The US Isn’t Moving Right — the Democrats Are
BY
BRANKO MARCETIC
"As the Kamala Harris campaign lurches rightward, pundits want us to believe
she’s just following the will of the voters. The facts don’t bear that out.
Some alarming news is brewing for the Left. It turns out that after a brief
flirtation with progressive and socialist politics, the United States is now turning
back to the right.
“Five years ago, as a candidate for the Democratic nomination, Harris catered
to the social justice Left. Now she tells Oprah she’ll shoot intruders with her
Glock. That’s what I call progress,” the American Enterprise Institute recently
celebrated, pointing to Harris’s moves to “catch up” with a more conservative
voting public. “Kamala Harris is running to the center-right because America is
center-right,” National Review blared last month. Dave Weigel argues that
Democrats have “adjusted to an electorate that’s shifted to the right” by making
several major policy concessions “that they didn’t want to, or think they needed
to, in 2016 and 2020.”
Don’t be so sure.
It’s not that there’s nothing to this. Immigration has become a more important
issue to voters across the board, and far-right ideas like mass deportation,
gutting the right to asylum, or simply curbing immigration now have support
from majorities or pluralities of Americans, even leaping in popularity among
Democrats. And polling shows that the public has lagged or moved the other
way on topics related to transgender Americans, who the Right has been
somewhat successful at turning into a wedge issue.
But it’s a mistake to treat the Democratic Party’s rightward lurch under Kamala
Harris as an accurate measure of the country’s politics as a whole, or even to
treat support for Donald Trump or Joe Biden and Harris as a proxy for ideology.
(To be fair to Weigel, he takes care to take note this and other nuances.)
Take the issue of raising the federal minimum wage. Harris never talks about it:
not at the debate with Trump, not in her first sit-down interview in August, not in
the Univision town hall she just did. Though it might be part of the Democratic
platform, for all intents and purposes, it has been dropped from her campaign
and presidential agenda.
Does this mean the country has turned against a $15 or higher minimum wage,
a major left-wing priority that was one of the Bernie Sanders campaign’s (and,
later, Biden’s) flagship policies? Obviously not, as we can see not only from
robust recent polling that shows the measure is wildly popular across party
lines, but from the results of state and municipal ballot measures that have
routinely seen Americans directly vote to hike the wage — including in deep red
Florida, 60 percent of whose voting residents backed raising the wage to $15
four years ago, at the same time they elected Trump and a spree of
Republicans downballot.
This isn’t the only such example. There are a host of progressive policies that
poll well across the board that Harris either refuses to take up, like adding
dental coverage to Medicare and lowering the program’s eligibility age, or
doesn’t ever talk about, like a national rent cap. In a political system where both
parties beg for money from corporations and the ultrarich, treating what
policies those parties do and don’t support as a reflection of the will of the
voters doesn’t make much sense.
Harris’s rightward lurch on foreign policy isn’t justified by meeting the electorate
where it is either: polling consistently shows that voters, especially in swing
states, are worried about the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East escalating,
see preventing that escalation as a higher priority than total military victory,
oppose Israel’s war and favor an arms embargo on it, and prefer the United
States generally shrink its global footprint to focus on domestic problems.
These are all positions traditionally espoused by left-wing voices, and they’re
also positions that Harris is on the opposite side on. Several of them are
actually much closer to what the public has been (wrongly) told are the
positions held by Trump, who is consistently trusted on foreign policy more
than Harris.
In fact, the clearest and most consistent takeaways from election-related
polling are not that voters think Harris is too far left and that Trump’s policy
platform is what Americans want. It’s that voters are most concerned with the
cost-of-living crisis that we’ve all taken to calling “inflation” as shorthand, that
voters are drawn to Trump largely for this reason, that they want to hear more
from Harris about what she would actually do as president to solve this, and
that they don’t think she would break from President Joe Biden, whose years in
power they associate (not unfairly) with feeling poorer.
At the same time, we’re only two years out from a midterm election in which
Republicans, convinced that voters had turned against socially liberal views on
abortion and LGBTQ rights, failed miserably to capitalize on an unpopular
incumbent president by making what turned out to be an alienating
conservative assault on both issues central to their identity. Even now, a left-
populist candidate is within striking distance of beating a Republican for a
Senate seat in Nebraska, a state that hasn’t voted blue since 1964 (yes, by
taking a more conservative position on immigration, but also by running on a
more liberal position on abortion).
Meanwhile, Trump and his campaign organization are not exactly acting like
he’s running for president in a country that’s lurched rightward.
Trump has spent the bulk of this year running away from Project 2025, the
deeply unpopular policy blueprint of radical right-wing ideas that members of
his first administration devised in partnership with the Heritage Foundation, and
which the campaign once proudly touted and has many overlaps with his
official campaign documents. He’s renounced the GOP’s politically toxic stance
on abortion, to the point of wrenching control of the platform-writing process
and angering the party base with a more centrist position. The biggest
takeaway from the vice-presidential debate was how Trump running mate J. D.
Vance pretended to be someone else with a whole different set of beliefs.
That’s all before we get to the fact that, despite Trump’s resilience in the polls,
his campaign has gone from consistently leading to being neck and neck in the
popular vote, even trailing — and that Harris, in spite of running a far more
conservative campaign, is not exactly running away with it either.
In fact, Trump’s resilience in the polls is in large part explained by the time he
departed from right-wing economics.
Commentators have scratched their heads over why voters seem to have a
nostalgia for Trump’s final, chaotic year as president in 2020. One obvious
reason is that a Democratic-led Congress passed, and Trump signed into law, a
hugely expensive welfare state expansion that, despite the hardship of the
pandemic, was transformative for many people: income inequality narrowed on
a historic scale, debts were paid off, money was saved, and many had the
newfound financial security to find new, more rewarding, and lucrative careers.
Almost all of that expanded welfare state gradually disappeared under Biden.
Even on immigration, the issue voters have most dramatically moved rightward
on, things aren’t as clear-cut as they might seem. Current public opinion on this
hasn’t come out of a vacuum. Part of it has been a migrant crisis that is more
and more visible to the average voter on their streets, and record arrivals at the
border earlier in the year. But part of it is also a high-profile Democratic retreat
on the issue, which has seen the party adopt a defensive crouch, abandon its
Trump-era positive case for the benefits of immigration, and inadvertently
elevate the issue by picking a high-profile fight over it instead of one over
Trump and the GOP’s weaknesses (raising Social Security benefits, for
instance). We can’t know how differently things would have looked after this
path not taken. But it’s absurd and ahistorical to argue it would have had no
effect.
So no, it is not really true that the country has lurched right, and certainly not
that the rightward shifts we’ve seen are simply part of some organic process of
the electorate coming to its senses. But we can say one thing for sure: the
Democratic establishment is turning rightward, and it is determined to do so
after a short-lived experimentation with mildly progressive governance under
Biden. Whether Harris wins or loses in November, the result will be spun to
argue there is no alternative."
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