By Jonathan Michael Feldman, November 6, 2024; Updated November 10, 2024

Introduction

In the opening post by Masha Gessen we see the confusion of liberal elites. They are unable to understand the difference between (a) exploiting a contradiction and (b) a majoritarian consensus. Masha Gessen, while a generally sophisticated observer, misses the larger nuances. The US is dominated by economic, political and cultural realities which Trump exploited and the Democrats largely ignored or delayed generating discourse about, e.g. inflation, the migration crisis, and things being better now than before. First, the liberal left ignored these realities. Then, they confuse exploiting a contradiction with a new ideological consensus. The left position seems to confuse morality with politics and ignores realities like cities being overwhelmed with illegal immigrants. The overwhelming had to do with border problems that the Democrats tried to solve initially with ideology, e.g. support open borders, abolish certain immigration policing. When Gessen argued earlier that Israeli policies in Gaza resembled Nazi actions, she failed to explain how they did not resemble such policies. Similarly, here she does not show the difference between factors related to Trump’s win and other factors related to Harris. She shows correlations between Trump support and a new hegemony for reactionary ideas. The Trumpian affect is the result of failed Democratic Party politics more than something that he uniquely brings to the table as an alternative other than his ability to exploit the failure of liberal globalism. His rhetoric is an attack on Democrats and even Republicans who embrace a certain kind of discourse.

Trump does not necessarily challenge liberal globalism, however. Yet, he sounds as if he does and that convinced millions of persons. In contrast, Harris did not sound as if she challenged liberal globalism. There are a lot of material factors distinct from Trump the person, candidate or new political paradigm. If it were not Trump, sooner or later some other Republican could have exploited these contradictions just like Bernie Sanders tried to do within the Democratic Party. The Democrats marginalized Sanders and their elites crippled his campaign. They paid the price once by the defeat of Hillary Clinton. They pay again now with the defeat of Kamala Harris. Biden was a kind of compromise, but obviously not a durable alternative to Trump.

While Harris failed to distance herself rhetorically from Biden’s record, contributing to her lost, it is not clear to me whether such verbal distancing would prove sufficient for a victory. Furthermore, this record seems tied to the Democratic Party’s long-term agenda to embrace globalized policies associated with inexpensive illegal migrant labor, the free movement of capital, and militarist expansionism.

The Globalization Disaster

Free trade regimes are necessary for peaceful integration and to keep the global economy going as various nations depend on trade for their livelihoods. Yet, anti-globalization protestors explained decades ago that this system has winners and losers. The winners tend to embrace globalization despite its costs to the losers. Or the winners support band-aid solutions to placate the losers.

Globalization has several components. One is free floating migration with limited restrictions. Another is the free movement of capital via “free trade” and capital mobility that accelerates de-industrialization. In a series of podcasts on “The Daily,” the podcast of The New York Times, the liberal elites have been preparing their audience for the outcome of the 2024 election, i.e. the victory of Donald J. Trump. One program showed how NAFTA was destroying communities. Another discussed the problems of mass, illegal migration. Free trade and under-regulated migration were linked to consensus positions in the Democratic Party.

The Migration Crisis

Corporate elites welcomed mass migration and the free movement of capital represented by NAFTA. While countries like the U.S. depend on migration to compensate for skills shortages and demographic challenges, the form of this migration helped overwhelm various cities like New York. Conservative commentators already sensed the Democrats’ loss prior to the election, linking this to the mass migration by various immigrants to New York City. A report in April 2023 described how Mayor Eric Adams said that the “cost of caring for the surge of illegal aliens” would be “$1.4 billion this fiscal year, 2.8 the next. Those are the numbers.” According to a post I reviewed today on a New York City government webpage: “Mayor Adams has released updated costs of the asylum seeker crisis impacting our city since 2022. Nearly 100,000 asylum seekers have made their way to NYC, and with no end in sight, the city is poised to spend more than $12 billion through Fiscal Year 2025.” An article by  Luis Ferré-Sadurní in The New York Times noted in August 2024 that “over 210,000 migrants” had “arrived in the city since 2022.” The article claimed that this migration had “strained government resources and the city’s openness to immigration.”

