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.
100% agree that this election was built on vibes and rooted in the concept of community ritual and culture, vs. a consultant driven election-cycle campaign (which was likely more pronounced in swing and purple states, blue Seattle has its own juices political community). I appreciate the self-awareness, but I also suspect progressives are a couple steps behind. What crises await this presidential term? What will the legal and electoral systems even look like a few years from now? We need to lean into community not because it’s the way back to power, but it’s how we might survive whatever lies ahead.
“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.”
ding ding ding.
How do we Trump-proof Seattle? Well, we can’t, not really. We can blunt some of the worst elements of it, but not with this city council or mayor. I’m really disappointed that this article spent a couple thousand words describing problems and prospective solutions without talking about how we move the mayoral and most council seats to even years — preferably presidential election years.
If Progressives want to win, prioritize policies that help you AND help the working-class people in flyover country that you moved to the big city to get away from.
“SOLIDARITY!”
Nah, I’m kidding, that shit’s old.
@5: If the 2020 electorate had voted in 2024, Harris would have won. Millions of voters who’d participated in 2020 decided not to participate in 2024. In this context, this author’s mocking of get-out-the-vote efforts comes across as cruel.
Just as the Stranger will not mention Sawant’s stumping for Trump, they won’t mention the related issue, of all-Gaza-all-the-time coverage of leftie media outlets, including the Stranger. Even after learning “Gaza Isn’t Driving Votes,” the Stranger still regarded the “embargo genocide” crowd as worthy of promotion, not as a cranky fringe to be thoroughly ignored. This author can sneer all she wants at Democrats not delivering a good message, but it was media like the Stranger who promoted blatant falsehoods like “Genocide Joe,” and insisted that Harris kowtow to a group of voters who were openly trying to defeat her.
Negative campaigning only works when it drives down turnout. Focusing on Gaza, to
the exclusion of issues voters actually care about, drove down turnout. Lying how both Democrats and Republicans are exactly the same drove down turnout. And that lack of turnout, pure and simple, is why Trump won.
@5 so in a way you validate Katie’s point which is progressives focused on the wrong things and were needlessly divisive to their own detriment. The broader question is can they look in the mirror and change. Evidence by what we have seen since the 2023 council election and even in the month since this one it seems unlikely. We are still inundated with blame stories of secret cabals and/or dumb voters. Progressives whole movement is based on oppressor/oppressed and I don’t see them giving that up.
@6: I’d agree that on the national level, they obsessed about Gaza to a point where they eventually sounded unhinged, but were able to drive down turnout to the point Trump won. Locally, they’ve been losing because their policies have all failed, and this essay is another example (like Morales’ whinily quitting) of them absolutely refusing to admit this. So they count as an “unalloyed victory” exactly two examples, one of them in a special election. As you’ve noted, if Shaun Scott ever becomes anything other than an ineffectual back-bencher, that will be good for the 43rd LD, but it’s hard to see that happening.
The lesson for the left is quite simple and requires far fewer words than this column. If you want to be effective, you need to be able to answer yes to these two questions:
1) Am I prioritizing normal people over those who engage in antisocial conduct?
2) Am I relentlessly focused on making sure my constituents are receiving high quality essential services?
If the answer to either of these two questions is no, as it has been in Seattle and many other places for leftists for years now, then leftists will continue to accurately be perceived as incapable of governing and will spiral further into irrelevance. If the answer starts being yes, then maybe you’ll have a movement that can build something bigger.
Our people didn’t stay home; Harris got the 3rd most votes ever (after Biden 2020 and tfg 2024)
@8 is correct. Trump won because of you, not in spite of you.
In this asymmetrical news and info environment, Dems don’t stand a chance. Repubs have a 30 year head start, at least, with the most popular cable network dumping misinformation/propaganda into our collective consciousness 24/7. Dems have nothing close to an equivalent. When a third of the population has been convinced that lying and criminality are good qualities for a president, conventional political analysis is totally useless. Fascism has been the mission of the American right since Nixon, and we’ve all been frogs in boiling water, not really noticing our country becoming a cult. It’s going to get much worse before it can get better. Trump followers need to actually feel the consequences of their votes, which has yet to happen.
It isn’t hard. Tax the actual rich. Not the “tax the rich” modern Seattle progressives do, which is soaking the middle and upper middle class. The actual rich pay nearly nothing here. All the nuisance taxes, sales, property, etc…are rounding errors in their budgets or easily avoidable to the actual rich.
