Democrats need a 50-state strategy or face death from Microwave-ism
In 1960 Vice President Richard Nixon narrowly lost the Presidency to the charismatic Jack Kennedy. Like all elections, there were a thousand reasons why it happened the way it did. But one of the forgotten reasons was that old-school Nixon insisted on campaigning in all 50 states. It was not unreasonable position for someone looking to govern all of the country and not just a part of it. Kennedy on the other hand took a more modern approach. His campaign targeted specific ‘swing’ states to get him over the line, which he did by a slim margin.
In 2024 we witnessed something of a reversal of the strategy Kennedy pioneered. Harris spent nearly 1.5 billion dollars mostly in a handful of swing states and failed to win any of them, an extraordinary failure of electioneering. Donald Trump, who had fewer financial resources, didn’t campaign in all 50 states. But sometimes he didn’t campaign at all. Sometimes he just stood listening to music with the attendees of his rallies — he could have been anywhere.
Yes, Harris made a flying visit to Texas, a state she stood very little chance of winning, but that trip would probably have been more effective if she had paid a visit to Joe Rogan and reached a slightly different audience of Americans that was poised to vote against her in huge numbers rather than preach to a stadium of the converted.
Meanwhile, there is ample media coverage of all the poor voters in those swing states feeling overwhelmed by 1.5 billion dollars worth of pamphlets and other advertising. It must have felt very… transactional.
Just like in 1960 how you win an election is changing. Bombarding a tiny section of voters every four years can bring its own type of apathy and break the limp bonds of trust between voters and candidates. Al Gore would have won in 2000 if he hadn’t lost his home state, which he spent little time in, and Hilary Clinton never visited Wisconsin which unbeknown to her had become a battleground state. In the future, politicians will need to reach voters in a more universal way.
This splintering of the connection between voters and politicians and the hopeless gap between mounting problems and vanishing solutions taps into the greater forces taking place in America and across the world. From the loneliness of ‘Bowling Alone’ to the insecurity of the ‘polycrisis’, we don’t feel in control of our present and feel pessimistic about the future. Most politicians fail to see this and therefore cannot offer a solution. Why?
Happiness vs. Unhappiness
After 2020, support for Donald Trump became increasingly similar to a cult of personality that would likely attract more people to it than it would shed supporters. He became more popular the more he faced consequences that would destroy other candidates. He became an ominous, overwhelming and unique electoral force driven entirely by his personality.
The urge to assert the ‘Trump fever was breaking’ was strong during Kamala Harris’ summer honeymoon. But nothing reinforced long-standing predictions that Trump would win more than seeing the film ‘Terrifer 3’ top the American box office in mid-October. That’s not the film of a happy place.
‘Terrifer 3’ is an indie horror film that dethroned the big studio-backed ‘Joker’ sequel. The film is distinguished by its use of violence as entertainment. Not violence to create fear, or violence as the dark component of the human condition — nor even as violence for pure violence’s sake like in the ‘Hostel’ series. Instead ‘Terrifier 3’ uses violence as equivalent to joke-telling.
For example, when protagonist Art the Clown peels off the face of a man dressed as Santa Claus and wears his bloody white beard as his own, dancing in front of the twitching victim, the sequence is presumably written and directed for laughs. In the past, there might have been a joke or a pie in the face but now there was the bloody hairy face of one man on another. This isn’t the laughter of a happy place. Nor a place that the Nixon or JFK of 1960 would really recognise.
Whether people are happy or unhappy is an important reason for explaining how they vote. Take Brexit in 2016. The city of Leicester should have voted to leave the EU like nearly all English cities similar to it in size, geography or demographics such as Birmingham, Nottingham, Derby and Wolverhampton. There was no apparent material reason for Leicester to vote to remain in the EU.
But 2016 was a special year for Leicester. Against 5000–1 odds, its football team Leicester City won the Premier League. They had achieved the unthinkable and its people were in a state of ecstasy. The concept of ‘Europe’ was part of a positive vision for the future that included travel, prosperity and pride. They were happy, even if that happiness was temporary — and the voters voted accordingly.
In 2024, Harris’ campaign used one word to signify its campaign: ‘Joy’. They couldn’t have picked a word more disconnected from reality. Anyone who had spent time in a town that had lost its biggest employer over the last 40 years, suffered addiction, had worked in the gig economy, or had enjoyed ‘Terrifier 3’ would know that ‘joy’ does not define our lives, if it ever did.
Microwave-ism and Comforting Stories
Unhappiness with the status quo is spreading and there are more ways to express this unhappiness than ever before. But the ability to listen to other human beings and really understand them is ebbing away. Instead of listening to them, we substitute the complex story we hear with simple statistics, or stories, that are comforting.
Take for example the American economy. All indicators for the American economy are positive, repeated Harris supporters. However, most Americans did not agree and felt in a state of economic and social depression. With this, a great disconnection between voter and candidate was achieved. But instead of addressing this disconnection, the Harris campaign repeated the message that the economy was doing well at the volume of 1.5 billion dollars.
