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Democrats are currently focused on the fight against Donald Trump. But quietly, factions within the party are preparing contingency plans for a different battle: the one over how to interpret a Kamala Harris loss.
Polls of the 2024 election show the closest presidential race in modern memory. For Harris, defeat is roughly as likely as victory. The former outcome is sure to trigger a fierce, intra-Democratic debate over what the party should learn from losing the White House (twice) to an unpopular demagogue.
Already, moderates in the party are seeding the narrative that Harris was doomed by the Biden administration’s excessive deference to left-wing interest groups and aversion to orthodox economics. Some progressives suggest that Harris may be undone by her ties to big business, failure to articulate a “vision for the country,” and complicity in Israeli atrocities in Gaza.
It’s impossible to say with absolute certainty which — if any — of these theories would become conventional wisdom in the event of a second Trump victory.
Often, when a party suffers an electoral rebuke, the faction that led it into the wilderness loses influence within the coalition. After Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, the Democratic Party became more progressive, ceding influence to some of her left-wing critics.
Yet no wing of the Democratic Party can claim full ownership of either the Biden presidency or Harris campaign. On the one hand, Biden was the moderate candidate in the 2020 primary. And Kamala Harris is now running to the right of Biden 2020, touting a more modest fiscal agenda than the president’s, championing a conservative border security bill, promising to appoint a bipartisan council of advisers, and pledging to solicit input from “the business sector” while in office.
On the other hand, progressives wielded tremendous influence over economic policy in the Biden White House. And Harris is only five years removed from campaigning as a proponent of Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal — issue positions that Trump’s team has relentlessly highlighted. What’s more, the fact that Harris secured the Democratic nomination without competing in a primary makes the question of who within the party owns her success or failure even more ambiguous.
All this said, I suspect that anyone who believes a Harris defeat would strengthen the party’s progressive wing is kidding themselves. On the contrary, I think Trump’s election would push the Democrats rightward or at least consolidate the moderate turn that the party has already taken.
This would not be a happy development, from my perspective. Under Biden, the Democratic Party’s positioning on many issues has been to the right of my own preferences. I believe the United States would be best served by a more generous social welfare state, higher levels of immigration, and a foreign policy that showed less tolerance for the human rights violations of US allies. But the political case for some degree of moderation in the wake of a Harris loss will be plausible. And I believe that case will win out for three reasons:
First, the unusual conditions that led Democrats to move left after their first loss to Trump no longer hold.
Second, one of progressives’ perennial arguments against the political necessity of moderation — that Democrats can mobilize low-propensity young and nonwhite voters through bold progressivism — has grown less credible over the past eight years.
Finally, a Trump victory would almost certainly lead to a full extension of his 2017 tax cuts — and, if the Republican gets his way, new reductions in corporations’ tax liabilities. This would swell the federal deficit, thereby rendering moderate Democrats more averse to ambitious new social welfare spending, such as that proposed by Biden during his first year in office.
This is not to say that a Harris loss would cause Democrats to re-embrace the across-the-board centrism of Bill Clinton’s second term. Rather, Democrats would likely remain staunchly progressive in areas where left-wing positioning has little political cost.
But losing a second election to an undisciplined reactionary probably won’t convince Democrats that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were insufficiently left-wing on immigration, criminal justice, or fiscal policy. A second Trump victory would therefore probably mean not only a more conservative federal government, but also, in all likelihood, a more moderate Democratic Party.
We’re not in 2017 anymore
The last time Democrats lost to Trump, they proceeded to move left: Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-all bill gained sponsors in Congress, nearly every Democrat with presidential ambitions embraced more progressive issue positions, and the party ultimately nominated a candidate with a more left-wing platform than Hillary Clinton’s four years earlier.
But this history is unlikely to repeat, should Harris lose in November.
Three factors enabled the Democrats’ progressive pivot after 2016. First, Trump’s victory and Sanders’s strong general election poll numbers briefly threw conventional political wisdom into doubt. Second, the Vermont Senator’s surprising strength in the 2016 primary led many Democratic presidential hopefuls to court his constituency. And third, the party knew that it would be running against an exceptionally unpopular Republican in 2020.
None of these conditions would hold following a Harris loss.
In 2016, most mainstream commentators understood Trump as an extremist and expected him to lose partly for that reason. After all, the right-wing demagogue praised political violence, called for ethnic discrimination, and promised to imprison his presidential rival. The fact that Trump nevertheless won the presidency naturally invited suspicions that the realm of politically tenable positions was wider than previously thought.
This sense was reinforced by Sanders’s apparent popularity. During the 2016 campaign, polls frequently showed the socialist senator performing better against Trump than Clinton did. Taken together, Trump and Sanders’s apparent electability suggested that the benefits of moderation may have been greatly exaggerated.
In the intervening years, however, conventional political wisdom regained credibility. Democratic politicos came to appreciate that swing voters did not see Trump the same way they did: Voters saw Trump in 2016 as the most “moderate” Republican nominee since 1972. This perception wasn’t entirely baseless. Although Trump adopted some far-right positions, he also pulled his party to the left on entitlement spending and trade. At various points in his 2016 campaign, he also offered rhetorical support for center-left positions on Planned Parenthood, LGBTQ rights, and foreign policy.
