There’s an old story about boxer Max Baer, “Cinderella Man,” a heavyweight known for his arrogance as much as his power, who once found himself thrown back by a right hook from Tommy Loughran, who he considered beneath him. A dazed and incredulous Baer spat out his mouthguard and said, “This guy?”
It’s a sentiment shared by me and, I imagine, by tens of millions of Harris supporters this morning.
Internal DNC polls had it all wrong, as did the Harris campaign and nearly every Democratic strategist and liberal pundit. Our instincts were off, and our expectations were dashed. Today, many of us are reeling in disbelief as we slowly recover from the agony of watching Kamala Harris’s shot at the presidency unravel.
So how could we have lost, especially to “this guy”, someone we’d long since pegged as unfit, unstable, even un-American. How could Kamala lose to Donald Trump, a figure we on the left see as a punchline-turned-threat, with twice-impeached baggage and enough personal scandals to sink a porn career?
The knee-jerk explanation, which I felt most of the evening, that “half of America has lost its mind” is tempting, but misses a larger point: liberal America’s echo chamber just isn’t as in tune with everyday folks as it thinks. Over the years, that dissonance has cost the democratic party dearly, and this is just the latest blow. So, what happened?
Sure, Harris had her tactical missteps: picking a progressive running mate who didn’t deliver a key state or with key voters, sticking too close to Biden’s record, and labeling Trump a “fascist,” which felt like an insult to his supporters too. Her strategy leaned heavily on celebrity endorsements while struggling to clarify Harris’s personal appeal and positions. Her failure to address her past controversial stances with anything other than canned lines like “My values haven’t changed” left many feeling unconvinced. But those were just tactical stumbles. The real problem ran much deeper.
Let’s start with the main liberal blind spot: a conviction that things in Biden’s America were going just fine, and that anyone who disagreed was uninformed, brainwashed, or plain stupid. Rising grocery prices? “Check the Fed data,” was often the response. Immigration crisis? What immigration crisis? Biden’s health and mental acuity are just fine, by the way, and anyone saying otherwise is “being a Troll.” Everything the right-wing media says is “Fake News” (Lab Escape Theory) and everything the left-wing news says (COVID School Closures) is gospel truth.
Harris’s frequent mention of her tough-on-gangs stance, for example, completely missed the border issue’s larger, unspoken concerns: it wasn’t about crime, it was community strain, feeling like an outsider in your own hometown, and most of all, housing prices.
This tone-deafness might’ve sounded smart to lefties talking to each other on social media, but for regular working-class folks, it came across as elitist, dismissive, and out of touch. They know full well the neo-liberal elite doesn’t give a shit about their fears, needs, and aspirations.
The one thing they want, R.E.S.P.E.C.T., the left refuses to give them because the left is convinced it knows better. About everything.
More than that, there was the cultural divide, with the Democrats often feeling like the party of social mandates and tortured jingoistic terminology. Gender transitions for kids (restricted in most of Europe), and athletes crossing over to compete in women’s sports, required D.E.I. training and loyalty statements/oaths… and BTW, I had to sign one, so don’t tell me they don’t exist. Americans raising concerns about anything relating to race or LGBTQ+ got labeled as transphobes, racists, and reactionaries. But was that fair?
Most people just want to go about their lives without being told they’re villains for questioning new norms. The left, in a majority of American minds, has become the scolds and the moralizers, fixated on cultural issues and wielding identity politics like a hammer in whack-a-mole. And then there was Trump, rallying around simple freedom to “live and let live,” his brash defiance contrasting sharply with liberal pieties and resonating with voters who felt cornered.
Lastly, the left approached Trump as a dire existential threat to democracy, not as a politician whose policies should be outdone by BETTER and more popular policies. Indeed, the “Trump is a fascist” label opened the door to blatantly and reductively anti-democratic moves by the left, such as courtroom brawls to strike him from ballots or legal charges too convoluted for anyone to follow. Rather than beating him with a clearer, better platform, liberals went all-in on pretentious self-important *resistance* politics. Trump, to our surprise and horror, shrugged it off; if anything, the drama only added to his renegade allure.
For many of us, Harris represented stability, decency, and forward-thinking policy, and fears of Trump’s foreign policy, economic protectionism, and populist brinkmanship were real. But as a Harris supporter, I can’t ignore the truth that the left seems to lack the humility to reflect, the savvy to realign, and the grit to seriously challenge Trump’s appeal to the working class and America of both today and tomorrow.
In the end, to a clear majority of voters, the Democrats became the party of high-handed moralism, tone-deaf elitism, and finger-wagging virtue. While it might’ve felt righteous, that shit sure doesn’t win elections. Especially with the minorities no longer being, as of now, reliable and consistent base voters for Dems.
I voted for Harris out of genuine concern for the country’s direction under another Trump presidency, but I worry that the bloviating left-sphere on social media and the liberal establishment lacks the humility and foresight to course-correct. For Democrats to win back the public’s trust, we need to meet voters where they’re at: talking less, listening more, and showing them genuine R.E.S.P.E.C.T.
Op-Ed by Mark Rein-Hagen
