Progressives are urging Democrats to pursue a path forward that prioritizes America’s working-class population, the coalition that overwhelmingly rejected their party and supported President-elect Trump for a second term.
Leftists believe moderates have failed to uplift economically marginalized people, deviating from their decades-old mandate and leaving that group open to Republicans’ message.
Failing to keep the White House and Senate and reclaim the House, leaders on the left are emphasizing economic populism as the best way to recapture voters who flocked to Trump and broaden a party that has become increasingly detached from the plight of low-income people.
“Success runs directly through leading with economic issues,” said Pete D’Alessandro, a senior aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) during his 2016 presidential campaign.
“This isn’t some abstract theory either. It’s what Dems do when they win,” D’Alessandro said. “You lead with economic populism and because you win, you can do the other things.”
Trump’s sweeping victory was a wake-up call to Democrats who tried to beat the president-elect by warning that he is authoritarian and will unravel democracy. Instead of giving voters a positive vision, progressives say the tone was fear-based, warning that Trump would lead as a fascist and govern by stripping groups of people of their rights.
That message ultimately tanked at the ballot box. Some key demographics that Democrats have usually relied on shifted toward Trump, who broadened his base to include more Latino and Black voters and young white men than he got in prior elections. Voters cited anxiety around their day-to-day living costs as one of several reasons for their decision.
Grappling now with Republicans’ “trifecta” control of the White House and Congress, progressives are urging centrist Democrats to rethink their electoral strategy, rejecting arguments that the party has moved too far leftward and attempting to focus the dialogue around putting economic hardships like minimum wage stagnation, housing, food and gas costs at the forefront.
“The working people of this country are extremely angry. They have a right to be angry,” Sanders said on CNN in a cable news blitz post-election.
“What does the Democratic Party stand for? Do ordinary people say, ‘Yeah, that is a party that is fighting for my interests?’” Sanders later asked rhetorically on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Sanders, 83, is the most recognized — and arguably still the most polarizing — face of the progressive wing, who burst onto the national scene eight years ago by primarying Hillary Clinton.
He caught flack this week from Democratic stalwarts like former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who rejected the premise that her party “abandoned” the working class, as the Vermont independent put it in a recent post-mortem.
But Sanders, who has called out corporate structures for decades, is not the only one criticizing his party’s default centrism. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) was among the first on Capitol Hill to give the populist argument some weight after Vice President Harris’s defeat.
In a lengthy thread on X, Murphy wrote: “The left has never fully grappled with the wreckage of fifty years of neoliberalism,” which, in the senator’s view, “has left legions of Americans adrift as local places are hollowed out, rapacious profit seeking cannibalizes the common good, and unchecked new technology separates and isolates us.”
“And when progressives like Bernie aggressively go after the elites that hold people down, they are shunned as dangerous populists,” he wrote. “Why? Maybe because true economic populism is bad for our high-income base.”
Progressives have fought against centrist headwinds for many cycles, sometimes successfully and other times with significant losses. Sanders’s early traction shocked Clinton and her brain trust in Washington, and Democrats were still largely surprised when, after Trump’s first term, the elder Democratic socialist ran neck-and-neck with then-candidate Joe Biden in the first few early primary contests in 2020.
After Biden won against Trump, the Sanders coalition as it existed in Congress promised to work with the administration and was considered an asset. Notably, Democrats didn’t see progressive defections coming out against Biden.
After all of that good will failed to secure a Harris win, many on the left are now asking to revisit the original economic premise of what sparked mass interest in Sanders’s first campaign.
“I think we need to rebuild the party,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, in a press conference on Monday.
Jayapal gave some weight to the takeaway that a majority of people felt worse off under Biden, where high inflation drove up prices in a post-Covid economy. “Tangibly, people did lose something,” she said. “They were tangibly worse off.”
A key ally of Sanders who worked closely with Biden’s orbit, Jayapal suggested that Democrats should take lessons from the GOP strategy to meet voters where they are over their current economic conditions. “There’s a level of anger that this election really brought out,” she said.
“The reality is we need to channel a lot of the anger that’s out there that people don’t have a fair shot anymore,” she added.
Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), the CPC whip, reiterated that “the Democratic Party’s response has to be for working class people. … That’s what people need to hear from us first,” he said.
The scope of the Democratic defeats does not, however, mean the party will quickly unify around a different approach. Progressives expect pushback from moderates who are already emphasizing other factors that they say plague the party each cycle, particularly around racial and social justice activism.
Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) said Democrats lost because in part they used shorthand like “Latinx” to describe Latinos — a stance that was amplified by moderates and Republicans, even though the term was not widely used within the party this cycle. Torres claimed that Trump “has no greater friend than the far left.”
“Establishment Dems will never admit this but in too many places … they would rather lose to a Republican than win with a progressive,” D’Alessandro said.
One progressive strategist expressed optimism that the defeats would force a wholesale change in thinking, even among centrists who have been committed to their view that a middle ground approach works best at the national level.
“This of all elections feels the least like … the pundits get to say this is the left’s fault, despite the Morning Joes of the world doing so,” said the strategist.
“It was a failure of Dem leadership to build the coalition the left has been saying we need to build forever,” the source said. “Instead we spent more time courting the five voters who might be swung by a Liz Cheney endorsement.”
As the party-wide soul-searching starts, self-proclaimed economic populists still have considerable challenges ahead. Leftist Democrats who tried to run for president in Sanders’s model failed to take off in a similar fashion, further demonstrating the difficulties of campaigning on an anti-corporate model. Ex-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), once a fierce and early supporter of Sanders, is now on Trump’s transition team after being a surrogate in his 2024 campaign.
Another progressive outsider, spiritual author Marianne Williamson, was not able to build the kind of large coalition or gain the same big following as Sanders despite running on largely the same platform for the past two cycles.
“Trump couldn’t care less about working-class concerns, but he’s shrewd enough to at least acknowledge them,” Williamson told The Hill.
“The Democratic elite has had this paternalistic assumption that they know what’s best, and people should simply surrender to their superior wisdom,” she said. “It was b.s. from the beginning, the curtain has been pulled, and the wizard is exposed to have been a bunch of soulless managerial types feeding on the carcass of what used to be a vital political party.”