In his description of the crisis, Andy Newman of The New York Times revealed in a February 24 interview how the crisis could be exploited by politicians seeking to move against migration. In an interview, he said “as the number of migrants currently in shelters passes 60,000, you do see – it’s become a very common sight in the subway system, which, of course is used by millions of people every day, to see families, sometimes with little kids, selling candies, selling mangos, selling other kinds of…food and other treats on the subways. In recent weeks, there has been a lot of attention paid and a lot of coverage of migrants as a sort of menace and some coverage of crimes committed by migrants or allegedly committed by migrants.” By February, this had led to “kind of a backlash against migrants,” with people being “just kind of exhausted with the fact that taking care of the migrants is so expensive to the city.” Mayor Adams even threated “to cut other services in order to kind of keep housing the migrants.” Protests emerged against migrant shelters.

Ruth Messinger, the former New York City politician, noted that the migrants became  “a scapegoat for everything…When the mayor has to close a firehouse in Queens, he can go there and say, ‘Well, immigrants and the budget.’” By October 2024, it was clear that the scapegoat campaign was effective. An analysis by Shayla Colon in The New York Times explained: “Public polling at the height of the influx indicated voters disapproved of how all Democrats, including Mr. Adams, Gov. Kathy Hochul and President Biden, were handling the issue. A Siena College poll released from August found that 64 percent of New Yorkers said the influx had became worse over the last year, with a higher share of suburban voters viewing the crisis as more dire.”

The scapegoat campaign is tied to material realities that Republicans were able to exploit. The growth in illegal immigrants during the Biden Administration is described below in Figure 1. The Pew Research Center reports that “from 2019 to 2022, the unauthorized immigrant population from nearly every region of the world grew. The Caribbean, South America, Asia, Europe and sub-Saharan Africa all saw increases.” Other data in Figure 2 shows a crackdown in illegal immigration, but it may have been too little too late. The political left argues that fears about migration are based on demonization. A September 2024 report in The Guardian quotes Germán Cadenas, an associate professor at Rutgers University, as follows: “The demonization of immigrants is a repeated move by lawmakers to secure votes…Immigration is really not as divisive as some politicians are trying to make it out to be.” In fact, 64% of Americans believe immigration is beneficial for the country. Cadenas explains such demonization is “a tactic that has been used historically to mobilize voters who feel threatened.” This analysis begs the question about why persons feel threatened and how cities like New York City become overwhelmed by illegal immigration.

Figure 1: The Number of Unauthorized Immigrants in the U.S.

Source: Pew Research Center estimates based on U.S. Census Data

Figure 2: Illegal Crossings Along the U.S. Border Over a One Year Period

Source: Camilo Montoya-Galvez, “U.S. Illegal crossings at U.S. southern border reach lowest point of Biden presidency,” CBS News, October 7, 2024.

A counterfactual argument used to defend mass migration relates to skill shortages. A June 2024 report explained that in the United States, “75% of employers are not able to fill job vacancies.” Yet, migration does not generate its own skill levels automatically. There are also problems in how the United States is able to absorb or integration various groups who already live in the country. For example, the share of whites, African Americans and Asians in the U.S. is 75.3%, 13.7% and 6.4% respectively according to census data. Yet, among entry level engineers the respective shares are 51.38%, 8.9% and 29.63%. The reasons for this discrepancy are complex but lie in an inability to promote the necessary integration mechanisms.

The Transnational Network Contributing to Globalized, Militarized Mediocrity

A considerable share of migration is based on the failures of globalization and refugees from wars. The Biden Administration tried to promote industrial and infrastructure investment policies to address the former, but did little to stop militarist expansionism by NATO or by Israel. While Ukrainian and Palestinian refugees don’t have much impact on U.S. migration, a global arms trade involving the U.S. does promote conflicts and under-development throughout the Global South (with the U.S. joined by other arms exporters in this migration-generating enterprise). According to a United Nations report in October 25, 2023, over 114 million persons have been displaced by war and violence worldwide. The nations contributing to the global refugee crisis including leading Cosmopolitan nations like Brazil, Norway, Sweden and South Africa (Table 1). These nations turn out to be not very different from Belarus, Iran and Russia when it comes to being in the merchants of death club. These nations all contributed to the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. They not only helped fuel conflicts that increased refugees, but they also helped deplete their recipient nations of capital that could have been used to fight climate change and deepen integration options.

Table 1: The 25 largest exporters of major arms and their main recipients, 2019–23

Source: Pieter D. Wezeman, Katarina Djokic, Mathew George, Zain Hussain and Siemon T. Wezeman, “Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2023,” SIPRI Fact Sheet, March 2024.

