For most Democrats, Trump’s win was a shock. For Ruy Teixeira, it was unsurprising.
A political scientist and lifelong Democrat, Ruy has for years now been warning that the party was prioritizing ideological purity over popular appeal.
His 2023 book with John Judis, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, could have been a wake-up call for the party. One wonders how the election might have gone if the Harris campaign had read it carefully.
Ruy’s writing has been prophetic on the exact questions Democrats are grappling with as they try to find their way out of the political wilderness. Questions like: Why did so many working-class Americans abandon the party? What happened to the promise of a multiracial Democratic majority? And how, once Democrats have picked themselves up and dusted themselves off, should they go about putting together a winning coalition again?
These questions are set to be a major theme of our politics in 2025 and beyond, and we can think of no better guide than the man who saw so much of it coming.
That’s why we’re thrilled to announce that Ruy is joining The Free Press as a Contributing Writer.
Every other week or so, you can find Ruy right here, helping us make sense of the future of the left and the Democratic Party, as they try to figure out how to handle a second Trump term—and how to win in 2028.
In his first column as a contributing writer, Ruy argues that Democrats are in denial about why they lost the election. — The Editors
In the wake of the Democrats’ drubbing at the hands of Donald Trump and the GOP, you’d assume the party would be all-in on a fundamental rethink, starting with some serious soul-searching on how the party came to be so out of sync with the majority of America on key cultural questions.
Questions like: Is America a “white supremacist” society? Is it racist to question levels of immigration? Are citing one’s personal pronouns necessary? Is anyone who questions the differences between trans women from biological women a bigot who should be expunged from polite society? For each of these questions, the answer for the overwhelming majority of Americans is an obvious no. But in elite Democratic circles, it’s a different story. For a party pondering its unpopularity, you might think that this gap would be a good place to start.
Well, if the six weeks since the election is anything to go by, you’d be wrong. Instead, much of the party is maneuvering to change as little as possible on the cultural front. Why? Because many of today’s Democrats are culture denialists. That is, they do not consider cultural issues to be real issues. Instead, they see them as fictions, distractions, or expressions of bigotry that are to be opposed, not indulged.
Consider Greg Casar, the new chair of the powerful Congressional Progressive Caucus. In a recent interview with NBC News, Casar urged the Democrats to “re-emphasize core economic issues every time some of these cultural war issues are brought up.” He said that “when we hear Republicans attacking queer Americans again, I think the progressive response needs to be that a trans person didn’t deny your health insurance claim, a big corporation did—with Republican help.” Casar said that “the Republican Party obsession” with culture war issues is “driven by Republicans’ desire to distract voters and have them look away while Republicans pick their pocket.”
Massachusetts Democratic representative Jim McGovern echoed Casar’s thoughts recently with this rhetoric about Republicans: “They want to blame trans people? Guess what? Trans people aren’t the ones raising people’s grocery prices. Big corporations are.” Republicans, he added, “want to blame immigrants. . . . Immigrants aren’t the ones denying health insurance claims. . . . it’s the billion-dollar insurance companies that do that.”
Get it? These aren’t real issues. They’re just distractions ginned up by Republicans for nefarious political purposes. The logical conclusion of this argument is that Democrats don’t need to actually change their position on any “culture war” issue. Instead, they just need to change the subject and talk about mustache-twirling corporate villains.
Many senior figures on the party’s left have skipped discussions of cultural issues altogether, instead publishing progressive policy wish lists. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont thinks Democrats should talk more about billionaires. Rep. Ro Khanna is betting on a “New Economic Deal” that would emphasize high-paying jobs for the middle class. Senator Chris Murphy thinks the key to a Democratic revival is advocating for the breakup of corporate power. Other Democrats suggest a relentless focus on “kitchen-table” issues. (Ah, what would Democrats do without that fabled kitchen table?) The general idea is that talking more about economic issues, typically in a populist vein, will win back the working class and obviate the need to change anything else.
Or perhaps the real problem, some Democrats argue, is that the party hasn’t communicated its wonderful positions adeptly and thoroughly enough. With the right spin, maybe their positions on everything, from the economy to transgender issues and immigration would be popular. This seems to be the view of the two leading candidates for chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Ken Martin, head of Minnesota’s Democratic Party (technically its Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party), has a 10-point plan that calls for a “massive narrative and branding project.” Ben Wikler, head of Wisconsin’s Democratic Party, believes Democrats must “become the narrator” of their own brand.
This all seems reasonable enough but, cutting through the verbiage, nowhere do these candidates for the DNC chair concede the party’s cultural vulnerabilities. When reading their pitches for the powerful post, it’s as if those problems don’t exist.
