Other People’s Takes: WayToWin Podcast Edition
At the suggestion of Dan Ancona, I listened to the “WTAF Just Happened??” episode of the WaytoWin podcast. I personally would have preferred this to be a white paper, but that might just be because my blood is weak and I can’t do the podcasts at 2x speed thing. Godspeed to all you fast podcast people.
Context setting:
If you work in a certain branch of progressive/democratic politics you know this, but for everyone else-
WayToWin describes themselves as a “national strategy tank and donor collaborative building a multiracial coalition” and they were early Harris supporters before Biden dropped out. I believe they self describe as center-left, and they tend to lean more grassroots in strategic approach. Coming out of 2022, they were working on a strategy of “state powerbuilding”, “progressive governance”, and “narrative strategies” (doc is here), with the theory that “we win elections to govern progressively, and we govern progressively to keep winning elections”.
The Podcast Itself:
There’s more episodes of the podcast I didn’t listen to because, again, can’t do the speed podcast thing, so this is just from the WTAF episode. I found this really interesting, and useful for processing and clarifying my thinking, even if I didn’t fully agree. If you’re looking for a take from the more movement-oriented side of Democratic politics, you could do worse than this.
Right off the bat, they’re focusing on a turnout explanation for Trump’s victory, which I don’t agree with. I do agree that Trump and Republicans had high turnout this cycle, which is helpful to them, but doesn’t do much for us.
One part where I do very much agree is when they discuss what most surprised them about the election- it was a shock how decisive it was. I follow polls pretty closely and I was still shocked. Maybe I shouldn’t have been, idk, but I was. The other useful point they make here is that swing is different from margin, and saying we lost ground with a particular group is not the same as saying the majority of that group voted for Trump. This is mostly relevant in the post-election discourse when people start posting about which voter group’s “fault” the result is, which I tend to find pretty ghoulish in any case, but also it’s good to be accurate.
There’s a section on “worst election takes” which are predictably pretty much 100% different from my idea of “worst takes”.
Jen Ancona: “My personal favorite worst take is the idea that Democrats have become too progressive or too woke around certain issues, [ ....] and that somehow, like, the change we need to make is taking a more moderate approach when I feel like we have been taking a more moderate approach in all of these elections, including this last one on the presidential front, but also in a bunch of current states. So I think to blame these election results on some of the most vulnerable among us who we as Democrats consider part of our coalition, and we're fighting for them, like trans people, like immigrants, other people of color.”
I don’t really think that checks out with the past- Biden in particular was described at the time as leading a government heavily influenced by progressives including Warren, and while Harris did some clear correction to the center, she never made a clean break. I’m sympathetic to the annoyance at “too woke” takes, and I definitely see people online substituting personal grievances for policy analysis (which is bad, and frequently gross, and I would prefer people stop). My perspective is that it isn’t “woke language”, it’s about policy choice, on which Democrats ended up left of the population of voters, and a lot of the anti-wokeness and anti-anti-wokeness stuff forgets this.
It’s interesting that Jen takes the pushback on “woke” and draws a direct line to “blaming these election results on the most vulnerable”. I don’t see that as what’s happening in the majority of the discourse at all- pushing back on policy and positioning choices isn’t pushing back on people. Blaming the policy positions isn’t the same as blaming the people they’re meant to help. One of the critiques of “the groups” is their separation from their supposed constituencies, and I think it’s weird to call criticism of groups and activists “criticism of vulnerable people”. We as Democrats have huge amounts of empathy for vulnerable people, which is why we want to win and help them. We can’t do that out of power.
To make it doubly clear: Ordinary vulnerable people aren’t why we lost. Policy decisions are, and policy decisions are tradeoffs between our goals, popularity, and political expediency.