The U.S. military economy, which is associated with massive arms transfers and expansive militarism backed by both political parties, is sustained by various countries (outlined in Figure 3) who pay for U.S. debt, relieving Democrats and Republicans for the need to increase tax burdens that would otherwise be necessary to maintain military budget increases. Foreign debt allows the two parties to maintain high military budgets without a tax-increase=based political backlash. These nations help the U.S. to sustain its military budget which reduces or displaces the capital needed to satisfy economically insecure voters and help manage integration challenges.

Figure 3: Five countries holding about $3.3 trillion in US Treasurys — roughly 40% of all foreign-owned assets: US foreign-owned debt by top five holding countries as of April 2024

Source: Treasury Department Data as compiled by USA Facts, August 1, 2024

The Free Trade Crisis

When it comes to the free movement of capital, various studies illustrate how trade with China leads to potential job loss. The Center for Prosperous America (CPA) claims that since 2001, the trade deficit with China led to a loss of 3.82 million jobs. While some of the hardest hit states voted for Harris, a number of these voted for Trump in 2024 (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Total Jobs Lost Due to China Trade Deficit by State

Source: Andrew Heritage, “Post PNTR: 3.8 million Jobs Lost Due to China,” Prosperous America, May 4, 2023.

There are sophisticated explanations about how regions or persons hit by deindustrialization or such things do not necessarily vote for Trump (as in the 2016 electoral cycle). In fact, offshoring continued under Trump. This does not matter. What matters is that Trump was able to tap into economic anxiety or concern about what goes on in one’s region or state to gain a majority of votes in key states. Harris captured the votes of the poorest and most affluent, not the middle class potentially affected by dislocations of jobs (Figure 5). Non-white college graduates comprised 10% of voters and Trump won 31% of their votes according to exit polls. White non-college graduates comprised 39% and Trump won 65% of their votes. He also won 44% of union households. Simply put, persons who felt screwed over by the economy voted for Trump (Figure 6).

Figure 5: Share of Vote by Family Income (Harris, Blue; Trump, Red)

Source: NBC News, 2024 Exit Polls, 2024.

Figure 6: Share of Vote by Family Income (Harris, Blue; Trump, Red)

Source: NBC News, 2024 Exit Polls, 2024.

What Can Be Done About All This?

Let us start with the basics. In a recent interview on the Ezra Klein show (broadcast November 1, 2024), the historian Gary Gerstle explains that the U.S. is in the midst of a changing global order, away from Neoliberalism (which I associate with the liberal globalist paradigm elaborated above). He explains what a political order is, i.e. the currency of the current change: “A political order is a way of thinking differently about political time in America. We focus so much on two-, four- and six-year election cycles. A political order is something that lasts beyond particular elections, that refers to the ability of one political party to arrange a constellation of policies, constituencies, think tanks, candidates, individuals who come to dominate politics for extended periods of time. And their dominance becomes so strong that the opposition party feels compelled — if they still want to remain real players in American politics — it compels them to acquiesce and to come aboard the other political party’s platform. They don’t get established that often. They usually last 30 or 40 years. Economic crisis is usually involved in the emergence of a new order and the breakup of the old. Every political order also has not only an ideology but a vision of a good life in America.”

The Democratic Party is tied into neoliberalism via its strategic partnership with the professional managerial class and Wall Street. Thomas Frank has explained some related problems in various books and interviews. Larry M. Bartels, a leading political scientist in the United States, explains his critique of this approach in an article in The Quarterly Journal of Political Science in 2006. He wrote: “Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? asserts that the Republican Party has forged a new ‘dominant political coalition’ by attracting working-class white voters on the basis of ‘class animus’ and ‘cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion.’ My analysis confirms that white voters without college degrees have become significantly less Democratic; however, the contours of that shift bear little resemblance to Frank’s account. First, the trend is almost entirely confined to the South, where Democratic support was artificially inflated by the one-party system of the Jim Crow era of legalized racial segregation. (Outside the South, support for Democratic presidential candidates among whites without college degrees has fallen by a total of one percentage point over the past half-century.) Second, there is no evidence that ‘culture outweighs economics as a matter of public concern’ among Frank’s working-class white voters. The apparent political significance of social issues has increased substantially over the past 20 years, but more among better-educated white voters than among those without college degrees. In both groups, economic issues continue to be most important. Finally, contrary to Frank’s account, most of his white working-class voters see themselves as closer to the Democratic Party on social issues like abortion and gender roles but closer to the Republican Party on economic issues.”

