Democrats Are Blaming Activist Groups for Kamala Harris’s Loss, but the Problem Is Much Deeper

A new discourse from Democratic pundits seeks to blame the hippies for 2024, but avoids pointing fingers at party leaders.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

In the days after the 2024 election, certain pundits close to the Democratic Party — people who’ve worked intimately with Democratic politicians, organizations, and consultants — came up with a theory of Kamala Harris’s presidential loss: it was the Groups who were responsible.

Progressive activists simply have too much power over the Democratic Party and those activists compelled the party to take unelectable positions, the argument goes.

The New York Times’s Ezra Klein, who is on first name basis with many elite Democrats, blamed a “a culture in which nobody is saying no to the groups at any level of American Democratic politics.”

Adam Jentleson, a former senior staffer for Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman (and a former colleague of mine at the Center for American Progress), pointed specifically to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in an op-ed written after the election:

To cite a few examples, when Kamala Harris was running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, the A.C.L.U. pushed her to articulate a position on surgeries for transgender prisoners, needlessly elevating an obscure issue into the public debate as a purity test, despite the fact that current law already gave prisoners access to gender-affirming care. This became a major line of attack for Mr. Trump in the closing weeks of this year’s election. Now, with the G.O.P.’s ascent to dominance, transgender Americans are unquestionably going to be worse off.

At first glance, this is a perfectly reasonable argument being offfered. The Democrats have lost their way because extreme activists have too much power.

We can all think of examples of annoying progressive activists who we wish would have less influence over politics.

But where the argument breaks down is it reverses the chain of causality. Take Jentleson’s claim that Harris was “pushed” into her position by the ACLU. This treats Harris as an object without agency — she is being acted upon without acting herself.

The ACLU is influential in liberal-left circles but it has no actual power over someone like Harris, who was running for president when she filled out the questionnaire. And it also turns out that she adopted this position before the ACLU ever handed her team the questionnaire.

On January 21st, 2019 — the very same day she launched her 2020 bid for the Democratic nomination for president — Harris appeared at Howard University in Washington, D.C. and took questions from reporters.

A reporter from the Washington Blade, which focuses on LGBTQ issues, asked her about a time when she had represented California’s Department of Corrections & Rehabilitations in a legal fight where it sought to refuse to pay for gender reassignment surgery for transgender inmates. Before becoming a senator, Harris was the state’s attorney general, meaning she regularly had to preside over thorny legal representation like this.

In answering the question, Harris sought at first to rationalize her stance:

So I was as you are rightly pointing out the Attorney General of California for two terms. And I had a host of clients that I was obligated to defend and represent. And I couldn’t fire my clients. And there were unfortunately situations that occurred where my clients took positions that were contrary to my beliefs.

But then, in classic Harris fashion, she pandered to the person in front of her, who continued to ask how she felt about the issue:

On that issue I will tell you I vehemently disagree and in fact worked behind the scenes to ensure the Department of Corrections would allow transitioning inmates to receive the medical attention that they required, they needed, and deserved.

Responding to a follow-up question, she said we need to have a better understanding of the issues facing transgender people.

This is something Harris did on the very first day of her presidential campaign.

The much-vaunted ACLU questionnaire, which can be read in full here, came many months later. Something worth mentioning is that Harris did not simply cave to every demand from the ACLU. In many areas, she refused to answer either yes or no to the ACLU’s requests and often talked around their questions on issues like drone strikes and the level of incarceration in the United States:

From the ACLU website: https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-rights-for-all-candidate-questionnaire-2019

From the ACLU website: https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-rights-for-all-candidate-questionnaire-2019

Indeed, the Trump campaign used Harris’s own words in their videos highlighting her stance on transgender issues, and those words were from events that Harris herself was part of — not her answer to the ACLU questionnaire.

It’s also unlikely that the ACLU can be blamed for the recent vote in the House of Representatives, where just two Democrats voted in favor of a GOP-led effort to make sure that transgender women do not play in female sports. (One Democrat voted present.)

Contrast this to public opinion polling on the issue, where about two-thirds of Americans believe that people should play on sports teams that match their biological sex.

What seems to be happening her is less that certain activist Groups are boxing Democrats into this position as the larger universe of people who make up the Democratic Party — everyone from the media, to legislators, to think tanks, to donors, to consultants — are simply culturally progressive in a way that ordinary voters aren’t.

In fact, funny enough, Jentleson of all people was arguing on Twitter that the Republican Party’s “pivot to trans was a bad idea” on November 5th (the day that Donald Trump was elected to a second term because he saw an exit poll that seemed favorable to the Democrats. He also argued that abortion would mobilize a massive vote that would overwhelm the Republicans.

The problem is not the Groups so much as it’s the Democratic Party itself. Something I’ve noticed for many years is that the kinds of people who staff the party at every level are fixated on social or cultural issues. It’s not like they don’t have viewpoints about issues like taxes or labor unions or wars.

But if you really want to dig down deep and see what many of these people are motivated by, it’s being an enlightened cosmopolitan liberal who doesn’t think any of the Bad Thoughts — the -isms and -phobias. When Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman was asked recently why he doesn’t just switch to the GOP, he started off his answer by talking about how “pro-choice, pro-really strong immigration, pro-LGBTQ” he is. I’m not sure why this is.

Maybe as a party of the college-educated elite they just happen to think more like college-educated elites rather than janitors or waitresses and prioritize the kinds of issues you think about in a DEI training at an elite college.

But whatever the cause, the problem with admitting that the Democrats are too culturally progressive as an institution and need to go back to the center on these issues would implicate a lot more than activist groups like the ACLU — it would strike at the core of politicians like Harris and many Democrats who even now can’t adopt moderate positions on these matters because it’s simply too offensive to their party elite.

What the party actually needs is less a proliferation of left-wing activist groups — they will always exist — and more strong leaders who can manage diverse and often unwieldy coalitions. It’s not like there weren’t left-wing activists under Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.

And to look at the other side of the aisle, there were plenty of pro-life activists who were angry at Donald Trump for not endorsing a national abortion ban. But Trump, whatever you think about him, was able to adopt a moderate position over the anger of his party base in a way that Harris and former President Joe Biden did not.