Following the Democratic Party’s devastating 2024 election loss, various autopsy reports offered a number of explanations: voters cared deeply about inflation and immigration, which the Republicans had the edge on; the Democrats got bogged down in identity politics; Joe Biden staying in the race as long as he did was bound to doom any Democratic candidate that followed him. But the explanation that I keep coming back to is that it was folly for the Dems to run on the idea that Donald Trump was a grievous threat to democracy. In doing so, they cast themselves as defenders of the status quo or, even more fatal, defenders of “the establishment.” See Ari Berman’s and Jacob Rosenberg’s excellent election post-mortem in Mother Jones, Obama admin alum Ben Rhodes in The NYT, or former Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer.
Going back to the 1992 presidential election, the case can be made that the “establishment” candidate always loses and the “outsider” candidate always wins. Arkansan Bill “Bubba” Clinton > Country Club Republican and ultimate Washington Insider H.W. Bush. And Clinton held onto that outsider badge in ’96 against Bob Dole, who’d been a D.C. creature since 1961. In 2000, W. Bush successfully played the role of swashbuckling Texan, despite his Brahmin roots, against sitting veep and last-person-you’d-want-to-have-a-beer-with Al Gore. In ’04, it was easy for W. to maintain that edge against John Kerry, who the Bush campaign painted as the ultimate Brahmin (in fact, Kerry appeared to willingly play the role). Obama, of course, was the first Black nominee from a major political party, and when he ran for reelection the Republicans ran the whitest nominee in the history of presidential politics. And so Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton, who campaigned as the most qualified person ever to run for higher office? The outcome was inevitable. And Democrats have continued to play into this trap by insisting on painting Trump as a threat to democracy, i.e., the outsider. In contemporary presidential politics, it appears the only thing that can disrupt the “outsider” advantage is a once-in-a-century catastrophic event. See COVID-19 and the 2020 election.
Enter Chris Murphy, who may have the antidote to the “outsider” advantage dynamic in presidential elections. Though he is now in his third term as the junior U.S. senator from Connecticut, Murphy is giving strong upstart vibes as one of the more impactful critics of the second Trump administration. But beyond his own potential as a 2028 presidential contender, Murphy has been offering a compelling roadmap for any Democrat to follow. Last week, on Ross Douthat’s “Interesting Times” podcast, Murphy laid out a number of prescriptions for how to push back against Trump. Perhaps most compelling were his thoughts about the Biden-Harris pro-democracy message in the 2024 campaign, which he said was fatally flawed because of the “version” of democracy it sought to protect. His prescription on how to improve that message could upend the “outsider” advantage dynamic in presidential elections. Here’s what Murphy had to say:
Democrats can’t really argue for this version of democracy because people think this version of democracy is rigged in favor of the billionaires and the special interests, and they’re not really interested in protecting this version of democracy. For Democrats to credibly argue against Trump’s destruction of democracy, we have to make it credible that if we win power, we will unrig the democracy. That means Democrats have to talk a lot more about campaign finance reform, getting a constitutional amendment to get all private money out of politics, things like the STOCK Act, or closing the revolving door of lobbyists and staff and members of Congress.
We’ve got to have a real focus on the way in which we would fix democracy if you give us power. In the last 10 years, I would argue that that set of issues was never Top 10, certainly not Top 5 for Democrats. It’s got to be Top 2 now, because that’s the only way that you’ll convince people that are starting to get pretty tired and pretty worried about Trump’s assault on democratic norms.
When Douthat pushed back on Murphy, rightly pointing out that voters in the 2024 election were more concerned with the economy than they were with democracy, the senator had this to say:
Right, which is why I say it has to be a Top 2 issue. The first issue is how Democrats would unrig the economy…. One of the only ways you unrig the economy is to unrig the way the government works, in which the special interests and the billionaires get everything they want out of government. The reason that the economy is rigged is because the government is rigged. It’s because the way in which campaigns are financed means that the billionaires and the corporations get a seat at the table and you don’t. If you are interested in changing the structure of the economy so that small businesses get a chance to compete or wages actually rise or workers don’t get abused in their workplace, then you have to fundamentally unrig the way that government works. The two are intimately connected.
To follow this prescription is to totally upend the “outsider” advantage dynamic in presidential elections. By running against the democratic system – the very system that Biden-Harris sought to preserve and protect – a candidate can totally sideline the ad hominem of presidential politics. No longer would an election turn on personalities, as it has for the past quarter-century. No longer would a candidate like Trump so thoroughly own the outsider mantle. For the last decade, since Trump entered the political arena, Democrats have been obsessed with protecting democratic norms. But what Democrats failed to understand was that democratic norms is what resulted in the election of Donald Trump.
In 2016, when he accepted the Republican nomination for president, Trump declared, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I, alone, can fix it. I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged.” In the nine years since, Trump has only further rigged the system for his own political and personal gain. As Chris Murphy rightly points out, Democrats should stop campaigning on the idea of protecting a system in which Donald Trump has thrived, and should instead campaign on radically reforming that system.