It was one of the most obvious wastes of political money since the UK Labour Party leader in 2015, Ed Miliband, spent thousands of pounds (peanuts, but no less embarrassing) on the ‘Ed-Stone’, a looming monolith that might have been rejected from Kubrick’s ‘2001’, on which were engraved meaningless pledges like “An NHS with time to care”.
The Harris campaign shares a lot with the 2015 Miliband campaign because they convinced themselves of victory because of the statistic ‘number of conversations with voters on the doorstep’. To have been a fly on the wall of these millions of conversations from both campaigns would surely see the Labour/Democratic operative nod as the voter listed their concerns before the operative repeated a list of talking points before moving on to the next door.
This strategy is a losing one because there is no validation of the voter’s concerns and no offering of something the voter wanted. In 2015, Miliband brought in Obama election guru David Axelrod to sprinkle some of that just-about-still magical Obama dust on his campaign. The exasperated Axelrod summed up Labour’s offer to voters as “Vote Labour and win a microwave”. Axelrod was trying to explain that what Labour was offering was partial, random, weird, boring, insufficient, embarrassing and irrelevant. The 2024 Harris campaign also suffered from this, let’s call it, ‘Microwave-ism’.
When Bernie ‘We are the 99%’ Sanders criticised the Democratic party for abandoning working people in the days after the 2024 loss, the head of the DNC Jamie Harrison responded forcefully with pure ‘Mircowave-ism’. Harrison said:
“From the child tax credits, to 25k for a down payment for a house to Medicare covering the cost of senior healthcare in their homes. There are a lot of post-election takes and this one ain’t a good one.”
But it wasn’t about tax credits or no tax credits. And if you think that tax credits are the best thing for the working class — or anyone not in the 1% — then it needs to be communicated in a clearer, more positive way that resonates with an individual’s life. It is indefensible that this is the first thing out of Harrison’s mouth when defending the 2024 platform because it shows that he has not listened properly to what voters were saying or Sanders’ criticism. Worse, it contains the vibe that voters were wrong all along because it is the Democratic party that knows what is best — and what is best is tax credits.
These policies probably also fail to resonate with the average voter because they are likely already sick to death of the wider system of tax, healthcare and saving for a house down payment — because, as we apparently failed to learn in 2016, the average voter feels the system no longer works for them and feels there are political, economic, and social forces that are actively working against them. They are screaming it now — you don’t need to be a professional listener to hear it.
Substituting simple, reassuring stories in place of the complex truth to explain Harris’ loss is rampant. There is no clearer example than pointing to Harris as another victim of the ‘2024 incumbency graveyard’ effect. For example in the first two minutes of the first episode after the election of ‘Pod Save America’, the leading thought-leadership podcast for Democrats, led with this idea — saying that in 2024 “incumbent leaders all over the world have been losing” with voters punishing them for inflation.
But it’s not really true. What is true is that incumbents have taken kickings or underperformed across the globe and this is statistically happening more than in other years. But in 2024 the vast majority of incumbents actually won their elections, had their chosen successor or ally win, or retained power democratically according to their respective constitutions. These countries include Mexico, India, Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, Slovakia, Bangladesh, Taiwan, Austria, Algeria, Pakistan, Japan, South Africa, Belgium, Croatia, Hungary, Iceland, Lithuania, and France (where the President ignored election winners and appointed a friend as PM). Only the UK, Botswana, Senegal, Panama, Uruguay, Sri Lanka, Finland and North Macedonia chucked out their incumbents. In reality, Harris was an outlier in 2024 for not getting it over the line.
50-State Strategy or Groups Strategy
The Democratic party is a big tent made up of lots of groups. One of the pioneers of psychology in the United States, Kurt Lewin, defined a group like this:
“It is not the similarity or dissimilarity of individuals that constitutes a group, but the interdependence of fate”
All of the groups that make up the Democratic party will have their say and conclude that winning over specific groups of voters is the key, like young white men or Hispanic people. But dividing up the electorate according to groups like this is only going to fail more at the ballot box because it ignores the interdependence of fate of 99% of voters in America.
Democrats need a 50-state strategy that talks universally to all Americans who share problems from the cost of living to discrimination to climate change. It needs to win in the deep south like in 1992 and 1996, and places like Ohio, Florida and Iowa which were won handily in 2008 by an unlikely Black candidate. Momentum can be kept up in places like Texas and Georgia, viewed as future Democratic strongholds. But whoever leads the party needs to be on the ground everywhere, listen to all different types of voters and, when they have done that, offer something all Americans want. This is the only path to prevent the Democrats from becoming an ever more narrow party of well-educated and well-off diverse people driving straight off the cliff of electoral destruction.
Back in the 60’s, President Kennedy knew all about this ‘interdependence of fate’ when he gave that famous speech, five months before his death (on the campaign trail). He was talking about relations between nations but it also functions as an analysis of relations between citizens. He said:
“So, let us not be blind to our differences — but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
Everyone shares this interdependence of fate when it comes to economic prosperity and wealth inequality, needing healthcare, democratic and civil virility, climate change, peace and AI. It is only with this attitude that we can overcome the polycrisis and feel hopeful for the future again. But to forgo this attitude is to further sink our society into the deepening unhappiness of ultraviolence and allow everything we have built up to burn down.
