Reflections

What we got right, what we got wrong, and where we go from here

Like a lot of Democrats, I’ve spent the last month thinking about what went wrong in November and how we do better in the future.¹ In this piece, I want to assess what we in the Biden Administration got right economically (and politically) and what we got wrong, and then begin to address what Democrats can try to do better in the future.

My unfashionable thesis is that Democrats actually did a very good job economically and politically to blunt the damage of global post-COVID inflation. Despite benefitting from a strong worldwide anti-incumbent tailwind, Donald Trump only won narrowly and had minimal coattails down ballot. Democrats did better than any other developed country incumbent party in 2024:

Part of the reason Democrats did better than any other developed country incumbent party is that America’s economic performance was better than any other developed country’s economic performance. That’s captured well in this graph showing that the US had comparable core inflation to other advanced economies, but far higher inflation-adjusted growth:

Growth isn’t everything, of course. But a host of other economic measures also reflect the strength of the US economy under President Biden: a boom in new business applications, a surge in wages for lower-income workers (even adjusting for inflation), a sharp rise in wealth for the average household, faster productivity growth, near-record annual gains for the stock market, and more.

Both policy and political analysis should begin and end with these facts. Democrats lost like every other incumbent party, but they stemmed the size of that loss by doing a better job than any other incumbent party at navigating post-pandemic economic turmoil (which includes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a big contributor to global inflation, particularly highly salient food and gas prices). The primary lesson from the 2024 election is “don’t have the misfortune to be an incumbent party during a global inflation surge.”

That’s also why it’s wrong to dismiss the political appeal of the Biden economic approach. I have seen a number of commentators argue that “we tried X and people hated it,” with X being industrial policy or robust antitrust enforcement or pro-labor orientation or full employment fiscal policy or whatever particular economic bugaboo they might have. That’s misleading. People hated inflation — the same largely supply-side driven inflation they hated in Germany or the UK or other countries where they pursued a variety of different economic agendas. It’s intellectually lazy, at best, to use overall economic approval to argue that Americans reacted negatively to some specific economic policy item on the Biden agenda, rather than to the inflation that consumed the global economy and undermined left-wing and right-wing governments alike.

Put it this way: If you decide to go to the beach and you and all your friends are swept away by a once-a-century tsunami, does that mean it’s a bad idea for anyone to go to a beach again? Or were you just unlucky? And would it have made a difference if you had brought your beach chairs with you instead of leaving them at home?

That is not to say the administration handled everything perfectly. Unlike many, I believe the size and design of the American Rescue Plan were correct and politically helpful to Democrats, even given the bill’s small contribution to inflation.² But I believe Democrats erred in their handling of the so-called Build Back Better effort — the follow-up to the American Rescue Plan that sought to address a number of long-standing Democratic priorities (e.g., housing supply, child care affordability, paid family leave, rural broadband, and much more) while offsetting the cost with new taxes on the wealthy and large corporations.

Once it became clear that certain Democrats in Congress could not get behind the fiscal outlay needed for the full Build Back Better proposal, the administration should have pivoted more quickly to a modified BBB that did a few things permanently rather than a number of things temporarily. In particular, a modified BBB could have turned into a bill primarily intended to (a) ease the blow of a number of pandemic-era emergency programs ending by making those programs more generous permanently and (b) address the burgeoning cost-of-living crisis by targeting the cost of housing and groceries through a mixture of supply-side and demand-side measures. While the bipartisan infrastructure bill and Inflation Reduction Act that eventually emerged from the BBB process were both important bills, neither of them delivered any real relief from the cost crunch most American families were feeling. Even key cost-cutting provisions in those bills, like a cap on out-of-pocket spending on prescription drugs in Medicare and permitting Medicare to negotiate the cost of expensive prescription drugs, were written so that people would only feel the effects in 2025 or later. As a result, as good as they are for America’s long-term interests, those two bills produced near-zero benefit for Democrats politically in 2024.

Maybe that BBB pivot would not have been enough to win in November. And it certainly would have been incredibly hard to pull off given the party’s deep attachment to the original elements of the proposal. But a party that could talk about what it had already done to reduce your housing and grocery costs surely would have been in better shape than a party that could only talk about what it hoped to do if you gave them another chance.

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So what should Democrats do next? If Trump’s election is mostly attributable to a global anti-incumbent backlash, this suggests that Democrats can make a few tweaks, wait for Trump and the Republicans to pursue their largely unpopular agenda, and gain back ground in 2026 and 2028.

That’s a comforting argument but it’s dangerous for Democrats to embrace it. Democrats lost people making under $100,000 a year for the first time in a long time. Yes, that’s primarily because of cost-of-living issues that are likely to recede. But it’s risky to assume that people who voted Republican for the first time in this election will naturally migrate back to Democrats the next time around, particularly when some of these voting shifts represented accelerations of longer-standing trends. Democrats should assume they have to win these voters back proactively and act accordingly.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll suggest some ideas. For today, here’s my first one: simplifying and clarifying our agenda.

If you ask people who only casually follows politics what Republicans stand for, they’ll probably say something like “lower taxes and a stronger border.” We can debate how effectively Republicans actually deliver on these basic commitments, but they have managed to get most people to understand what they want to accomplish.

