"Identity politics" did not cost the Democrats the election

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a campaign speech at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2024.

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a campaign speech at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, October 29, 2024.

Losing an election is a an opportunity for reflection. It’s also an opportunity for airing pet peeves. Unfortunately, as the Democrats’ post-election conversation proves, the two are often one and the same, especially when it comes to identity.

Donald Trump’s victory has unleashed a flood of complaints that Democrats are too wrapped up in “identity politics.” Column after column, and story after story pin at least some of the blame on Democrats’ defeat on spending too much time on identity politics.

Of course, it’s easy to make that accusation in retrospect. It’s also wrong.

For one thing, Kamala Harris never went all in on identity politics. If anything, she underplayed the issue. The critics blame “the left,” a large, faceless group, for taking control of the party and pushing it into unfriendly territory.

Then there is the phrase itself, which is insulting. It diminishes the quest for equal rights by characterizing it as a fringe issue.

For another, it’s applied solely to women, non-white groups, and the LGBTQ+ community. No one is talking about college-graduate identity politics. Indeed, many of the people arguing against “identity politics” are actually arguing for a different form of identity politics.

For example, consider the column that Harry J. Holzer, a professor of public policy at Georgetown and a senior fellow at Brookings, wrote for The Hill, “I strongly believe Democrats must tone down their very heavy focus on race and gender issues — which are divisive and appeal primarily to the college-educated, while turning off most men and the working class.”

So women’s issues are identity politics. Men’s concerns are not, and white people’s aren’t. What’s silly about Holzer’s comments is that the reason why Democrats played so heavily to women’s concerns this time out is because the support of women was a big reason why they succeeded beyond their expectations in 2022. If Democrats had won this time out, there would have been as many articles praising the success of identity politics as there are articles now condemning it.

Nowhere is the sniping worse than when it comes to trans issues. Democrats who think they hold the key to understanding the electoral loss insist that trans issues played a big role in Harris’ defeat.

“The Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left,” Rep. Tom Suozzi said after he won his election in suburban New York.

“I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.” Rep. Seth Moulton expressed a similar sentiment.

So where’s the evidence that trans issues affected the outcome of the election? There isn’t any. Republicans spent a fortune on anti-trans ads, but that doesn’t mean they were effective.

That hasn’t stopped political reporters from presenting the issue as if it were true, as opposed to just speculation. Moulton, a one-time presidential candidate, was given a big feature in The New York Times as “the Democrat picking a fight with his party over transgender rights.” (Moulton, who has a pro-trans voting record, said the story focused on trans issues despite being part of a “long conversation about the problems of Democrats and how we can’t relate to people in America.”)

Of course, no one talks about Republican identity politics. Being a white evangelical is as much an identity as being Black or trans. Indeed, after Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012, the GOP actually undertook a post mortem that concluded that the party was too narrowly focused and needed to expand its outreach to voters, including gay voters, by being more compassionate. With Trump, the party moved in the opposite direction.

The simplest explanation for Harris’ loss is that people weren’t happy with the economy. Joe Biden hanging on as long as he did hurt Democrats as well. The Democrats didn’t have a compelling message about the price of eggs and paid the price for it. Immediately jumping to the conclusion that Democrats are in dire straits as a result is quite the leap. Frankly, nothing was likely to overcome people’s heartburn over the lingering effects of inflation.

There are other complicating factors. Certainly one thing that the pundits aren’t taking into account is the environment of disinformation that social media has enabled, making it harder for reason to puncture lies.

The other issue that people seem to forget is that Trump didn’t win by a landslide. He didn’t win a majority of voters, and his margin of victory was a slender 1.6% (and shrinking as vote counts are finalized.) Trump has proclaimed this “a powerful mandate,” when in fact it’s anything but. He’s abetted in his hyperbole by the media, which make his win sound like Ronald Reagan’s 1984 blowout.

Perhaps the best comment on post-election debate comes from Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI). Schatz told New York Magazine that he doesn’t know what went wrong. But what he does know that he doesn’t buy the armchair analyses that the media love.

“I happen to be wary of anybody who thinks this result vindicates their particular policy worldview, whether people think we were too far to the left, or not populist enough, or not pro-Israel enough, or not pro-Palestinian enough,” he said. “I am deeply suspicious of anybody who uses this result just to advocate for what they wanted all along.”

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Originally published here.