Meanwhile, Sanders’s poll numbers softened. By 2020, the senator’s favorability rating was underwater, with non-college-educated white voters disapproving of him by more than 25 points in some polls. Sanders remained more popular and electorally competitive than socialists were traditionally presumed to be. This likely reflected the popular appeal of many progressive positions, including a $15 minimum wage and support for organized labor. Nevertheless, in many high-quality polls in 2020, Biden performed better against Trump than Sanders did.
The second condition that led Democrats to move left after 2016 was the apparent strength of progressives in presidential primaries. Despite Hillary Clinton’s enormous edge in party support, Sanders still managed to make the 2016 primary highly competitive. In a more open race, it stood to reason that a progressive in Sanders’s mold might have the inside track to the nomination. This led Democratic presidential hopefuls to bid against each other for the left’s support. Ultimately, that progressive fervor influenced even the race’s moderate, Joe Biden.
But Sanders and Warren both put up underwhelming performances in the 2020 primary. Once the party’s moderates unified behind Biden, he won easily. The race’s ultimate lesson was that a majority of Democratic primary voters care more about perceived electability than ideological purity.
Further, if Harris loses — after Trump spent months assailing her for positions she took in 2020 — Democrats will take a second lesson from that primary: Getting into bidding wars for progressive support is electorally damaging. Put these two takeaways together, and the Democrats’ 2028 field following a Harris loss is likely to be more moderate than its 2020 one.
Finally, after 2016, Democrats knew that they would be running against an exceptionally unpopular and undisciplined Republican candidate four years later. This made it possible for the party to indulge its activists and advocacy groups while remaining highly competitive in the polls.
Assuming a second Trump presidency doesn’t end the republic, Democrats would face a non-Trump Republican in 2028, for the first time in more than a decade. One shouldn’t put it past conservatives to find an even more repellent standard-bearer, but odds are a post-Trump GOP nominee would be more capable of adhering to a message and avoiding personal scandal than the party’s current leader. And that could force Democrats to exercise greater ideological discipline.
Juicing turnout through bold progressivism is no longer a plausible alternative to placating swing voters
In the wake of a Harris loss, progressives would also lack one weapon that they had long possessed in intra-party skirmishes over strategy: a halfway plausible theory of how Democrats can make moderation unnecessary by mobilizing their base.
The idea that Democrats could forgo winning over skeptical swing voters by increasing turnout was long central to progressive political thinking. And it’s not hard to see why: An American who would consider voting Republican is one who does not share the progressive movement’s worldview, by definition. Such a person might have progressive views on some issues (swing voters often have ideologically heterodox views), but they are unlikely to believe that the Democratic Party is insufficiently aligned with the left on all major issues. To the contrary, according to polling from the New York Times, swing voters are more likely to identify as conservative than liberal. And this is liable to be even more true of those nonpartisan voters who ultimately do cast a ballot for the GOP nominee.
Thus, if Democratic officials conclude that their party must win over some voters who backed Republicans in the last election, then those officials are liable to moderate ideologically, at least on some issues.
In the wake of past defeats, progressives tried to dissuade Democrats from reaching that conclusion by offering an alternative path to a new electoral majority: Instead of placating Republican-curious voters, Democrats could mobilize young and nonwhite voters who already favored their party but hadn’t previously shown up at the polls. Achieving the latter task required championing a bold vision for progressive change.
This pitch always had its flaws. For one thing, persuading a Republican-leaning voter is twice as valuable as turning out a Democrat: Doing the former not only adds a vote to your party’s column, it subtracts one from your opponent’s tally. For another, evidence that nonvoting people of color were uniformly progressive has never been especially strong.
Still, the idea that mobilization could serve as a substitute for moderation had some plausibility in the 2010s. In the Obama era, Democrats thrived in high-turnout presidential elections while struggling in low-turnout midterms. The demographic groups with the lowest turnout rates — including young and Hispanic voters — were overwhelmingly Democratic.
But two developments have weakened this case in recent years. First, young and nonwhite Americans have become less reliably Democratic, according to the polls. Second, it’s become clear that the subset of young and nonwhite Americans with a low propensity to vote isn’t especially left-wing.
In polls of the 2024 race, Democrats’ margin with young voters has fallen sharply. In some surveys, Trump has opened up a roughly 20-point lead with young men, and he has also made substantial gains with Black and Hispanic voters.
More importantly, it’s become apparent that low-propensity young and nonwhite voters — the typical targets for a progressive mobilization strategy — are particularly open to the Republican message and not particularly liberal.
Nate Cohn of the New York Times first flagged this reality in 2019. In a study of battleground state nonvoters, Cohn found that Biden’s margin over Trump with nonvoting Black respondents was 44 points smaller than his margin with Black voters who turned out in both 2016 and 2018.
Cohn’s analysis also found that young nonvoters who leaned Democratic had more conservative opinions on immigration, health care, and gender than young Democrats who showed up for elections. All in all, Cohn found that nonvoters’ views didn’t differ substantially from those of the electorate at large.