This is why folks are fine w/the capital gains tax. It taxes the actual rich. More of that, less soak the middle.
@12 most of the wealth you decry from the rich only exists on paper. Using taxation as a form of wealth distribution is highly inefficient and about the worst thing you can do. People around here are wealthy because they own/work for a company that has a high valuation likely indicating it has a large share of whatever market it competes in. To push that capital to other areas and decrease that wealth concentration it would be much better for the overall economy to break them up or create more competition. That is a job for the FTC and the Feds though.
Being part of the intersectional demographics (black, gay, over 55, and disable) his winning in 2016 and recently was a large pill to swallow. Many people have the PRIVELEGE of putting politics on one side and themselves on the other. Growing up, I toyed with not going along with my domesticated-democratic principles and values. Primarily, because I along with most of my friends were privileged and some were Mormon. The policies that the Reagan administration enacted changed my principles and values dramatically–I am an IRON-Clad Democrat. I am POLITICS, I must rely on politics/government for civil, LGBT, voting, and other rights. Until people intertwine politics and themselves, we will continue to have large pills to swallow.
@13 That’s as maybe on the federal level, maybe, and not the point. Nor am I “decrying” anyone’s wealth. What I am saying is similar to this article. “Progressives” have, in general, given up on taxing the actual rich for the much easier task of soaking the middle class, then shouting condescending guilt and insults when the middle-class objects. Then they scratch their heads and wonder why they vote rightward.
Progressives have to start at the top, or remain forever irrelevant.
@15 If only it were that simple. Good luck taxing the rich while Murdoch and Fox are around. As I said earlier, the right has a huge head-start on us. The last time they were actually taxed was mid-20th century, and they’ve been enacting their revenge ever since. They’re way ahead in this game.
@16 the “rich” have never been taxed. Even back in the hey day that progressives wax poetic about when the upper rate was 90% no one actually paid that. They deferred income (like Ohtani is doing to CA), they took payment in some other form that couldn’t be tracked but no one actually paid that
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-nocera-tax-avoidance-20190129-story.html
I reiterate my point that using government to confiscate wealth in this manner and arbitrarily decide who is deserving more will only lead to corruption and a loss of wealth in totality. Even now Europe continually is losing some of their best start ups to the US as they migrate to a more business friendly environment
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2024/08/27/us-business-migration-grows-europe-loses-top-startups-in-2024/
The left got played out and the far right will never give up control. Democracy is doomed by a rapist and perpetual liar soon to be head chief again. AGAIN. Expect morality laws and the death of freedoms as we know it because another four years is enough time to hit the nail in the coffin. Next outrage: the release of the insurrectionists
As an Eastern Washington property owner, one of my pet peeves is that the Democratic party completely ignores and neglects the non-Puget Sound parts of the state. Look at Grant County, for instance. You’ll see that the electorate consistently votes about 30% Democratic, with absolutely no party presence and often no Democratic candidate on the local level. Rural and small town people should be natural Democratic constituents, but there’s no one talking to them. Granted, the population of Grant County is about a tenth of the size of Seattle, but this political division is just stupid and extremely counter-productive.
“Build Populist Power”?
I thought populism was le bad thing. I guess I’m a few revisions behind on the Newspeak Dictionary.
Ignorance is Strength.
@20: My reaction as well. So confusing.
Today the Left is experiencing the same kind of challenges that bedeviled social revolutionaries in Russia as far back as the 1860s. Firstly, the class/culture divide between the “change agents” and the masses. Narodniks, urban elite and aristocrats, had revolutionary zeal and resources to act on it but were wildly out of touch with the mostly agrarian population, who proved far more practical and culturally conservative than the Narodniks. Sound familiar?
In Russia many SRs adopted to this reality by advocating for highly disciplined party cadres to enforce ideological obedience on the masses. Here we see the emerging irony of a kind of disdain toward populations who were to benefit from their revolutionary mentors but needed to be compelled. Leninists at Iskra would feel quite at home in any US college campus. Most lefties I personally know find the “common folks” a contemptible lot. Not good.