If you ask those same people the same question about Democrats, you’ll probably get a blank stare or maybe one of a dozen different answers. That’s less of a problem in midterm elections, which produce an electorate that is more likely to follow politics closely and understand the actual nuances of the Democratic agenda. But it’s a big problem for general elections, which produce electorates with a lot more voters (and swing voters, in particular) who don’t follow politics closely.

I would urge Democrats to think hard about simplifying and clarifying their agenda so that it speaks in relatively broad and understandable terms to issues that directly affect most people. This will necessarily annoy portions of the party, who will feel as if their top issues are being excluded. But simplicity is the core of effective communication, effective communication is the key to electoral success, and Democrats can’t accomplish any of their policy goals if they don’t win.

Here’s my crack at a simple agenda that could (a) unite the party, (b) draw meaningful contrasts with Republican policies, (c) appeal to independents and even Republican voters, and (d) speak to real problems in the country:

• Cheaper healthcare: Healthcare is about one-sixth of the economy and an issue on which Democrats historically have a major political advantage. In recent elections, outside of abortion (a critically important healthcare issue, but one that only directly affects a portion of the population), Democrats have mostly geared their healthcare agenda around protecting Obamacare. Obamacare is undoubtedly popular now and worth defending substantively and politically, but there are still serious problems with our healthcare system and our current posture comes off as satisfaction with a flawed status quo. Putting forward a proactive and understandable agenda to reduce the cost of healthcare not only addresses a serious issue facing the country, but will contrast well with what is almost certain to be a big rollback in health insurance coverage and affordability under GOP control over the next two years. I would try to unite the party around letting anyone 50+ buy into Medicare, a simple and popular idea that targets the weakest demographic for Democrats (people aged 45-64), strengthens Medicare, already has broad support within the party, and marks an important step towards single-payer healthcare.

• Better schools: The issue of K-12 education has largely vanished from the national political debate even though it affects every child and every parent of school-age children. At the same time, K-12 education has gone from a core political strength for Democrats—an issue on which the public trusted Democrats far more than Republicans—to a jump ball. Refocusing public attention and regaining public trust on K-12 education with a proactive agenda should be a top priority, especially given serious problems with learning loss coming out of the pandemic. Democrats should be the party that emphasizes the importance of great schools, high academic achievement, and a safe learning environment. I am not an expert in this area so I am not sure what the right, simple policy prescriptions are (A big national tutoring program to help kids catch up post-COVID? A longer school year?), but I would pair them with a renewed commitment to universal pre-K, a popular, relatively inexpensive, economically beneficial initiative that is already on the Democratic agenda and that also helps ease some of the child care costs for parents of three- and four-year olds.

• Fair treatment at work: The Biden Administration prioritized opportunities and job quality for unionized workers and it paid off electorally: VP Harris did better with unionized workers than Biden did in 2020, bucking the national trend away from Democrats between 2020 to 2024. But unionized workers make up only 7% of private sector workers. More than 80% of workers are in the service sector, with the majority in nonunionized jobs, and Democrats have a muddy agenda for these workers. By contrast, whatever their flaws as policy, Trump’s no-tax-on-tips and no-tax-on-overtime proposals were smartly targeted at this large group. Democrats should develop and run on a cogent job quality agenda that addresses concerns that plague the service sector too. It could include raising the minimum wage, requiring more predictability and notice in scheduling, and massively increasing enforcement against wage theft, which is common in service industries like retail, hospitality, and construction.

• Cleaner government: Democrats cannot be the party of bigger and bolder government without being the party of cleaner government. Most people are deeply skeptical of political institutions and believe that politicians work in their personal interests rather than the public interest. Swing voters tend to have even lower trust and pride in our political institutions. Democrats must be the party that channels that skepticism. The first Trump Administration was cartoonishly corrupt and Trump has already named several highly conflicted billionaires to prominent government posts for his second term. Democrats should center cleaner government as a core goal to heighten the contrast they can almost certainly draw over the next four years. There are many simple policies to choose from here but I would suggest a complete ban on stock trading while in government³ and a lifetime ban on lobbying for members of Congress and senior administration officials. If these policies deter certain types of people from wanting to serve, that’s great — those are people who seem attracted to public service as an avenue to personal enrichment, rather than as a calling to pursue the public good.

I recognize this excludes things like child and elder care, immigration, taxes, climate change, higher education, and more. These are important issues, and of course, Democrats will have to say things about them. And they will have to address news-of-the-day type issues too. But in terms of a proactive agenda—vote for us and this is what we will give you, like Republicans did with the Contract with America in 1994—the four items above strike me as most likely to unify the party and tap into traditional Democratic strengths while resonating with the voters Democrats need to win back.

1. I wasn’t planning on writing any of these thoughts down, but I’ve been basically immobile since I tore my Achilles just before Thanksgiving, and there are only so many hours of Sopranos clips a person can watch on YouTube before turning to other forms of engagement.

2. I made that case at length here, so I won’t rehash it.

3. President Biden came out for this just this week. I’m glad to see that, but wish he had done so a couple years ago when there was a serious push to enact such a ban.