don’t think so.

The real story is not some unassailable wave of conservative enthusiasm, but the total cratering of Democratic support from Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential ticket to Kamala Harris’s over the last four years. As of the latest count, Harris received just over 73.2 million total votes in this election, eight million fewer than Joe Biden received in 2020. That is the deficit that needs to be explained. 

Democrats lost seats in the Senate, but four Democrats actually won in swing states that Harris lost. This includes both progressives like Arizona’s Ruben Gallego and Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin and moderates like Nevada’s Jacky Rosen and Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin. The Democrats still will not take the House, but they barely lost any ground. This evidence suggests that the weakness was not necessarily party-wide, but linked to Harris specifically. 

The usual suspects have folded Harris’s loss into the conventional narrative about how Loony Lefties alienated the median American from the party by being too woke and radical. This is not a new argument, but it’s arguably less coherent than it has ever been. For instance, Free Press founder Bari Weiss argued on Fox News that: 

It turns out, running on these extraordinarily niche issues like gender fluidity or defunding the police don't actually matter—or frankly, feel profoundly out of touch—to ordinary Americans.

In the New York Times, columnist Maureen Dowd made a similar case. In an article quoted in full on MSNBC’s Morning Joe talk show the next day, she wrote that “Some Democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke,” with her chief example being that, supposedly: 

The party embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like “Latinx,” and “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color). This alienated half the country, or more. And the chaos and antisemitism at many college campuses certainly didn’t help.

Philippe Reines, a Democratic strategist who worked on both Hillary Clinton and Harris’ campaigns, suggested on a CNN panel that “far left” immigration policy was the culprit. “We need to take stock of why we are being held hostage to the far left,” he said. In addition to echoing the blame towards trans athletes, he said that “Most Democrats I know think there’s a huge problem at the border… Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face.” 

These sorts of arguments almost always have the problem of working backwards from the anti-woke conclusion and finding evidence to support it. But I can’t even give Weiss, Dowd, and Reines that much credit. They don’t even have cherry-picked evidence. They don’t have evidence at all. This is just a quintessential example of Making Up a Guy to Get Mad At. 

To begin with, Kamala Harris did not run on “gender fluidity.” In fact, she barely discussed transgender people at all. Trans issues were not mentioned by name in her policy platform despite anti-trans legislation being a top Republican priority in recent years. There was not a single transgender speaker over the four days of the Democratic National Convention. And even if Harris had run on that issue, there’s no evidence that it would have cost her votes. Polls from right before the election showed that voters did not consider trans issues to be salient at all. But if they had, then it would have probably benefitted Harris, as nearly twice as many voters said they agreed with the Democrats on trans issues than the Republicans. 

Blaming Harris’ loss on “defund the police” is even more absurd. She actively attempted to distance herself from that movement for the entirety of the race, emphasizing her history as a prosecutor and bragging about how Biden invested billions to pay for more police officers. The Democratic platform even contained a statement explicitly saying “We need to fund the police, not defund the police,” and it lurched right on crime and punishment in several other ways, including removing any objection to the death penalty. 

As for the use of controversial neologisms like “Latinx” or “BIPOC,” Dowd did not cite any instance of Harris or anyone close to her doing this, because, as far as I can tell, it just didn’t happen. If it did, the burden is on Dowd to provide evidence, which she did not. Nor did she cite evidence that this thing that Harris didn’t do somehow alienated any significant group of people, let alone “half the country.” 

As for the “chaos and antisemitism on college campuses,” Dowd’s disingenuous description for the outpouring of anger over Israel’s barbaric assault on Gaza, she is about as wrong about the electoral effects as she could possibly be. To the extent that anyone believed Harris was tied to a wave of antisemitism, it didn’t seem to affect her. In fact, exit polls show that Jewish voters were one of the very few demographic groups that actually increased their support for the Democratic ticket, while Trump—who sought endlessly to portray the left as a hotbed of “anti-Jewish hatred”—got less Jewish support than any Republican since 2000. (Insisting, as Trump did, that not voting for him makes American Jews “disloyal” to Israel will do that. So will saying you want “the kind of generals that Hitler had.”) 

If anything, Harris almost certainly lost votes because of her support for Israel. Polls in the months leading up to the election showed that a strong majority of Americans supported imposing an arms embargo on Israel and that in critical swing states, imposing one would have gained Harris many more voters than it would have lost her. Harris did not heed these warnings and instead continuously spit upon the Uncommitted movement that was begging for the faintest reason to vote for her—Harris would not even grant them the hollow gesture of allowing a Palestinian speaker to voice their concerns at the Democratic convention for a measly two minutes. Did this single-handedly cost her the election? We really can’t know for sure. But we know that Harris’ support completely collapsed in Michigan’s majority-Arab cities of Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, and Hamtramck, where voters appear to have followed through on their promise to “Abandon Harris” if she failed to break from Biden’s policy on the Middle East. We also know that in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, the number of people who voted Uncommitted (or other equivalents) in the Democratic Primary to voice their disgust at Biden’s policy toward Palestine was greater than the margin of victory for Trump. We can’t assume that every one of those voters chose to stay home in the general or vote Trump specifically to spite her. But if even half of them did, that’s a significant chunk of support that Harris gave away.