Sadly some social revolutionary thinkers never get the love they are due. Consider, for example, Georges Sorel. For Sorel social movements had to organize organically from the proletariat. Yet here we are in 2024, receiving ideological wisdom from the Ivory Tower, from the high earning professional class, from urban elites. If in fact, cultural Marxism was even a real thing, this is what it would look like – elites espousing some radical memes (aka – luxury beliefs) while simultaneously living fully invested in the status quo. Sorel would have critically predicted this.
@16, @17,
https://www.thefp.com/p/why-i-left-norway-unrealized-gains-tax
To @17’s point, 100 of Norway’s top 400 taxpayers have left because of the wealth tax. It’s why they have few tech start-ups.
@23 Yes, somehow there’s never a shortage of reasons (or talking points) regarding why the rich can’t be taxed. It’s weird how that works, huh.
@22 Until some evolution takes place, humans are doomed to repeat this cycle forever. Silly humans, want to be independent and self-determinative. But also want to be members of a pack, following an alpha leader. These two contradictory instincts rule most of our behavior. According to sci-fi cannon, we’ll end up being ruled by AI, simply because we can’t manage our own crap. Sounds about right.
I just found this nugget by John Halpin over at the Liberal Patriot,
” The Democratic Party elite needs to be replaced with normal Americans and more working-class leadership. You can’t build a majoritarian party in touch with working people if your current party is entirely run and represented by out-of-the-mainstream cultural elites and college-educated weirdos. The Democratic Party is controlled by rich people, lawyers, and “social justice” activists. They make the decisions, set the priorities, and devise the election strategies. Unlike in the glory days of the FDR coalition, their focus is not on working-class economic advancement but rather on promoting cultural ideas that are wildly unpopular with mainstream voters who are concerned about their finances…”
You add to this the woes over at the DSA (some of which were painfully recounted by co-founder Maurice Isserman at the Nation last year) and get a fairly grim picture.
Ancient gray-haired lefty here: This is almost all Joe Fucking Biden’s fault. Had the senile old codger kept to his pledge and gotten out of the way, the Democrats would’ve had a robust primary and nominated someone not named Harris. Trump’s margin of victory was very narrow. The voters do not like anointed candidates. (Hillary, anyone?) If the Democrats can get the insane Progressives to put a cork in it, have actual primaries, and reengage their historic base of blue-collar folks, then victory will be had.
@22: “Most lefties I personally know find the “common folks” a contemptible lot. Not good.”
True. But fortunately, those common folks are better at reading motives than people give them credit for. And given even a mediocre grasp of history, they aren’t going to put up with cadres in this century.
@25: ” Silly humans, want to be independent and self-determinative. But also want to be members of a pack,”
Which is why we have secret ballots. You can go to all the liberal campus political meetings you want. You can stick Harris-Walz stickers all over your bumper. And still vote Trump. No one will ever know. And, ranked choice voting notwithstanding, no one will ever be able to point a finger when the “wrong” person wins. The wisdom of the masses is a powerful thing.
Thank you! I am appalled at the level of magical thinking taking place post-election on the left. We have to pull off the band-aids and pick at the wounds to understand and, more importantly, learn. We have to pick and chose our issues. We also have to learn to – not sure how to say this – let Trump be Trump. Stopping him – or really attempting and failing to stop him – is only going to be used as fodder for the “oh give him a chance” crowd who will then point to the Dem’s obstruction attempts as reasons why Trump’s ludicrous policies fail. We have to allow it to be obvious how bad these ideas are. Let Trump give himself – and yes, America – the full Trump treatment.
Well, a certain Ruy Teixeira has been advocating the party return to practical working class solutions while dropping the cultural stuff. No one wanted to listen to him…until after the election. Now he’s booked by the likes of John Stewart.
Unfortunately, a realignment has occurred. College educated progressives love the identitarian discourses, and as a class, partially require standout issues as “positional goods” to signify their status. They will not want to be told their issues are a liability. Until then, expect more repub ads that declare “so and so is for they/them, Trump is for you.”
When a third of the population has been convinced that lying and criminality are good qualities for a president, this is no longer about politics. It’s about an out-of-control cult, with its own media empire, and a gaggle of billionaires calling the shots behind a fairly transparent curtain. Nothing the Dems could have done would have made a bit of difference. This isn’t about the Dems – at all.
@28
How you twisted: “Silly humans, want to be independent and self-determinative. But also want to be members of a pack,” to be about liberal campus politics is impressive in its absurdity. Keep up the great work.