Subsequent polling and election results have lent credence to these findings. In the Biden era, Democrats have performed better in low-turnout special elections than relatively high-turnout presidential and midterm elections. And polls have consistently found Trump performing better with low-propensity voters than reliable ones, a pattern that holds within the nonwhite and young subsets of the electorate.
This doesn’t mean that Democrats have nothing to gain from mobilizing low-propensity voters who lean left. Even if nonvoting Black Americans are less Democratic than Black Americans in general, they’re still majority Democratic. To the extent the party can target its supporters — without accidentally mobilizing conservative voters — turnout operations can aid Democratic candidates.
But the fact that nonvoters aren’t overwhelmingly Democratic and that nonvoting Democrats aren’t especially progressive makes it harder to argue that mobilization can serve as a substitute for winning over swing voters, or that moderating is antithetical to increasing Democratic turnout.
For these reasons, progressives would likely have a harder time preventing Democrats from moderating, at least on some issues, after a 2024 defeat than they did after Clinton’s loss in 2016.
Trump’s tax cuts would likely constrain future Democrats’ fiscal ambitions
Kamala Harris’s Democratic Party is already less fiscally ambitious than Joe Biden’s was when he took office.
The Democratic nominee still supports a wide range of new social programs, from increased funding for long-term care to universal pre-kindergarten to family and medical leave. But Harris is nevertheless proposing fewer progressive economic initiatives than Biden did upon taking office and has dropped the public health insurance option that the president campaigned on in 2020. The most expensive item on Harris’s fiscal agenda is the extension of Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for households earning less than $400,000 (Harris would offset some of these costs with tax increases on corporations and high earners).
If Trump wins, it’s likely that the next Democratic president’s economic ambitions would be even more modest than Harris’s are today.
Should Trump win the presidency, Republicans will have an excellent shot of controlling both the House and Senate. In that scenario, the party would likely enact the bulk of Trump’s proposed tax cuts, adding as much as $7.5 trillion to the deficit.
Even if Trump only manages to increase the deficit by a fraction of this sum, it would likely constrain moderate Democrats’ appetite for new social spending the next time the party takes power.
Already in 2021, a significantly lower national debt total rendered Sen. Joe Manchin unwilling to endorse more than a sliver of Biden’s program. Since then, following the post-pandemic spike in inflation and interest rates, Democratic wonks have grown significantly more concerned about America’s long-term fiscal trajectory. As we get closer to 2032 — when, according to projections, Social Security will cease taking in enough revenue to cover its benefits — anxieties about how the government will sustain its existing commitments will increase.
The easiest way for Congress to cover Social Security’s shortfall in 2033 would be to pay for the program’s unfunded benefits with general revenue. But this would cost $440.1 billion that year, according to the Congressional Research Service, with the sum increasing steadily over time. To put that in context, merely sustaining Social Security’s existing benefits would cost more than all of Harris’s current proposals for expanding social welfare combined, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s score of the latter.
By itself, Social Security’s trajectory is enough to threaten Democrats’ fiscal ambitions. Add in another round of deficit-swelling tax cuts, and Biden’s Build Back Better agenda may come to seem as politically moribund in 2029 as Bernie Sanders’s health care plans do today.
Democrats aren’t going to party like it’s 1999
There are three caveats to this analysis. The first is that anticipating how American politics will change over four years is not easy, as any pundit who followed both the 2012 and 2016 elections can tell you.
The second is that, should Harris lose, there would probably be tight limits to the Democrats’ moderation.
Unlike during Bill Clinton’s tenure, the Democratic Party no longer has the remnants of a center-right Southern wing. And unlike during much of the 20th century, socially conservative union heads and urban machines have no clout in blue America.
Rather, the Democratic coalition is more uniformly liberal than at any point in its history, and the same can be said of the party’s major advocacy groups. The contemporary leadership of the AFL-CIO is progressive on both economic and social issues, having forfeited the organization’s historic opposition to immigration in 2000. Meanwhile, progressive foundations, think tanks, and nonprofits have extraordinary influence in the party, effectively crafting much of Biden’s domestic agenda for him. And by most accounts, the rising generation of Democratic staffers is quite left-wing, their progressive impulses reinforced and sharpened by social media’s tendency toward group polarization.
The personal liberalism of Democratic elites will act as a check on any rightward pivot. Where there is no apparent political cost to upholding progressive principles, Democrats are likely to retain their current positioning or perhaps even move left. This category of issues would include abortion rights, minimum wage hikes, and pro-labor policies, among other things.
The third caveat is that this is not intended as a case for fatalism. I think Americans have a strong interest in higher levels of legal immigration and a more expansive welfare state. Neither Social Security’s impending shortfall nor another round of tax cuts will make it impossible for Democrats to create ambitious new social welfare programs. The party could simply enact large tax increases if it found the political will.
Progressives should try to forge that will by persuading the public of their views and discouraging Democrats from giving unnecessary ground. The ideological trajectory of America and the Democratic Party is not fixed.
But should Harris lose, the path of least resistance will cut to the right.
