Seattle’s election results were an unalloyed victory for the left, with progressive Alexis Mercedes Rinck winning decisively over Tanya Woo, and Shaun Scott heading to Olympia as the first socialist elected to the Legislature in a very long time. But Trump’s reascension to the presidency should cause us some soul-searching.

By now, eagle-eyed hindsight has started to answer the “why:” Incumbents around the globe are paying the price for post-pandemic anxiety, inflation, and voters’ grim assessments of the state of the economy and the world. People are in a kick-’em-out mood; the modest margin by which Trump won the popular vote reflects, if anything, his weakness as a candidate. Perhaps there was a path to a Democratic victory, but it was a narrow one and the party didn’t take it.

It’s the “how” of Trump’s victory that should give us pause. Contemplating Trump’s allure, we’re used to thinking of him stoking racial resentment to win votes from the disgruntled white working class. And he certainly did that. But over the last three election cycles, the most notable shift in his base was toward the very groups that the left considers our people. He showed growing support among voters of color, with some of his biggest gains in areas with large Latino, Black, and Asian populations. He also fared better with younger voters than he did in 2020 or 2016. And, for the first time in over fifty years, Democrats did worse among the poorest third of the electorate than among the richest third. The largest shift to Trump was among voters making less than $50,000 a year. 

If the project of the left is to build a politically potent movement rooted in the multiracial working class, the last three elections underscore our failure.

The Working Class, Divided

For those of us who consider ourselves generally to the left of the Democratic party, there’s a tempting rejoinder: The Democrats lost support because they tacked right. “Our people” stayed home. Or, if they voted for Trump, it was more a vote against the establishment than a sign of enthusiasm for tariffs, mass deportation, and anti-transgender laws.

This isn’t totally wrong. Trump did succeed by channeling anti-elite sentiment, in his words and simply by behaving so unlike a polished, or wooden, politician. Unfiltered shoot-from-the-hip ranting, viewed from a slightly different angle, becomes what-you-see-is-what-you-get candor. He told a story about the struggles and anxieties of ordinary people, telling them exactly who to blame for their problems, and promising to “fix it.” It might all be lies and bravado, but it cut through the noise. 

The Democrats, for their part, failed to counter with a convincing left version of populism. Instead, they ran headlong into the trap, choosing presidential candidates who were preeminently of the establishment and focusing on peeling off the still-respectable layers of the Republican party. In the end, it didn’t matter that Biden’s administration adopted bits of Bernie’s platform and made gains for workers, because it was all wrapped in technocratic garb and done with little fanfare. The good news didn’t reach beyond the party faithful.

So far so good. But if we stop there, we lose the opportunity this election gives us to look in the mirror. The fact is, we—the left to the left of the Democrats—largely share with the party a culture that, despite “grassroots” and radical pretensions, marks us as part of an educated and liberal establishment. We’ve adopted theories, practices, and language that come across as obscure, elitist, and condescending to the very people we are trying to attract and organize. We’ve created an unappealing politics of guilt and sanctimony that proved alienating especially, though not only, to men. We certainly weren’t going to win over the white working class, and it turned out that working class people of color didn’t buy it, either. Instead, they drifted right.

That’s stating it baldly, but I think all this is true enough that the left needs to reckon with it. This doesn’t mean we should focus on economic grievances to the exclusion of other issues, from race to gender to the climate crisis. But to make lasting progress, we have to figure out how to unite the working class in all its diversity and stratification, instead of dividing it against itself. And that’s a lot more complicated than bandying about the word “solidarity.”

A Different Kind of Culture War

All this is difficult enough, but there’s more. The challenge for the left, and for the Democrats too, goes beyond saying the right things and choosing the right policies or demands. Trump’s win surprised many, including me, whose social media timelines were bursting with enthusiasm for the Harris-Walz ticket. The clever memes! The packed rallies! The results—not a landslide, but decisive—underline how the ways in which people get their information and develop their political beliefs have changed, and polarized, over the past decade or more. To some extent, it simply didn’t matter what the Democrats were saying or doing, because half the country didn’t see it—or glimpsed it only through a grotesque distorting mirror.

Left and right increasingly inhabit mutually incomprehensible bubbles. Trump voters exist in a Fox News and influencer-dominated media ecosystem rife with conspiracy theories, misinformation, and disinformation. While the New York Times, NPR, MSNBC and other national news purveyors favored by Democrats may give space to conservative voices, they’re rarely of the MAGA variety. Local news, which might once have provided a bulwark less partisan and more anchored to a shared reality, is rapidly collapsing. Throw AI and some strategically deployed bots into the mix, and the future of public discourse looks bleak indeed.

And that understates the problem. Political identity formation isn’t just a matter of individuals soaking up information and forming opinions; it’s historically been a social process. Before the slow collapse of American civic life that’s taken place in the past half century-plus, far more people belonged to organizations that involved at least a semblance of internal debate, deliberation, and democracy. News and opinions published in the press were discussed within these groups as people worked out their common interests, and that messy process informed their political choices. It’s no coincidence that many of these organizations, notably labor unions, tended to bind working class people to the Democratic party as the better vehicle for improving their lot.

