It’s the Policies, Stupid

Let’s start here. At Time Charlotte Alter does a preview into the Democrats’ analysis of why they lost the 2024 election:

Democrats could dismiss Trump’s first win as a fluke. His second, they know, was the product of catastrophic failure—a nationwide rejection of Democratic policies, Democratic messaging, and the Democrats themselves. The party got skunked in every battleground state and lost the popular vote for the first time in 20 years. They lost the House and the Senate. Their support sagged with almost every demographic cohort except Black women and college-educated voters. Only 35% of Democrats are optimistic about the future of the party, according to a May 14 AP poll, down from nearly 6 in 10 last July. Democrats have no mojo, no power, and no unifying leader to look to for a fresh start.

and

Over the past two months, I’ve spoken to dozens of prominent Democrats, from Senators to strategists, frontline House members to upstart progressives, and activists to top DNC officials, in an effort to figure out how the party can chart its way back. I asked them all versions of the same questions. How did they dig this hole, and how can they get out of it? What ideas do Democrats stand for, beyond opposing an unpopular President? How can they reconnect with the voters they’ve lost? Who should be leading them, and what should they be saying? In other words: What’s the plan?

Many of these conversations made my head hurt. Democrats kept presenting cliches as insights and old ideas as new ideas. Everybody said the same things; nobody seemed to be really saying anything at all. But in between feeble platitudes about “showing up and listening” and “fighting for the working class” and “meeting people where they are,” a few common threads emerged.

Those “threads” include:

• branding
• messaging
• mismatch between what most Americans believe and party orthodoxy
• generational issues

Now let’s turn to an editorial from the Chicago Tribune on the gap between what the mayor is saying and what’s actually happening in Chicago:

We’re halfway through Mayor Brandon Johnson’s term, and the city the mayor described in a series of recent interviews to mark the milestone hardly resembles what we see.

We agree with the mayor that Chicago is a great American city, made so by the people who live, work, play and love here.

But in many other respects — a transit system that continues to perform unacceptably, public schools that cost too much and do a poor job of teaching our children, violent crime levels well above peer American cities and a local economy needlessly deprived of the dynamism that produced our uniquely beautiful skyline — Chicago is ailing.

For all the unfair shots ideologically motivated critics take at the city, Chicagoans who’ve grown up here and made adult lives here know something has gone wrong these last two years. They’ve seen what this city looks and feels like when things are going well. And, judging from Johnson’s rock-bottom public-approval numbers, many of them have concluded he’s a big part of the current problem.

The job of mayor is tough no matter who’s in the office, but Chicago could be doing so much better with a different brand of leadership — and, really, a wholly different philosophy — than Johnson has brought to the fifth floor.

Let me offer a few suggestions.

First, we’ve got to produce more of what we consume. Until that happens governments, whether federal, state, or local, can’t tax more or borrow more without producing inflation. Taxing is another way of saying “reduce the private sector’s ability to spend or invest and increase deadweight loss”. If the Democratic orthodoxy is that we must produce less, other priorities will be doomed to failure. Fortunately, the “abundance doctrine” being promulgated by some progressives suggests that they are getting that message. Whether anything will come of it is another story.

Second, if you are more interested in identifying and expelling heretics than you are in making converts, you will have a perennially shrinking caucus.

Third, the results you produce have got to be what you are promising and what the people want. It makes little difference how benign your intentions. And how vile your opponents are makes little difference if they’re producing the results that the people want.