Reines’ criticism similarly makes no sense. Like with policing, Harris ran hard to the right on immigration, echoing Trump’s border policy from four years ago. One of her most frequent campaign talking points was that Republicans tanked a bi-partisan border bill that included $650 million for Trump’s border wall. She embraced President Biden’s crackdown on asylum seekers and pledged to extend it even further. And when asked about her opponent’s immigration policy, she didn’t criticize him for the fact that he wanted to carry out the “bloody” mass deportation of 15 million people, she criticized Trump for not building enough of his border wall while he was in office. 

I wrote earlier this year, when Biden first rolled out his asylum crackdown, that trying to out-hawk Trump at the border wouldn’t work because people who vote based on immigration policy are already mostly Republicans. And exit polls show this is exactly what happened: Among the 11 percent of all voters who picked immigration as their top issue, 90 percent of them went for Trump compared to just 9 percent who went for Harris. Harris didn’t “kowtow” to the left as Reines suggested. She kowtowed to the right, and it did her no favors. Harris won just 5 percent of registered Republicans, less than the 6 percent Biden won in 2020. It turns out that Republicans vote for Republican politicians…Who would have thought? 

So the Go Woke, Go Broke analysis is clearly bunk. Another, slightly more sophisticated line of argument says that Harris’s loss demonstrates that delivering economic gains to voters through populist economics (sometimes called “deliverism”) has failed as a political theory, or at least that voters don’t actually decide who to vote for based on their material conditions. In other words, they believe that the Bernie Sanders theory of politics, that voters will reward you if you make their lives better, is wrong. 

Probably the most vocal proponent of this theory that I’ve come across is the prolific Twitter user (and failed Minnesota congressional candidate) Will Stancil, who has championed the theory that the Biden economy is actually amazing and pervasive social media narratives have simply tricked voters about the price of groceries and housing into believing that it’s not. In response to Sanders’ recent claim that Democrats lost because they “ignored the justified anger of working-class America,” Stancil retorted:

Biden’s presidency was incredibly supportive of workers.  [Bernie’s] worldview has failed and instead of reevaluating he’s simply retreating to old habits. [...] If there is one single lesson of the last election, and really, the last four years, it’s that DELIVERING MATERIAL BENEFITS TO WORKERS WILL NOT HELP YOU ELECTORALLY. Which basically annihilates the left’s entire theory of politics.

The problem with this analysis is that voters clearly do care if the president delivered them material benefits. Both before and after the election, they made clear in poll after poll that the economy—specifically inflation—was their number-one deciding issue. As I pointed out in my piece about Bidenomics last October, while top-line inflation chilled back to pre-pandemic numbers throughout 2023, that didn’t mean that the absurd cost of living had been solved. Although people often use the word “inflation” to mean “prices,” inflation going down does not mean prices have gone down; only the rate of increase has. The cost of rent, groceries, healthcare, and other necessities had still gone up, meaning that any wage growth people experienced was largely eaten up by higher prices and felt hollow. Add to that the fact that many of Biden’s most tangible policies that were designed to put money in people’s pockets and make their lives more secure—the expanded Child Tax Credit, $1,400 checks, expanded SNAP, student loan forgiveness—had either expired or were struck down by the time people went to vote.

In her post-election analysis for the Atlantic, Annie Lowrey pointed out that while the economy might have looked good on paper,

The poverty rate ticked up, as did the jobless rate. The number of Americans spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent climbed. The delinquency rate on credit cards surged, as did the share of families struggling to afford enough nutritious food, as did the rate of homelessness.

Lowrey sums up the Democrats’ problem quite succinctly, saying that “The issue is not that deliverism failed. It is that Democrats convinced themselves that they had delivered, without listening to the voters telling them they had not.”

It’s still very possible that Harris would have lost even if she’d run on her 2019 platform and embraced policies like Medicare for All and a jobs guarantee. Incumbent parties of all kinds have been getting knocked out left and right across the globe in the wake of backlash to post-COVID inflation. (Although the landslide election of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s left-wing successor Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico suggests that embracing broad poverty reduction policies can win mass support despite this global trend.) We don’t know what this campaign would have looked like if Harris had not run so hard to the center, and we never will.

But the idea that left-wing policy is electoral poison is not borne out by reality. Some, like the Guardian’s Rebecca Solnit, drew the fatalistic conclusion that “Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do,” that Americans are simply too broken and dysfunctional to vote for humane and compassionate policies. In fact, when voters have the option, they vote for it, even in red states. This is certainly the case for certain “culture war” issues, where expanding the right to abortion got majority support in 8 of 10 states where it was proposed—including states Trump won like Arizona, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and Florida (where it received 57 percent support but failed due to the unfair and anti-democratic requirement that ballot measures get 60 percent support to pass). While voting overwhelmingly for Trump, Alaska and Missouri both voted to raise their minimum wages to $15 an hour and expand paid sick leave. (Nebraska expanded sick leave as well.) Arizona eliminated the tipped minimum wage. Colorado, as well as red Nebraska and very red Kentucky, all voted against measures to introduce taxpayer-funded vouchers for private and religious schools. (Such “school choice” policy is a major goal of the right’s Project 2025). 

You should be wary of anybody attempting to lay this election loss at the feet of the Left. If anything, leftists have been ahead of the curve in predicting the Democratic Party’s failures. Long before Democratic elites were catching onto Biden’s mental unfitness, we were ringing the alarms that he needed to be replaced. We warned that Harris’ strategy of attaching herself to the Cheneys was failing. And now, it’s finally becoming apparent that, as we said, people would not respond well to being told that the economy was actually amazing and that their struggles were only in their head. While I’m not saying that we would have necessarily run a better campaign, you can’t blame us for the one that Harris did run.