The War Over Woke in the Democratic Party
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As Democrats sift through the wreckage from November to figure out precisely how they lost to Donald Trump and the Republicans, the party’s conventional wisdom has congealed around a ready reason: Cultural progressivism alienated a great swath of the working class, which, across racial lines, is socially more conservative.
“Woke is broke,” Mika Brzezinski pronounced days after the election during a Morning Joe segment in which she read aloud a Maureen Dowd column citing James Carville and other Democratic bigwigs to argue that the party elite was too concerned with identity politics. The Democratic Party, Dowd wrote, lost because it “embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like ‘Latinx,’ and ‘BIPOC.’”
The primary example Democrats give of the left’s damaging focus on cultural issues is the Trump campaign’s “they/them” ad, which flooded the airwaves. The ad used a clip from a 2019 interview Kamala Harris did with the National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund, in which she discussed providing taxpayer-funded gender-reassignment surgery for detained migrants and others in federal custody.
“We can’t be the party of pronouns and land acknowledgments,” says Philippe Reines, a longtime aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton who has twice now played Trump in debate prep for Democratic nominees. “We are bleeding people right now, and we are not going to get them back with the branding that we have — and it really is just a branding issue. It’s not like every day you run into people changing their genders on the government’s dime; it is not as if every Democrat is telling you their pronouns.”
There is a body of evidence to support these assertions. A postelection poll from Blueprint, a well-regarded Democratic polling outfit, found that 90 percent of swing voters who supported Trump agreed with the statement “Democrats want to promote a transgender ideology” and that 91 percent thought the party is “too focused on identity politics,” while 84 percent said the party wants to promote critical race theory. A majority or near majority believed that Harris favored defunding the police, decriminalizing the border, and giving reparations to Black Americans for slavery — all positions she does not hold. A 2022 poll from Echelon Insights found that white progressives held views on cultural — and even racial — issues far to the left of most racial minorities, agreeing with the phrase “Racism is built into American society” at twice the rate of Hispanic Americans and 13 points more than Black Americans. They were half as likely as Black Americans to say that “America is the greatest country in the world.”
Part of the problem, according to Blueprint’s lead pollster, Evan Roth Smith, is that most of these issues are seen by the public as the concerns of elite, college-educated voters. So even though Harris rolled out a suite of economic-policy proposals that polled more favorably than what Trump offered — taxing the wealthy and corporations more, expanding the child tax credit, increasing the earned-income tax credit for the poorest workers, including home-health aides under Medicare, providing $25,000 for first-time homebuyers, and increasing tax deductions for small-business start-ups — working-class voters believed the Democrat was out of touch.
“You can’t go out and be a class warrior on economic stuff if there are a lot of things people believe you are doing that are hostile to the working class,” says Roth Smith. He cites labor unions that benefited directly from the Biden administration, such as the Teamsters, but still didn’t support Harris because their rank-and-file membership “could write the whole party off as just a bunch of libs.”
But even if all of this is true, the party’s left flank says it is absurd to blame it for Harris’s underwhelming performance and even more absurd to lay the blame at the feet of so-called wokeism. Harris ran as a candidate of the center-left, campaigning with Liz Cheney and talking up her gun ownership and her work as a prosecutor going after criminals.
“It is laughable to see the same right-wing, corporate Democrats who have rejected any sort of populist agenda blame anyone but themselves on how they got here,” says Usamah Andrabi of Justice Democrats, a group that arose in the first Trump term targeting moderate Democrats in Congress. “The party has become increasingly beholden to corporations and billionaires and right-wingers who fund their super-PACs, and working people simply see it as no longer fighting for their interest.”
Andrabi says his side didn’t favor land acknowledgments or obsessive policing of pronouns, but not because they alienated swing voters — rather, because they weren’t what marginalized communities were asking for: Indigenous peoples want reparations, and transgender teenagers want to be respected as equals. Instead, he says, liberal elites came up with symbolic gestures and half-measures, which they then derided as not just phony but electoral losers.
Left-wing Democrats have been quick to point out that voters listed the economy and inflation as the overwhelmingly important issues in the election and that, say, trans rights scarcely came up at all. In fact, they say, blaming the election loss on these issues is further proof of the echo chamber of elite Democrats, who are far more likely to be reprimanded by their lefty peers — and annoyed by them — than the average swing voter.
“Get it together, man! I understand that you think your intern is overprivileged, but that does not need to be the obsession of our politics. Most working people don’t have time for that kind of thing,” says Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party. “Any time anyone has seriously used the word woke to me, I automatically lose respect for them.”
