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Democrats are engaged in a ‘new politics of evasion’ that could cost them in 2024, new study says
Trump and the GOP represent a danger to democracy, the study says. Democrats must win in 2024, but first they have to reorient on cultural issues and question whether there really is a progressive majority emerging in the country.
By Dan Balz
Three decades ago, Democratic policy analysts William A. Galston and Elaine Kamarck published a bracing critique of their party, warning against a “politics of evasion” that they said ignored electoral reality and hindered changes needed to reverse the results of three losing presidential races in which the party had won a combined total of just 173 electoral votes.
Now the authors are back, with a fresh analysis of their party. This time it comes in the wake of President Biden’s victory over former president Donald Trump in 2020, but it is an even starker warning about the future than the one they issued in 1989 after Michael Dukakis’s landslide electoral college loss to George H. W. Bush.
“A Democratic loss in the 2024 presidential election may well have catastrophic consequences for the country,” they write, arguing that the Trump-led Republican Party presents the most serious threat to American democracy in modern times. The Democrats’ first duty, they argue, should be to protect democracy by winning in 2024; everything else should be subordinated to that objective.
But they argue that the Democrats are not positioned to achieve that objective, that, instead, the party is “in the grip of myths that block progress toward victory” and that too many Democrats are engaged in a “new politics of evasion, the refusal to confront the unyielding arithmetic of electoral success.”
“Too many Democrats have evaded this truth and its implications for the party’s agenda and strategy,” the authors add. “They have been led astray by three persistent myths: that ‘people of color’ think and act in the same way; that economics always trumps culture; and that a progressive majority is emerging.”
Galston and Kamarck served in the Clinton administration, and Kamarck is a long-standing member of the Democratic National Committee. Both are scholars at the Brookings Institution, and their new study is published on the website of the Progressive Policy Institute, where they are contributing authors.
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