What Democrats learned in this election is that the shallow, money-powered campaign tactics that have replaced this social fabric—the rallies, the door-knocking, the phone-banking, the ads, the media coverage, the celebrity endorsements—are no longer enough. The right has done a better job reaching people where it matters, saturating their daily lives, satisfying needs for meaning and companionship, even creating simulacra of community.

More Trump voters than Democrats get their political news from friends and family, and the remnants of civil society, from churches to gun clubs, tilt conservative. A recent report from the Roosevelt Institute argues that the right has more skillfully intertwined culture with politics: “The Left often paints MAGA supporters as enraged bigots fueled by anger and hatred,” but Trump’s rallies are also fun, filled with camaraderie and even joy. Figures like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan peddle entertainment and self-help with a political valence; they will gladly keep you company for hours each day. If you’re a regular Joe, not among the small minority of the country that’s obsessed with politics, nor a member of a labor union that takes political education seriously, there are many more accessible and welcoming roads leading to the right than to the left.

The left could conceivably get better at fighting on this same cultural terrain, and perhaps we need to. But without a strong tether to fact-based journalism, it’s a terrifying path to contemplate. 

Our challenge is to find a way forward that is neither capitulation to a post-truth future, nor a quixotic quest to recreate the past. We must strengthen the free press, and especially local news, even though the old models of funding journalism are broken. (I’m hopeful that Seattle can pioneer one idea on this front.) We must somehow rebuild civil society and community, knowing that the churches and the fraternal orders aren’t coming back. In particular, we must build institutions that channel working class power. But despite all the recent public enthusiasm for labor unions, and organizing drives at high-profile corporations like Amazon and Starbucks, union membership slipped to a new low of just 10% this year. Preserving and expanding that bulwark is essential, but we should ask what other forms organizing can take, too.

Getting Our Own House in Order

What do all these “musts” mean for us here in Seattle? In my first column, I wrote about Seattle’s demographics and how our progressive politics derive partly from the ways in which we’re not a city of the multiracial working class. Seattle is awash in educated, secular, affluent professionals. 

After Trump’s first victory in 2016, I was part of a movement to “Trump-Proof” Seattle. It’s tempting to reprise that theme, in every way we can think of: Build our own little welfare state, shore up our local democracy, civil rights, and liberties even as the national ones crumble away. This is more feasible here in our wealth-soaked, deep blue city than almost anywhere else in the country; and despite the reactionary turn our city leadership has taken over the last two election cycles, November’s stellar results give us reason to hope that progressives are on the upswing once more.

That sounds like good news. But if Trump-proofing Seattle basically amounts to “let’s see just how far we can get these old white liberals to go,” how does it contribute to the left’s larger aims? That’s not to say fortifying our city isn’t worthwhile. But it’s not clear that we’d be setting a replicable example for the rest of the country. And it’s a very different project than trying to figure out how to wrench the multiracial working class away from Trumpism and towards a home on the left.

It’s not that we’re immune to the national trends. While Seattle’s wealthy, white, waterfront precincts got bluer in this election, working-class neighborhoods that are more racially and ethnically diverse shifted red: the Chinatown-International District, parts of the Rainier Valley and South King County. But do progressives need to reverse this shift in order to win local elections or pass local policies? On the whole, probably not.

This sets up a challenge for Seattle-area leftists who want to reckon with the lessons of this election and do work that is relevant outside our hyper-progressive bubble: How do we put our noses to the grindstone, when this is probably not necessary to achieving the sensation and some of the trappings of progress? I believe it’s possible, but it may mean resisting the temptation to out-liberal the liberals in reaction to every outrage of Trump 2.0.

It means, first of all, being smart about choosing issues. This is the easy part; we know, for example, that significant numbers of Trump voters also support populist economic policies like taxing the rich and raising the minimum wage. More difficult, we would need to prioritize mass organizing, leadership development, and community-building—labor-intensive work at the best of times—above merely winning policy victories. Hardest of all, we would need to create a culture that can hold together people who, despite strong shared interests, are diverse in many other respects: the Bernie-voter-turned-Trump-voter and the deeply religious recent immigrant, for example, in addition to your average godless, college-educated Seattleite. That means fighting the tendency of left organizations to become clubs of like-minded activists.

Meantime, Trumpism will crash and burn through the next four years. The rightward drift of working class and lower income voters is ultimately a symptom of the left’s shortcomings; Trump and the Republicans don’t have real answers for them. If Trump follows through on his promises, and the economic implications become clear, the season of buyer’s remorse will begin. And what is MAGA without Trump’s personality? Can Republicans convincingly maintain Trump’s anti-establishment vibe when the man himself is out of the picture? I doubt it. In 2028, the pendulum will swing back toward the Democrats, and we’ll see what lessons they’ve learned by then. But for those who want off this see-saw altogether, that shouldn’t be good enough.