Building on What the Democrats are Doing Right

Kamala received almost 30 million more votes than Bill Clinton did - and as many votes as ALL left-leaning European parties combined have received in recent years

The largest stupidity of DC punditry is many columnists act as if our elections depend on a few mythical swing voters deciding whether to pull the lever for a Democrat or a Republican on election day. Throw a few trans kids under the bus, as Gavin Newsom argues, or stop talking about immigrants being sent to El Salvadorean gulags, as centrists at Welcome Fest did this week, and those supposed swing voters will switch their vote over to the Dems.

However, the reality of elections over time is candidates win by how many new voters they activate who hadn’t ever voted before. And getting people who hadn’t voted before excited enough to actually do so is a very different political challenge from appealing to those imaginary swing voters.

And the reality is that Democrats have been hugely successful in the last few decades in adding tens of millions of new voters supporting their candidates. Contra ignorant punditry, Dems have added tens of millions of new voters to their base in recent decades, including mass numbers of new working class voters. As the chart below highlights, Kamala Harris received almost 30 million more votes than Bill Clinton did in 1996. And Joe Biden received more votes than any person in US history, including Trump in 2024.

And in the years since the 1992 election, the Republicans have won more voters than the Democrats only twice, in 2004 and 2024, and only received a majority of all voters in 2004 during George W. Bush’s reelection.

Given that track record of the Democratic Party message and organizing recruiting so many millions of new voters over those decades, more strategists should be asking what worked for Democrats in those decades and how can they build on that success to win over even more voters.

Even in 2024, it’s worth emphasizing that Kamala Harris receive nine million MORE votes than Barak Obama did in his 2012 reelection. Given Harris was facing inflation and the post-Covid anger that wiped out incumbent parties all over the world, this is hardly a catastrophic performance from a political standpoint - however grim the reality of a Trump Presidency may be.

This growth in voting totals was not just a matter of a growing population naturally adding to vote totals, but an increase in the percentage of eligible voters supporting the Democrats. As the graph below reflects, Harris received a higher percentage of potential voters than Obama did in his reelection and almost as much as he did when he first won in 2008. And Biden received an absolutely unprecedented 33.5% of the possible vote in 2020 - a success that most pundits fail to fully appreciate.

For Harris, there was no collapse of the “Obama Coalition,” just a marginal failure to add as many new voters as Trump did last year. And Trump sure didn’t add those voters by appealing to “swing voters” but by doubling down on the most extreme edges of his rhetoric - “they are eating the dogs, they are eating the cats” etc. - to break through to millions who otherwise likely would not have voted at all.

Given this trajectory of massive additions of new Democratic voters each decade, there is little evidence arguing for some massive course correction, only potentially looking for an even stronger message or messenger to break through the apathy of non-voters. The weak tea prescriptions of centrist Dems seems plainly unlikely to do that compared to the roaring anti-oligarchy message of Bernie and AOC that has doubled down on the most progressive aspects of Biden’s policies to bring out massive crowds across the country.

Making these overall voting gains for Democrats even more impressive is the comparison with the near-collapse of many left-leaning parties throughout Europe in the last few decades.

In country after country in Europe, left-leaning and social democratic parties have seen vote declines to the point that the left is not even competing for power in many countries. In France, a left candidate hasn’t even made the Presidential runoffs in multiple recent elections, with the neoliberal Emmanuel Macron facing off the rising fascist National Front in the last two elections. In this year’s German elections, the once dominant Social Democratic Party fell to an all time low of just 16.4% of the vote, far less than its long-time rival, the Christian Democrats, but less than even the rising neo-fascist Alliance for Democracy. In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party only managed to win the election last year because its conservative opposition was divided, but the total Labour vote was only 9.7 million - far less than the 13.5 million votes they received 30 years ago in 1987. And reflecting the state of play in many parts of Europe, in the just completed Polish election, a Trump endorsed ally of Holocaust deniers won against a leader of the Civic Platform party, itself characterized as center-right, with the traditional left a marginal force.

When you total up votes for all even vaguely left-leaning parties across the European Union and the United Kingdom - including Greens and smaller left parties - the total vote has been on the order of 75 million votes over a population of over 500 million people. Kamala Harris on her own received 75 million votes from the significantly smaller population of 330 million Americans, reflecting the growing strength of the center-left in the US compared to its decline in Europe.

What’s notable is that the Democratic Party has gained votes even as the party has moved to the left on issues ranging from social spending to gay rights to immigration. The party of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is far more progressive than it was under Bill Clinton, even as Biden nearly doubled Clinton’s vote totals in 2020. In contrast, social democratic parties in Europe have largely moved in a more conservative direction in the last few decades, bleeding voters as they did so.

Obviously, improving messaging, rethinking strategy and looking for a stronger standard bearer is always reasonable after a defeat. But in the context of both the historical growth in the Democratic vote and its success relative to its European cousins, building on that success to move forward makes far more sense than buying into centrist nostrums of abandoning the policies that has repeatedly energized the largest base of left-leaning voters in the developed world.