What I’m Listening To: Patrick Ruffini on Democrats’ disconnect

Today, I am listening to the Ezra Klein Show, a podcast from the New York Times, in an episode entitled, “The Book That Predicted the 2024 Election.” Patrick Ruffini wrote Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP in 2023, analyzing the realignment in American politics after Trump’s 2016 victory and 2020 loss, as well as the midterm elections of both administrations. He was an excellent guest for this moment on the Ezra Klein Show, providing insight about last week’s election data through the lens of his earlier, well-developed theses while avoiding the trap of premature postmortems on the 2024 election. To pick out one detail in a brisk but thoroughly informative interview, I was particularly interested in Ruffini’s comments about what midterm elections say about a party’s priorities.

Just over the midpoint of the podcast (beginning around minute 31), Klein talks about the failure of the predicted “Red Wave” to materialize in Congressional elections during Biden’s administration, most strikingly in the 2022 midterm elections. He asks if the conclusion that the MAGA movement had undermined Republican Party unity was borne out in the 2024 election. Ruffini asserts that midterm elections bring out a subset of voters—mostly partisan—so the core concerns are different. In a midterm, issues like women’s healthcare or immigration may drive one party’s turnout, while the presidential election attracts more voters who are less politically invested in one platform or another. The core issue for these voters, he posits, is the economy—always the economy—specifically, how they evaluate their economic standing at that moment.

To me, the crucial business in the wake of this election is to identify what general election voters want to hear about. We’ll need to know this and be prepared with messages about it for 2028, if we are to avoid a humiliating loss like the Democrats suffered in 2016 and 2024. So, Ruffini’s next statement was like a river coursing through the desert: “The message oftentimes from Democrats to those voters is, ‘This isn’t happening. Inflation’s over.’ Or, ‘Your income has risen enough to compensate you for inflation. What’s the problem?’”

With vaccination paving the way for reopening from pandemic social-distancing regimes, inflation began to dominate the news cycle and labor made headlines fighting for higher wages to ease the pain at the cash register. Inflation was the undeniable datapoint workers could relentlessly point to while holding out until contracts included significant pay hikes, long overdue. When management gave in at the negotiating table, bosses tried to salvage a win with morale-building tours, graciously bestowing accolades upon their staff whom, they conceded, deserved these raises “after everything we’ve been through.” The fawning media gladly picked up this messaging, coasting on 2020’s working class hero vibes, and completely obscuring the reality: post-pandemic wage hikes were cost of living adjustments based on 7% inflation, not raises in real dollar value, the way they were being painted.

This blind spot is at the core of the disconnect Ruffini points out, but the self-serving flattery that led to it is even more damning. The elites making strategy decisions at the top of the Democratic Party gladly peddled a feel-good message to their supposed base and expected that to carry them through two years later, feeling no responsibility to turn those midterm victories into legislative progress that would materially improve their constituents’ real economic standing or prospects. Nothing was done to reduce wealth inequality or “level the playing field” in any meaningful way. No efforts were undertaken to expand social programs that could reduce the cost of living and would provide more benefits to the neediest households. No actions were taken to stop price gouging or break up the monopolies controlling supply and driving up prices. Meanwhile those policy makers’ investment portfolios continue to grow—along with the donor class’s—in a world of record-breaking profits.

Earlier in the episode (22:30), Ruffini spoke about research he had done on generational political affiliations in a staunchly Democratic community in Texas. Folks told him, “When we grew up, around the dinner table, your parents told you, ‘We support the Democratic Party because they’re the party of the poor, just like us.’” He then noted, “the response of the people who became Republicans was, ‘What if we don’t want to be poor? We want to be with those people who are going to create policies that are going to benefit us because they’re going to enable us to move up the economic ladder, and doing that through private sector success, not necessarily through a government benefits program.’” Democrats cannot pretend to be the party of the poor these days, but they should also not concede the territory of economic progress to Republicans. Instead, they should understand that all voters want to know what they’re going to do to strengthen the economy and each household’s economic success. By 2028, they’ll need to develop a vision, plans, and policy proposals to reach that goal, and they’ll have to be focused and relentless in communicating about it. Instead of playing games to “win over” voting blocs, put liberal ideas out there and let the voters decide.

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