Why Centrist Democrats Keep Being Wrong About Elections

Donald Trump won in 2024, according to report co-authors Simon Bazelon, Lauren Harper Pope, and Liam Kerr, because Democratic candidates talked too much about divisive topics like climate and immigration and trans rights. Kamala Harris didn’t talk enough about “kitchen table” issues like the cost of living and prescription drug prices. The party platform had too many extreme positions, and voters noticed. The way forward, by their reasoning, is to support centrist candidates and moderate the party’s positions on immigration, public safety, climate, and “identity and cultural issues.”

There are a few problems with this thesis, which seems to get rehashed every single time Democrats lose an election. The most basic is that it assumes, in breezy fantasy borrowed from simpler times, that voters’ sense of the Democratic Party comes from the party’s policy platform and candidate speeches, rather than random tidbits absorbed from a propaganda-filled media environment.

What percentage of the public do you believe has any clue what is in the Democratic Party platform? I’ll give you a hint: It is lower than whatever number you just thought of. People also do not form impressions of the party based on canned answers, policy briefs, or stump speeches. The defining trait of the mass electorate is that they are an inattentive electorate. Their sense of the Democratic Party is shaped by stories that they incidentally hear, mostly as background noise.