The outgoing DNC chair takes things even further. Since the election, Jaime Harrison has strenuously resisted the idea Democrats should abandon “identity politics,” saying they represent how “people of color” see Democrats fighting for them. Invoking his status as a black man, he remarked: “That is my identity. . . . it is not politics. It is my life. And the people that I need in the party, that I need to stand up for me, have to recognize that. You cannot run away from that.” In other words, Democrats should double down on so-called culture war issues like race and gender that are so off-putting to voters. This is a strange recommendation since, as Democrats have become ever more associated with identity politics, they have been doing ever more poorly among non-white voters, especially non-white working-class voters. Their advantage among the latter group has declined by more than half since 2012.
There’s one further type of Democratic cultural denialism. I call this group the “There’s Nothing We Could Do” Democrats. They argue that the anti-incumbency forces at work in November—inflation, the Covid hangover, and so on—were so powerful that defeat was inevitable. Amusingly, this crowd includes the various high-paid operatives and consultants who ran Harris’s campaign. (What were you being paid for, then?)
All of these flavors of denial ignore the clear evidence that Democrats lost in no small part because of cultural issues.
In one postelection survey, the top reason not to vote for Harris among swing voters was the perception that she was more focused on cultural questions like transgender issues than on helping the middle class. This was the theme of the Trump campaign’s most effective ad, with its unforgettable final line: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
In other polling, overwhelming majorities (67 to 77 percent) of swing voters who chose Trump said that the following phrases about the Democrats were accurate: “not tough enough on the border crisis”; “support immigrants more than American citizens”; “want to promote transgender ideology”; “don’t care about securing the border”; “have extreme ideas about race and gender”; “aren’t doing enough to address crime”; and “are too focused on identity politics.”
These same voters believed Harris supported the following policies: using taxpayer dollars to pay for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants (83 percent); allowing children under 18 to transition genders without informing their parents (77 percent); decriminalizing border crossings (77 percent); allowing abortion up until the day of birth (76 percent); allowing illegal immigrants convicted of crimes to stay in America (75 percent); defunding the police (72 percent); and giving black Americans reparations for slavery (67 percent). While Harris disavowed her past support for some of these policies, such disavowals were obviously too little too late.
If the Democrats’ liability on a range of cultural issues is so clear, why do so many party members refuse to admit the obvious problem?
Part of the answer is a fear of “the groups”—the advocacy nonprofits that push so many of these radical policies. (Harris stated her support for public funding for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants in an ACLU survey in 2019.) Point out the obvious, and you will face an onslaught of criticism from the groups and their allies across social and mainstream media, foundations, academia, think tanks, and within the Democratic Party infrastructure itself.
If you think I’m exaggerating, just look at what happened to Massachusetts Democratic representative Seth Moulton soon after the election. For suggesting that biological boys should not be playing girls’ sports, no matter their “gender identity,” he was viciously attacked by progressives all over the map; his own staffers resigned in protest; and his hometown party in Salem, Massachusetts, demanded a resignation for “Nazi” remarks (witch trial, anybody?). To Moulton’s credit, he refused to back down. In an interview with The Free Press during the controversy, he warned that his party was “wearing an ideological straitjacket.” The lesson from the blowback Moulton endured is clear: Stay away from these issues, or you will pay.
Voters clearly sense that the inmates are running the asylum. In an interesting finding from a Progressive Policy Institute postelection survey of working-class (noncollege) voters, just 34 percent of respondents said they trusted Harris to stand up to the extreme members of her party. By contrast, a majority said they thought Trump could do so.
But the issue goes deeper than fear. Far too many Democrats simply believe they are on the “right side of history” when it comes to policies around immigration, crime, race, and trans issues.
This mistaken assumption has been a disaster for the party. Voters overwhelmingly believe illegal immigration is wrong and should be deterred—not indulged. They believe crimes should be punished and public safety is sacrosanct. They believe, like Martin Luther King Jr., that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” and therefore oppose discrimination on the basis of race no matter who benefits from that discrimination. They believe biological sex is real, that spaces limited to biological women in areas like sports and prisons should be preserved, and that medical treatments like drugs and surgery are serious interventions that should not be available simply on the basis of declared gender identity, especially for children.
These issues reflect deeply held beliefs and values and are vitally important to ordinary voters, especially working-class voters. They are not distractions, or fake issues, or nonfactors in the election. So far, even the screamingly obvious implications of this last election have not been enough to shock the party out of its denialist torpor. Until they wake up, Democrats are doomed to repeat the mistakes of 2024.
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