While Trump is himself aligned with militarism (but less associated with military interventions) and Wall Street or wealthy capitalists, he’s also associated with protectionism, pro-manufacturing discourse, and arguments that the Biden Administration failed to help millions of persons. His racism, sexism and xenophobia have hurt and helped him, but Biden’s win in 2020 clearly showed that such aspects were not sufficient for victory. The Democratic Party and large parts of the left did not learn their lesson from Trump’s initial victory in 2016. Or, they learned the lessons imprecisely, crudely or in such a way as to lead to insufficient measures or policies that made them vulnerable in 2024. If the Democrats do not learn how to free themselves from their dependency on big money interests and a certain kind of matching globalist discourse and practices which appear indifferent to the problems of Trump voters (i.e. now the majority), they will keep losing over and over and over.

One wonders if the Democratic Party is locked into a path dependent spiral of continued failure and implosion. One cannot say that the political left helped correct these failures. Rather, on issues like migration, military engagement in Ukraine, inflation and related indifference to certain kinds of voters, one could argue the part of the political left encouraged the Democrats’ worse tendencies. Third Party voters further underlined the irrelevancy of their exit option because their movement does not lead to the generation of media, political or economic democracy, only paper promises that have little material effect other than bolstering Republican electoral victories on the national level. Part of the political left and liberal strata are shaped by an upper class (to relatively secure middle class) university, entertainment, legal community milieu or by persons who believe one can transcend economic insecurity by economic redistribution efforts, symbolic deconstructions of police, or by industrial policies that fail to correct for macroeconomic failures or inflation-based political opportunity costs. One August 2023 analysis found that Inflation was up more than 15 percent, that “the cost of groceries for Americans has risen approximately 20 percent,” “U.S. gas prices are up nearly 62 percent,” and that natural gas prices were up more than 40 percent.

Despite the contributions of the Covid crisis, the failures are based on the limited ability to generate cheap clean energy, price controls or alternatives to distributive monopolies by food giants, and the under-investment in mass transit or electric car subsidies.

A populist attack on the food giants and oil companies was necessary, but Harris’s approach was insufficient. In 2022, Phoebe Stephens relayed the following information in an essay in The Conversation: “A recent report by Oxfam International has found that 62 new ‘food billionaires’ were created during the pandemic. The report, released ahead of this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, highlights the record profits made by industry titans. Food and agribusiness billionaires reportedly raised their collective wealth by 42 per cent in the past two years, all while global food prices soared by 33.6 per cent in 2021, and are expected to rise by another 23 per cent in 2022.” An essay by Steven Hill in The Fulcrum (May 7, 2024), provides a parallel analysis: “The California Energy Commission found that when gasoline prices jumped to $5.70 per gallon in September 2023, the state’s oil refiners more than doubled their 66 cent margin from the previous January, the largest increase ever … even though crude oil prices and other factors didn’t double. The state’s oil refiners ultimately made three times more than before. Also, two anti-monopoly lawsuits have been filed recently, which present compelling evidence that the largest U.S. shale oil producers have conspired with OPEC to keep gas prices high.” The Harris campaign should have studied Swedish parliamentary elections in September 2022, when the right-wing coalition defeated the Social Democratic-led one in part by appealing to lower gasoline prices. Lower gas prices are good politics but part of ecocide. In order to regulate oil use without losing political support one needs to establish immediately deliverable (inexpensive) alternatives.

We need a new movement based on collaboration among various actors that advances an economic populist agenda, not incremental piecemeal reforms designed by Ivy League policy wonks whose “habitus” is organized around relative economic comfort wrapped in identity, symbolic politics. This politics includes a move to impose price controls, taxes on excess profits, and provide various forms of economic anchoring of jobs so that they don’t flee overseas. Taxes must be increased on corporations to insure that the use of AI, automation and other ways to displace labor do not result in mass economic dislocation. Public procurement, taxes, and extensive support for cooperatives must be used to advance this agenda. Trump’s policy may well fail, but it’s not clear that the incumbent Democratic paradigm will offer a sufficient challenge. More coherent linkage of peace, ecological and integration agendas would help, with a parallel attack on oil, defense and supporting banking interests.

Postscript, Corrections and Clarifications

The Need for Both Long-Term and Short-Term Responses

An earlier version of this article had incorrectly described some of the statistics related to Trump support in an exit poll. I have also elaborated upon some details of the New York City migrant crisis in the newest version of this essay. I originally wrote: “A populist attack on the food giants and oil companies was necessary, but Harris said very little,” wording I have changed. When it comes to inflation, the problem was that Harris’s approach was insufficiently explicit. On July 30, 2024 Harris said: “On day one, I will take on price gouging and bring down costs….We will ban more of those hidden fees and surprise late charges that banks and other companies use to pad their profits…We will take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases.”