Anat Shenker-Osorio, a Democratic strategist on the left, says some form of this argument — call it “popularism” or triangulation or a “third way” — pops up after every election and that it “relies on a fundamental fiction that what people believe about Democrats is what Democrats say. That would be a nice world, but we wouldn’t be worried about the rise of a potentially fascist administration in Washington if it were true.”
The anti-woke brigade, she says, bases its theory on the belief that the electorate is static: Appeal to the concerns of the median voter and you win. But politics doesn’t work that way since the makeup of the electorate changes every cycle, as does what it purports to care about. “I can promise you that the dad in western Pennsylvania who has to stop by Walmart after work to get gas so he can pick up his kid after school isn’t thinking about the border or if trans kids are on the volleyball team,” Shenker-Osorio says.
David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the Harris campaign, told Pod Save America after the election that the Trump “they/them” ad did not have the effect most outside observers have assumed. “We were spending a lot of time with voters in these battleground states, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and this trans ad was not driving the vote,” he said.
If Republicans won’t let Democrats ignore the culture war, Shenker-Osorio says Democrats should lean into the fight and portray these issues as a distraction. For instance, while Republicans rail against trans girls playing on sports teams, Democrats should say the other side wants to cut educational funding so that there won’t even be any after-school sports teams. Or move the debate onto friendly territory. She points out that the question asked of Harris in 2019 was “Why should transgender people vote for you?” Harris should have discussed all sorts of Democratic priorities around public safety and the economy that would benefit all voters. “If Democrats won’t fight for their own causes, for their own issues, most voters look at that and say, Why are they going to fight for me, then?” Shenker-Osorio says.
As Democrats look to 2028, more and more of their younger voices are taking just this kind of approach.
“We are not a party that talks about power. We are not a party that attacks the powerful,” says Connecticut senator Chris Murphy. “We are a party that defends institutions that are badly broken, and we are a party that offers handouts instead of focusing on un-rigging the rules.”
As he sees it, Democrats have become synonymous with the political Establishment, and so any voter with grievances against “the Establishment” will vote against Democrats, regardless of their preferred policies. This is how Trump can both promise to crack down on crime while attacking Harris for her role as a prosecutor, how he can be tough on the border while obtaining increased Latino support, and how he can attract Arab and Muslim voters who think the Biden administration was too cozy with Israel and pro-Israel voters alike.
“We can talk about a child tax credit and expanded Obamacare subsidies and student-loan provisions, but that doesn’t win over many voters, because while people appreciate a check, what they really want is for the rules of the economy to be fixed so that if you start a business, it doesn’t get swallowed by Google or Amazon,” Murphy says. “We came to be the party of the Establishment, and people were able to look past Trump’s rough edges because he seemed, to them, like somebody who would fuck up the whole system.”
As Democrats become increasingly a party of the well educated and the affluent, some political scientists have predicted that they will cease to focus on lifting up working-class voters. It is, after all, Democrats who are voting to raise taxes on some of their own to pay for health care for people who vote for Republicans, who would take their health care away and lower taxes on the rich.
Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman representing Silicon Valley, says that he detected from his constituents, who are among the wealthiest in the nation, no sense of a retrenchment on the priority of lessening inequality. “I think that most of the people who I represent understand that you can’t have a healthy economy if it is just based on the coasts,” he says. “If you do that, you are going to continue to have the divides we are seeing in this election over anti-immigration sentiment, anti-technology sentiment, and we can’t have a prosperous country if the economic inequality continues.”
As party strategists blame the so-called wokes for Democrats’ defeat, some center-left figures are going further and insisting that it is not just left-wing cultural politics that hurt the party but left-wing economics, too. Dmitri Mehlhorn, a Democratic strategist who, until recently, worked for the megadonor Reid Hoffman, puts the blame on the party’s defeat not just on “defund the police” rhetoric and lax border policy but Harris’s price-gouging proposal, which he says “offended the business community.”
Reines agrees: “The left took the wrong lesson from the 2016 primary. They somehow decided that it meant that the party needed to move even further left.”
Matt Bennett, the executive vice-president of Third Way, an avatar of the center-left politics, warns against a nakedly populist approach as Democrats think about 2028. “Populism is about two things: Who is the villain, and what is the offer?” he says. “And the reason that left-wing populism is weak sauce compared to right-wing populism is that the right wing has ignorant and stupid notions about how immigrants are stealing your jobs and bringing crime, and left-wing villains are oligarchs and corporations and it is just not as clear a set of villains — not when the guy we just elected is palling around with the richest man in the world.”
For the left, those villains don’t only reside in the Republican Party.
“When have you ever seen this administration do anything to support any marginalized communities?” says Andrabi of Justice Democrats. “Instead, you see a party of, by, and for the elite, and we can’t deny that. Working-class people see that. We have politicians controlled by a consultant class, fighting on behalf of their biggest donors, and we are ready to take them out.”