Procedural Radicalism Is An Electoral Strategy
Forget about the autopsy. Enfranchise DC.
The DNC finally released its 2024 autopsy. Savvy observers (like Seth Masket) knew what was coming—a useless, shoddy sack full of consultant drivel, which vaguely encourages Democrats to abandon their principles in pursuit of a mythical Ohio Trump voter who is yearning to switch parties if Democrats would only hate trans people and immigrants slightly more.
The autopsy did have one positive effect—it led analyst G. Elliott Morris to write his own much, much better autopsy. Morris has discussed this issue before, but his new post is a very clear and illuminating summary of his findings.
Those findings are pretty straightforward: Harris lost because Biden’s approval was low and because inflation was high. Inflation was in fact high everywhere in the world, and as a result 2024 was a brutal year for incumbents across the globe. As Morris says,
every single governing party in a developed democracy that faced voters in 2024 lost vote share. The Tories were obliterated in the UK. Macron’s coalition lost its majority in France. The LDP lost its majority in Japan. And on and on. Incumbents from Portugal to South Korea either lost outright or were badly weakened.
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How do you out-strategize fundamentals?
Harris’ loss was driven largely by contentless “throw the bums out” anti-incumbent sentiment from people who pay little attention to political messaging. As Morris points out, this is a disheartening conclusion for politicians and partisans, because it suggests that they have little power over results. If your messaging is irrelevant, tweaking messaging isn’t going to help.
The good news (in terms of Democratic electoral fortunes; not in any other terms) is that Donald Trump is currently president and is attacking the economy in a staggering array of ways. As a result, Democrats have been wildly overperforming in special elections, and are likely to have very good years in both 2026 and 2028.
The problem, then, Morris argues, isn’t with the next couple of cycles. It’s with the ones after that. How can Democrats perform well enough in 2030 and 2032 to retain control of Congress and the presidency and stave off the fascists if anti-incumbent sentiment turns against them? Democrats need not just one electoral win, but a series of them if they are ever going to stabilize our democracy and force Republicans to become a normal democratic party again. But how is that possible if “throw the bums out” is the only consistent truth of elections in our new hyperpartisan fascist era?
Morris offers a couple of suggestions. First, he says, you should “run anti-incumbent candidates when the economy sucks”—but he doesn’t offer much in the way of advice as to how to brand your candidates as anti-incumbent when they’re running in the same party as the incumbent. Here, presumably, he is thinking about candidates like Dan Osborn did in Nebraska, who ran as an independent. Osborn he lost in 2024 too, but he wildly outperformed Harris, and perhaps offers a model for how Democrats could distance themselves from unpopular party leaders in tough years.
Morris’ other suggestion is that Democrats “do something big enough that voters actually feel it, or signal that you’re trying.” He suggests looking to LBJ and FDR as models and offering “a generational project that reorders the relationship between the American economy and the American worker.”
I am sympathetic to the goal of reordering the American economy. But I’m very skeptical that it would have the electoral effects that Morris is hoping for. In the first place, massive reordering of the economy takes time to implement and time to take effect. And the response is unlikely to be uniformly positive. Obamacare was a huge, major change to the economy which changed a huge number of people’s lives for the better. It led to a massive conservative backlash, devastating midterm losses, and a decade plus of (ongoing) efforts to roll it back. Because we are in hell.
Maybe change the rules
There is, though, one clear path to improving outcomes for Democrats in 2030 and 2032. That path is procedural radicalism.
Donald Trump doesn’t understand much, but he does in fact understand this. Faced with a massive approaching anti-incumbent blue wave, Trump has attempted to defend his House majority by changing the rules via massive racist disenfranchisement—aided and abetted by the Christofascist Supreme Court. The right wing robed oligarchs have embraced racist gerrymandering and gutted the VRA. Now Texas, Missouri, Florida, and states throughout the South—Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina—are rushing to eliminate Democratic legislative districts, ensuring that only white people have representation in Congress.
Democrats in California retaliated, and they made a half-hearted effort to do so in Virginia as well. But ultimately Republicans look set to pick up 10 seats or so in the House, maybe more maybe less depending on pending court cases and legal challenges.
It is very difficult to think of any possible messaging tweak or policy initiative which could ensure a 10-seat swing in an anti-incumbent environment. Democrats are not going to gain 10 seats by calibrating exactly how hard to throw trans people under which passenger vehicle. They aren’t going to get 10 seats by modulating the tones in which they chant “affordability” either.
They could, though, get 10 seats by fucking retaliating in kind. That means, first of all, going all in on gerrymandering in 2027 (Hakeen Jeffries has already said that 7 blue states may redistrict to maximize D gains before 2028.)
It also means ending the filibuster, expanding the Supreme Court absolutely first thing in 2029, and then immediately enfranchising Washington DC and as many territories as want it. Democrats should also pass gerrymandering reform, reinstitute the VRA, and pass real campaign finance reform. They should think about expanding the House, lowering the voting age, standardizing mail-in voting laws, and instituting other pro-democracy reforms.
None of this can ensure Democratic wins in 2032. But adding two, and maybe more, Democratic seats in the Senate (and a couple in the House) would be much, much more effective in retaining that chamber than seeking magic anti-incumbent candidates in Indiana or Texas. Ending gerrymandering would also give Democrats at least an even playing field in the House.
More, eliminating the filibuster and expanding the court would mean that Democrats would be in a position, for the first time in decades, to actually pass popular items on their agenda—raising the minimum wage, ensuring abortion rights, instituting real gun control, expanding health insurance or even passing a public option, child care, student loan forgiveness. It’s certainly possible that none of this would help them with voters. But it would improve people’s lives, and it seems worth at least trying to see if improving people’s lives in straightforward ways could in fact secure their votes.
Tweaks aren’t going to do it
We are currently in a fascist crisis. This is caused partly by the fact that the fascist party has a range of major structural advantages that have allowed them to leverage big, empty, mostly white states so that they can seize control of the senate and the judiciary in perpetuity, blocking change and entrenching ever more violent white supremacy.
Democrats have responded mostly by yelling at each other about messaging and engaging in endless struggle session about why they can’t attract more of the white voters who keep voting for the white identity party of Nazis.
Morris’ analysis underlines why this non-strategy is pointless and self-defeating. I think we should take the next step, acknowledge that tweaking branding and policy is not going to be much more helpful than tweaking messaging, and instead just overturn the table.
Fascists have taken advantage of the anti-democratic aspects of our system. So when you get into power, make a real, serious, sweeping push to end the anti-democratic aspects of our system. Seize control of the court. Expand the Senate. Un-gerrymander the House. Expand access to voting. Stop accepting that you have to fight with one hand, or both hands, stapled to the wall. If you want different outcomes, then you need to do more than make mouth noises. You’ve got to do something different.
You are on the right track. DC and if they want it, PR statehood should be high up on the list. Hell, if Trump wants Cuba so bad, let’s admit the states of East Cuba and West Cuba too. (I’m mostly joking.) Expanding the House is also high on my list. And a robust anti-gerrymandering law for the 2030 census.
Absolutely correct! The cowardly status quo dems just can’t seem to grasp that their failed formulas will continue to fail. Actually leaning into our supposed values and pushing forward is the way to move forward. Doing the things we say we want to do is the way to get things done. And fighting MAGA deviousness with our own strategies that also advance our ideals (DC statehood, empowering the vulnerable, etc.) is the way to make progress. Why does all this seem so hard for the pundits to grasp? Is it because they never actually shared these values? I’m gonna go with “yup.”