Democrats don’t lose presidential elections because they’re “too progressive.” They lose because they let the cultural left hijack the conversation, turning what should be a winning message—economic fairness—into a muddled mess that sounds like a TED Talk no one asked for.
Every election cycle, Democrats engage in the same navel-gazing autopsy: Why did we lose? The answers are always overly intellectual, predictably self-flagellating, and, most importantly, completely detached from the lives of everyday Americans. The latest chestnut is that Democrats “ran too far to the left.”
This would be laughable if it weren’t so patently absurd. Kamala Harris, who lost to Donald Trump in 2024, wasn’t exactly the second coming of Eugene Debs. Her economic policies weren’t even that progressive—she campaigned on a vaguely populist platform aimed at stabilizing the economy for the middle class and addressing wealth inequality. Yet pundits, scrambling to make sense of her defeat, are peddling the idea that the Democrats alienated voters by being too left-wing.
Really? Harris’s loss wasn’t due to Medicare for All or student debt relief. It wasn’t because voters suddenly decided they love paying more for prescription drugs or enduring the whims of health insurance companies. No, the problem lies elsewhere. It lies in the Democrats’ relentless embrace of cultural elitism and their uncanny ability to condescend to the very voters they need to win.
Here’s the thing: Americans aren’t allergic to left-wing economic policies. Poll after poll shows that raising the minimum wage, taxing billionaires, and even expanding healthcare are broadly popular. But many voters are deeply skeptical of the cultural left, a small but vocal faction of the Democratic Party obsessed with niche issues and arcane language that alienates more people than it mobilizes.
Yet somehow, Democratic strategists and commentators have conflated these two distinct realms. They equate a candidate championing working-class issues with one championing pronoun debates on college campuses. Worse, they act as if these are the same issues driving kitchen-table discussions in Ohio, Wisconsin, or Georgia.
Democrats don’t lose elections because they’re “too progressive” on economics. They lose because they let the cultural left hijack the conversation, turning what should be a winning message—economic fairness—into a muddled mess that sounds like a TED Talk no one asked for.
The Democratic Party’s biggest problem isn’t its policies. It’s its people—more specifically, the way its people communicate. Too many Democrats think that dazzling voters with their intelligence is the same as connecting with them.
Take the endless parade of think pieces and cable news appearances dissecting Harris’s loss. Analysts pour over demographic data, microtargeting strategies, and turnout models. They theorize about shifting suburban voting patterns and the erosion of the Latino vote in South Texas. These arguments might win points at Georgetown cocktail parties, but they miss the fundamental point: most voters don’t care about your political science dissertation. They care about whether their kids can afford college, whether they’ll have a job next year, and whether they can pay the rent.
The GOP, for all its faults, understands this. Donald Trump’s appeal isn’t rooted in policy precision or intellectual rigor—it’s rooted in the fact that he speaks to voters, not at them. He channels their frustrations in plain language, offering simplistic solutions to complex problems. Sure, those solutions often range from impractical to terrifying, but they resonate because they don’t feel condescending.
Democrats, on the other hand, seem incapable of simplifying their message without sounding like they’re reading from a PowerPoint slide. Worse, they insist on moralizing, lecturing voters on how they should feel about everything from climate change to cultural appropriation.
This intellectualism breeds a dangerous distance between Democrats and the electorate. Too many Democratic leaders are insulated from the realities of working-class life. They live in blue bubbles, consume blue media, and talk primarily to other blue people.
If Democratic strategists spent a week walking around the heartland, they’d quickly realize that most Americans don’t care about the latest controversy on Twitter. They don’t want to be lectured about privilege or taught how to be better allies. They want to know how you’re going to make their lives better.
But instead of meeting voters where they are, Democrats double down on their intellectual superiority. They dismiss voters who don’t share their worldview as ignorant or bigoted, forgetting that contempt is not a winning campaign strategy.
This smugness poses a bigger threat to the Democratic Party’s future than Trump or Trumpism ever could. Trump is, at his core, a symptom of larger problems: economic insecurity, cultural alienation, and institutional mistrust. Democrats should be the natural antidote to these ills. But instead of addressing them head-on, they get lost in debates about whether it’s okay to call someone “Latinx.”
The tragedy is that Democrats have the tools to win. Economic populism works. Focusing on bread-and-butter issues works. Connecting with voters on a human level works. But these strategies require humility, and humility is in short supply among Democratic elites.
If Democrats want to avoid becoming a permanent minority party, they need to stop overthinking everything. They need to ditch the consultants who say things like “authenticity tests well” and replace them with people who understand what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck. They need to embrace plain-spoken candidates who can cut through the noise and make voters feel seen and heard.
The solution isn’t to abandon progressive policies—it’s to sell them better. Talk about expanding healthcare in terms of saving lives, not reducing systemic inequities. Talk about raising the minimum wage as a matter of fairness, not a moral obligation. In short, stop trying to impress voters with your intelligence and start talking to them like they’re real people.
And for heaven’s sake, stop blaming the left for every electoral loss. The problem isn’t that the party is too left-wing. It’s that it’s too out of touch. Until Democrats learn how to connect with voters in Ohio as well as they do with donors in Silicon Valley, they’ll keep losing. And they’ll keep blaming the wrong things.
The Democratic Party doesn’t need to move to the right. It needs to come back down to earth.
TONY CASTRO, the former award-winning Los Angeles columnist and author, is a writer-at-large and the national political writer for LAMonthly. org. He is the author of “Mantle: The Best There Ever Was”. He can be reached at tony@tonycastro.com.
