https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/11/progressives-errors-2024-election/680563/
I think this is sort of correct. I’ve written about this elsewhere. But I don’t think it’s spot on. First, it’s an empirical claim and I don’t think we have evidence. Certainly it isn’t offered here. The essay seems more like an attempt to fit the results into a prior view than an objective analysis.
But I think it’s close. In my mind the issue is
1/ conceding the culture war framing; most of this stuff is low utility/impact for POTUS
2/ the issue isn’t so much a focus on woke issues and therefore a straying to left activism — a lot of the positions are good policy, not explained well but palatable to many if better presented. The issue is that risked focus was a symptom of the real problem, which is framing party affiliation with a set of values and signifiers that are not actually pertinent to the party platforms and buy into the exclusion of folks who self-identify with a certain lifestyle at the same time MAGa embraced that personal outlook and made it seem a no-brainer that it had become central/core to Republican identity.
As long as Democrats fail to delaminate middle America lifestyle and milieu from party identity, which is easy to do because policy preference of those folks actually naturally aligns left — they will keep losing. Hillary Clinton was a bad candidate for this reason. Bill Clinton was good for the same reason.
Democrats need a big tent on “type of person” and an embracing of populist sensibilities that Republican leaders didn’t like either but Trump made a coup. Is it going to take a coup in the Democratic Party to do the same?