How Democrats ‘pushed people away’ who agreed with their messages
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Did the Democratic Party get its election messaging wrong – or was the problem with how it communicated its political goals?
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In brief…
- Luke Tryl from UK polling organisation More In Common says Democrats’ main mistake in the 2024 election was poor communication.
- He says not enough was done to make messaging understandable by Americans, or to push back against Republican attacks.
- The party must now realise that while many people do agree with its more liberal stance the election result makes it an “outlier” in modern politics.
What’s the story?
The 2024 election dealt a crushing defeat to the Democratic Party, and its members are now reflecting on its losses, and what went wrong with its campaign.
Some have blamed Joe Biden. Some have blamed Kamala Harris. Some have blamed the Democrats for being too liberal, others have blamed them for not being liberal enough.
But could, perhaps, the problem lie – not in the Democrats' politics, but how it was communicated with the voting public?
That's the opinion of Luke Tryl, UK director of polling organisation, More In Common.
"Progressives are really good at building a very small tent and expecting people to pass a series of purity tests to be part of that tent," he tells The News Agents.
"But actually, if they looked at some of their framing, some of their messaging, they would find that what they're trying to say lots of people might agree with, but the way they've constructed the argument is actively pushing people away."
What next for the Democratic Party, and who will lead it next?
How Harris was hammered by the Republicans
Harris ran on a largely centrist, mainstream platform during her (admittedly brief) 100 days on the campaign trail this year.
But she was hammered by Republican rivals claiming she was a "woke" liberal from California, with Trump’s team spending tens of millions on adverts on culture war scare tactics around Harris’ views on transgender people – despite her barely mentioning trans issues during the time as nominee.
The Democrats, Jon Sopel says, never tried the same tactic with any of the contentious issues or groups Republicans could be linked to.
"What was clear in the US was you had a lot of voters who basically bought into this idea that Kamala Harris was a San Francisco liberal who believed in lots of these issues which weren't that popular in some parts of America," Tryl says.
"I don't think she perhaps did quite enough to distance herself from it. It was hard. She had 100 days, and if she had had longer, she might have been able to do more."
Tryl adds that more progressive politicians need to go "a step further" than to just ignore wedge issues, and often need to take a decisive stance.
He believes a mishandling of communication on key issues was one of the main reasons the Democrats took such a pummelling at the ballot box.
"Saying things like 'defund the police' doesn't really mean taking away funding from the police, it means putting more money into mental health' and that sort of thing," he says.
"Well, say that – because the moment you're explaining what ‘defund the police’ means you're losing."
Harris did not campaign to defund the police, but in 2020 she did make comments saying that more money should be invested in communities in order to reduce the need for policing, when conversations on the topic were widespread.
Is this Trump victory even more devastating for the Democrats than 2016?
What the Democrats can learn from the election result
Tryl says he has seen a similar situation in the UK when polling the public on the issue of white privilege.
"If you poll on white privilege, basically you only get the most progressive segment of the population agreeing with it," he says of More In Common's work.
"If you ask the question: 'Do people from ethnic minorities suffer disadvantages that white people don't, or face discrimination that white people don't?' Everyone agrees.
"It's saying almost exactly the same thing, but that subtle change of language, from ‘I'm telling someone they've got privilege’, to stating that other people experience discrimination, you might shift support."
He says some people might consider these frames as sounding "clever and academic", but which land "very badly" with most people.
But the most important thing any left-leaning politician can learn from the Democratic Party losses in this year's election, is that right now, their world view is not the mainstream.
"The crucial thing is to recognise that you, by nature of being progressive campaigners, being in politics, you are outliers," he adds.
"You're very different from most of the people that you're trying to speak to. You've got energy for social justice issues. You're going out and campaigning, but start by recognising that difference.
"I think a part of what Democrats probably have to recognise is there is an unfairness in this, and the bar for them will always be slightly higher."
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