Democrats and pundits have offered a multitude of explanations to try to explain Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to President-elect Donald Trump this week. But one political data expert is offering a different take on why so many voters rejected Harris.
In a Saturday essay for the Guardian, Ben Davis — who worked on the data side of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination — argued that all of the current explanations for Trump’s rout are incomplete. He noted that while the prevailing consensus is that Trump had the better economic message and Democrats were too focused on identity politics, Harris’ campaign was actually laser-focused on kitchen-table issues while identity was rarely discussed.
Rather, Davis opined that President Joe Biden’s decision to quietly sunset pandemic-era safety net programs may have been what stuck out the most in voters’ memories of Biden’s economic oversight. He wrote that when programs that helped prevent Americans from being evicted, provided them with direct financial assistance and granted them other emergency benefits colored voters’ perceptions of the economy more than anything else. And when they were suddenly taken away, itv paved the way to Trump’s eventual victory.
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“The massive, almost overnight expansion of the social safety net and its rapid, almost overnight rollback are materially one of the biggest policy changes in American history,” Davis wrote. “For a brief period, and for the first time in history, Americans had a robust safety net: strong protections for workers and tenants, extremely generous unemployment benefits, rent control and direct cash transfers from the American government.”
Davis went on to explain how, despite the ongoing mass death and isolation associated with the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, “Americans briefly experienced the freedom of social democracy.” He noted that laid-off workers “had enough liquid money to plan long term and make spending decisions for their own pleasure rather than just to survive,” and that pandemic-era safety nets allowed them “to look for the jobs they wanted rather than feel stuck in the jobs they had.”
“At the end of Trump’s term, the American standard of living and the amount of economic security and freedom Americans had was higher than when it started, and, with the loss of this expanded welfare state, it was worse when Biden left office, despite his real policy wins for workers and unions,” Davis wrote. “This is why voters view Trump as a better shepherd of the economy.”
In the first weeks after Covid-19 was designated as a global pandemic, millions of American workers lost their jobs after businesses shut down due to the public health emergency. Congress passed several emergency measures aimed at helping workers like the eviction moratorium, extended unemployment assistance and an expansion of the child tax credit, among other things that Trump signed into law. But Davis observed that Biden had no “political pathway” to justify keeping these programs in place after ending the federal Covid-19 emergency, meaning many Americans were stripped of safety nets they had grown accustomed to.
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“[T]he material reality is that when Trump left office, this safety net existed, and by the time of the 2024 election, it had evaporated,” David wrote. “How could Democrats have countered this? One way was by making it a central issue, fighting publicly and openly to keep these protections and messaging heavily and constantly that Republicans were taking them away while Biden fought for them. An enormous body of research has established that social programs, when implemented, are difficult and highly unpopular to take away. These were universal programs, beneficial at all income levels.”
“The political miscalculation the Biden administration made was that, lacking the political ability to implement these policies permanently, it was best to have them expire quietly and avoid the public backlash of gutting welfare programs and the black mark of taking a public political loss,” he added. “This was a grave miscalculation.”
Click here to read Davis’ essay in full.
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