An article by Nicholas Nehamas and Andrew Duehren in The New York Times, “Harris Had a Wall Street-Approved Economic Pitch. It Fell Flat” (November 9th), discussed Harris’s “first economic policy speech, in North Carolina in August.” At that point “members of her communications team had suggested she focus her speech on cracking down on corporate price gouging…as a way to address rising costs.” The “speech ultimately focused only on addressing price gouging for groceries.” In August, Jim Tankersly of the Times reported the following: “In a release announcing the policy, Harris campaign officials did not detail how a price-gouging ban would be enforced or what current corporate behaviors would be outlawed if it were enacted. They said Ms. Harris would work in her first 100 days to put in place a federal ban ‘setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.'” The Harris plan involved the Federal Trade Commission imposing “harsh penalties” on corporations fixing prices.

Nehamas and Duehren say Harris’s Wall Street allies and Republicans both “slammed the plan as price controls that would disrupt economic growth.” In response, “campaign officials further narrowed the scope of her plan.” Although Harris “brought up the idea repeatedly in campaign speeches and television advertisements, for some Democrats the approach remained too intangible.” This approach was not based on an explicit populist appeal, however. Dwan Walker, the Democratic mayor of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania explained: “You can say there’s a big, bad wolf blowing houses down, but you have to go after those people and point them out…It’s effective because now you went after somebody, you brought it to bear and you showed us what it was.”

One question is whether left-wing economics is popular. Nehamas and Duehren offer contradictory evidence, appearing to suggest that popularity relates to the person delivering the message or the specific character of the message. They explain that Biden “often styled himself as the most pro-labor president in the country’s history”. Still, while ” and “progressives loved much of Mr. Biden’s economic message,” but “he appeared on track for an even bigger loss to Mr. Trump.” Yet, the Times reporters note: “While Democrats were defeated, populist, progressive economic policies did well at the ballot box. In Missouri, a red state, voters passed an amendment to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by a wide margin, even as they overwhelmingly voted against Ms. Harris.” They explain that about “75 percent of voters in conservative Nebraska backed a measure to institute paid sick leave.” In contrast, “Harris did not make either policy a major part of her campaign.”

In May, Cato analyzed a YouGov poll of 4,000 voters in the Spring of 2004. The poll found that “of the top 10 policies by net support, five call for direct price controls or extending government power to affect prices.” The proposal to ban a range of “businesses from charging…hidden or misleading fees” received “76 percent net support.” The idea to allow “Medicare to negotiate more prescription drug prices” received the support of 75 percent polled. And 74 percent supported “capping the cost of insulin” with 55 percent supporting “(74 percent), and “tightening the ceiling on credit card late fees to $8.”

The Missouri and Nebraska measures, as well as the YouGov poll each suggest a fundamental flaw associated with the delivery vehicle of populist or corporate regulatory, progressive economic policies. There is something negative associated with that vehicle related to incumbency in a high inflation setting or other negative policy profiles related to other issues (elaborated above).

Entrepreneurship Versus Populist Attacks on the Rich

There is a potential counter-factual argument against the appeal of economic populism based on findings by Patrick Ruffini, a longtime Republican pollster. He explained why former Democratic Party voters turned against the party and its populist economics in a recent interview with Ezra Klein. He studied of voters in Rio Grande Valley who had long supported the Democrats by wide margins. Ruffini found that they were saying, “When we grew up around the dinner table, your parents told you, ‘We support the Democratic Party because they’re the party of the poor — just like us.’ And the response of the people who became Republicans in that area was, ‘What if we don’t want to be poor? We want to be with those people who are going to create policies that are going to benefit us because they’re going to enable us to move up the economic ladder.’ And doing that through private sector success, not necessarily through a government benefits program.”

Ruffini shows why certain welfare benefits programs are less popular than the promise of entrepreneurial possibilities. Certain forms of economic populism are too statist, and do not promise such possibilities. Certain voters do not want benefits when they can create their own jobs or gain them in the private sector. On the other hand, delivering the promise of such a future need not exclude statist policies, particularly if they are linked to a discourse that does not exclude entrepreneurial empowerment. Small businesses can be constrained by high taxes, although a rhetoric of taxes on the super rich can be falsely framed as a rhetoric of taxes on smaller businesses. In any case we have a circular problem.

