Every Time

After the election, well-meaning people were like "let's heal, and regroup," while the ghouls with the money and the microphones set to work blaming everybody but themselves.

The irony here is that Jentleson is describing a campaign that looks a lot like the one that Harris ran, and lost. As progressives quickly pointed out in response, in 2024 Harris did indeed say no to the kinds of groups he mentioned, leaning on celebrity endorsements and vague pronouncements of “joy.” The special interests that were most influential this cycle weren’t progressives but AIPAC, cryptocurrency PACS, and Uber, whose former chief counsel Tony West (Harris’s brother-in-law) urged the candidate to moderate her message so as to better appeal to corporate interests.

As journalist Dan Denvir wrote before the election, Democrats this cycle fell back on an old playbook of trying to outflank Republicans on immigration. They championed a bill chock-full of the right’s preferred policies, like expanding ICE detention capacity and restricting asylum, then campaigned on the fact that the GOP voted it down when Trump told them to. Having previously called Trump’s border wall a “medieval vanity project,” Harris then pledged to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building it. As Denvir writes, “Given the choice to pander to reactionaries or shore up the party’s left wing, Democrats tend to prioritize the former. The result is a dangerous asymmetric polarization: Republicans radicalize on immigration, while Democratic elites chase after them. The ‘normal’ position on immigration moves ever rightward.”

What precisely might Harris have said to better convince voters that she would be adequately tough on immigration? And if her fatal flaws in Jentleson’s view mostly come down to things she said in the 2020 primary, does that mean that all candidates should ignore the realities of the race that they’re currently in—including in relatively progressive seats—so as to avoid Republican blowback if they run for something else in the future? The trouble with the “moderation” pitch isn’t just that it ignores the reality of the election that just happened. It also leaves Democrats playing catch-up in debates whose terms are perpetually set by Republicans, whatever the real-world consequences. The demand that the party embrace whatever positions happen to be popular at the moment imagines public opinion as exogenous to the work of politics. What precisely is the “moral imperative” to win elections if Democrats are merely choosing the correct position among the options that the right lays out for them?