The folks on this episode also seem to have a very set idea of our coalition and a focus on building that back up with base appeals. I don’t think that makes sense. A party is not a coalition, and if we need to win with a different set of voters, we should do that. Of course we want as large an appeal as possible, but we aren’t bound to recreating the coalitions of the past. I am deeply concerned about our slides with POC voters, Latino voters in particular, and I think we should work to address that, but I don’t see our success in winning back those groups in particular as the ultimate benchmark of our success as a party. We have seen that doing policy to help certain groups doesn’t always bring electoral rewards, which doesn’t mean we should abandon those policies, just that we should be realistic about the outcomes. It is in many places *extremely electorally helpful* that we win back our base of 10 years ago, but we should prepare ourselves for our coalition to change and grow.
One kind of throwaway line is:
“[...] if you run a more centrist campaign, it robs you of the opportunity to deliver a more populist message that addresses the affordability crisis and inequality”
This doesn’t make sense to me- populism and centrism are orthogonal concepts, and I see Trump’s campaign this cycle as explicitly doing both. Most voters have a grab bag of views that work out to being moderate (see my post on moderation via heterodoxy positioning for a big tent party), and a populist candidate has a variety of choices about what positions that might include. You could absolutely run a centrist campaign that really focused on affordability (again, I think Trump kind of did this erratically), and potentially even inequality if you took it from a rising-tide approach rather than attacking business.
There’s another line in there, when they discuss the choices we need to make as a party, that really struck me.
Jen Ancona: “I think it's a figuring out what side we're on. I think we might need a lot of data to really see that, but it's just like, are we against the billionaire corporate class or are we not?”
To which my personal answer is: I guess? Like, inasmuch as that position helps ordinary people live better lives? I don’t see this as a core tension, and I don’t find related policy (antitrust especially) particularly energizing or motivating. Yes, taxes on the rich are good and popular because they give us the funds to run programs that help people, yes, we should seek to restrain abuses by corporations and the very rich, etc. But I will trade an abstract restraining of the billionaire class for more money for families and children any day.
I do mostly agree with their takes on what’s likely to come next. They foresee a mass of voters who voted Trump for low prices being disappointed by his erratic governance and the failure of those low prices to manifest. I completely agree that the economy-first Trump voters are likely to be disappointed, although I worry about what scapegoat he’s going to blame it all on. Messaging seems a lot easier when you’re willing to just lie all the time, but I do believe that voters are smart enough to notice when their personal economic situation doesn’t improve.
A Bigger Picture
There’s a bigger question implicit in this podcast and my reaction: what is politics for? What are political parties for?
The take in this episode is:
“Movements are are here to push the boundaries on what's possible and political campaigns are here to make that make sense in a political context.”
I can’t speak to movements- I am an electoralist hack through and through. On political campaigns and parties, here are my thoughts about what a political party is for, in priority order:
To win elections and get our party’s candidates into power
To achieve our policy goals once we are elected and in power
To improve people’s lives via our policy goals
You can’t do things if you’re not in office. Once you’re in office, you’re restrained by the circumstances in which you govern, i.e., do you have a trifecta. You get a limited amount of time and political will to enact policy, and you hope to do policy that achieves your goals and helps people. You may or may not be rewarded electorally for that policy (as we saw this election, sometimes voters hate things that you believe to be good for them), and you have to make tough choices about what to prioritize.
This prioritization of policies and issues is a core duty of an elected official and a political party. One of my big complaints about the current Democratic coalition is a complete unwillingness to have tradeoff conversations (if people even think they’re real). I don’t have any ideological problems with the idea that it’s okay to sometimes enact good policy that you know you’ll suffer for electorally. Sometimes that’s worth it. My problem is with the denial that that’s a choice you might have to make, and with the pervasive vibe in progressive politics that everything we want would be popular if only we explained it just right. That simply isn’t true, and we should get real about the tension between popular policy and our policy goals. Yes, it sucks to rein in your aspirations, but that’s the place we’re in now, facing a Republican trifecta fully enabled to enact their worst policy ideas. Winning is the first step back to power, and we should make that a clear priority.