People will want to think that they can be rich like Donald Trump. Ruffini explains: “The phrase I hear often used to describe this is, ‘Trump is the poor man’s idea of what a rich man should be.’ I think that’s probably redounded to his benefit in these elections that he’s run in. Democrats have haltingly tried to make Trump’s wealth an issue, the fact that he can’t possibly care about you, because his life experiences are just so different than yours. And it’s never really landed such that — I don’t think anybody tries that anymore.” Yet, why do people have aspirations to be rich? One reason could be that society does not deliver. So if progressive economics does not deliver in the present, it won’t sell.  We still have a problem, however. Even if long-term proposals like the Inflation Reduction Act don’t win over sufficient voters in a presidential election, not having such policies could make things far worse. So you must combine long-term proposals and plans with short-term measures. I have already explained how the Missouri and Nebraska proposals and YouGov poll could illustrate what such complementary measures could be.

Returning to the Anti-Inflation Backlash

We also need to consider the argument made by some that by the time of the election, inflation problems were considerably overcome. Turning to Figures 7 and 8, we see evidence for that claim. By September 2024, the inflation rate was 2.4%. This is an interesting argument, but something is missing in this analysis. What is missing is that food prices maintained a high rate of inflation as seen clearly in Figure 9. Unfortunately, the data in Figure 9 does not encompass the later trends found in Figure 7. In any case, over the summer inflation was the top priority for all voters as seen in Figure 10. The political perception of inflation based on actual past increases is what counts for many, i.e. not reductions in the inflation rate. In any case, by October 2024, food prices had increased 28% over what they were five years ago. In 2023, the average rent price in the US was $1,274 but by 2024 had increased by 10.75% to $1,411.

Figure 7: Monthly U.S. Inflation Rate

Source: Trading Economics, “US Inflation Rate,” accessed November 10, 2024.

Figure 8: Hours of Work Needed to Purchase a Week’s Worth of Groceries: Hours, Production and Nonsupervisory Workers

Source: Council of Economic Advisers, Bureau of Labor Statistics, CEA calculations. The shaded region indicates recession. Nominal groceries expenditures for non-managers in 2022 are adjusted using CPI: food at home, then divided by average hourly earnings for production/nonsupervisory workers. Information as of June 12, 2024, 12:00 pm.

Figure 9: Percent Changes in Food Prices

Source: Table based on the above sources as published in Economic Research Service, “Food-away-from-home price growth outpaced food at home and overall inflation over past decade,” United States Department of Agriculture, June 27, 2024.

Figure 10: Voter Priority Issues: June 20-22, 2024

Source: YouGov poll as published in Jamie Ballard, “Trump leads Biden in Americans’ perceptions of how they’d handle the country’s biggest problems,” YouGov, July 12, 2024.

Liberal Pundits Respond

In The New York Times podcast, “Matter of Opinion,” dated November 8, 2024, a few points relevant for this discussion were made. First, Trump and the Republican Party themselves engage in identity politics. Second, the Obama and Biden administrations helped promote successful economies that Trump will inherit and lay claim to. Third, a lot of Trump’s appeal is based on other lies, manipulation, displacement of truths, etc. Fourth, Harris communicated something or other about inflation, but was a bad communicator or did not sell her brand properly, etc.

In response to these points, one should note the following. First, Trump’s brand or identity politics is more effective than the Democratic Party’s brand. Trump’s brand as “Matter of Opinion” notes fails to alienate a lot of Latino voters. The morality of Trump’s identity politics is somewhat irrelevant because the Democrats need a response to that which they lack. The reason why they lack that response has to do with liberals’ fixation on Trump lying. This brings use to the second point.

Second, Trump’s lies are less relevant than the truths he speak that resonate with his audience. The truths are made based on material realities, e.g. inflation, illegal migration, etc. that concern voters even if Democratic Party leadership was late or ineffective in selling campaign points in response to these.

Third, the good economy of Obama and Trump is based on wasting billions on the so-called “defense” budget. Pundits at The New York Times or The New Yorker never address the money wasted by NATO expansion and the related Ukraine War. These are billions of dollars that could have been used to fight inflation, provide relief for inflated food prices, or increase a more rational migration system. Furthermore, Biden’s long-term economic successes were not sufficiently matched by the more short-term agenda proposals as noted above.

Fourth, if the Democratic Party has ineffective marketers, then that is a residual point which begs the question why. Commentators at both liberal publications note the absence of party democracy, open primaries, and the role of big finance. That’s the upstream variable with poor communication and intermediate variable or residual. The idea that Wall Street will voluntarily sacrifice power in the party is counter-intuitive. Therefore, you need to address how to democratize the Democratic Party.