Frontline Democrats Won With Progressive Populist Messages

[Passages]

Longtime Democratic moderates who attacked big business and monopolies outpaced Harris in swing districts.

by Luke Goldstein November 22, 2024

More often than not, efforts to fight corporate power come from the left flank of the Democratic Party, and have ever since progressives spawned the regulatory state in the early 20th century and the New Deal took on Wall Street. For the past several decades, by contrast, the party’s centrists have generally been more accommodating toward free-market solutions.

But times are changing as old ideological reflexes are starting to come undone.

SNIP
In The New York Times, John Fetterman’s former chief of staff Adam Jentleson went so far as to say that giant corporations such as Amazon are “extremely popular” and thus candidates looking to rein in corporate power “are the inverse of what voters want—people with the cultural sensibilities of Yale Law School graduates who cosplay as populists by over-relying on niche issues like Federal Trade Commission antitrust actions.”

The premise of this argument relies just about entirely on a misreading of the electorate at the national level that completely falls apart on closer inspection of the down-ballot races. Across the country, candidates not named Kamala Harris found success by more effectively selling the achievements of the Biden administration and casting a more convincing economic message.
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-11-22-frontline-democrats-won-with-progressive-populist-messages/

[ColinC]

1. The writer of this Prospect article gets their very own "No Shit Sherlock" award

Yay