Some Historical Revisionism of the 2020 Democratic Primary

Twitter isn't not real life.

Maybe you’ve heard this story about the past few years of Democratic politics:

Sometime after the 2016 election, Democratic strategists lost their minds. For whatever reason—probably because Hillary Clinton never visited Wisconsin—they all became slaves to their rose emoji-dominated Twitter feeds and came to believe that the only way to beat Trump was to veer far to the left on economic and social issues.

The likes of Bernie Sanders and AOC began setting the tone for the Democratic policy agenda, while trendy left-wing research firms like Data for Progress ran sketchy polls that purportedly showed lefty proposals were wildly popular with voters.

The 2020 Democratic presidential candidates ran on a series of wonkish, grandiose, and Very Online policy plans that could be summarized on a bumper sticker or a hashtag: Medicare for All, Green New Deal, Abolish ICE, Cancel Student Debt, etc.

Sanders proposed $97.5 trillion in new federal spending and a 93.4% top marginal tax rate.¹ Elizabeth Warren, who briefly looked like the frontrunner, promised to have a transgender child choose her Secretary of Education. Several candidates wanted to guarantee everybody in the country a government job. Half of them had pronouns in their Twitter bio.

The only viable candidate who wasn’t Too Online was Joe Biden. Biden still got roped into saying some comically dumb things, like promising to pay illegal immigrants to have abortions. (My favorite moment is when Biden was asked by an Iowa State Fair goer how many genders there are and responded: “There are at least three.” He clearly didn’t know what he was supposed to say, but he knew he wasn’t supposed to say two.) But Biden also defended fracking, opposed Medicare for All, and never had a section on his campaign website about “creating spaces of Queer joy for Black trans womxn sex workers” or whatever.

After George Floyd, it was hard for Biden to resist the crazies, but he bought them off by occasionally talking about “systemic racism” and ruling out Amy Klobuchar from the veepstakes. Meanwhile, Democratic surrogates invented Very Online terms like “mostly peaceful protests,” random brands told you not to be racist, and a lot of people started talking like Robin DiAngelo. And of course, who could forget this?

Source: The New Yorker.

Biden managed to eke out a victory over Trump because he was the Least Online of the Democratic candidates. (Can you imagine Warren winning Georgia?) And at some point, probably in 2021, everybody realized that Twitter isn’t real life and woke started to recede.

Fast forward to the present and Kamala Harris—one of the worst offenders in the 2020 race to the left—now leads a Very Offline center-pivoting Democratic Party machine. She shut out the “please-stop-committing-genocide-oh-good-madam” pissants from the DNC and refused Katy Perry’s offer to make Woman’s World the Fight Song of 2024. She’s been playing up her background as a prosecutor and playing down her identity as a Black Womxn. Her campaign’s policy proposals, insofar as they’ve articulated them, are tailored to what people actually want to hear and not what sounds good on Twitter.

That’s the standard history. You could have read it contemporaneously to the 2020 campaign in such places as Jonathan Chait’s columns (some of which now seem depressingly prescient) and you can read it today in the New York Times.

It’s compelling, and if you were tuned into the news during the 2020 primary, it might comport with what you already thought was going on. But is it accurate?

I think this history gets a lot of things wrong:

First, Twitter was never really an ideological echo chamber. Users skewed left, even compared to your average Democratic voter, but it always seemed like there was fair representation of both the “Every Billionaire is a Policy Failure” camp of angsty twenty-to-forty-somethings who backed Sanders and the “Defeat Cheeto Hitler at All Costs” camp of wine moms, normie liberals, and Boomers who would have Voted Blue No Matter Who and who cared a lot more about social issues and gun control than left-wing economics. The leftists were a lot wittier and better at posting, but even today, after a lot of liberals have left the website, people like Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias have a bigger Twitter following than any of the Chapo Trap House guys. If there weren’t a lot of Very Online people with normie Democratic opinions, then that wouldn’t make sense. And it wouldn’t explain how there could have been fierce online fanbases for candidates that the left genuinely despised, like Harris’s #KHive and Pete Buttigieg’s #TeamPete. (You know, those really annoying people who did that dumb dance to the worst Panic! At the Disco song you’ve ever heard. I, for one, much preferred the Bloomberg dance.)

Second, although it’s cliché to say that Twitter isn’t real life, it isn’t not real life, either. Again: Twitter users are unrepresentative of the average Democratic voter. But if you’re a Democratic politician, you’re concerned about more than just the average voter. You need to be disproportionately concerned about the activist class of the party, the people who are going to donate money, knock on doors, and set the ideological and policy tone for others. Twitter users are an imperfect proxy here, but the average Twitter user is worth a lot more than the average voter. As of 2019, Democratic Twitter users were three times more likely than the average Democrat to donate to a candidate or political organization, and four times more likely to attend a protest. Courting these sorts of highly engaged Very Online voters actually isn’t a terrible idea, as long as it’s part of a balanced campaign strategy.

Third, if you really think Twitter leftists were driving Democratic strategy during the Trump era, you’d have a hard time explaining anything other than the presidential race. In the 2017 special elections, the DCCC and DSCC backed moderates like Jon Ossoff and Doug Jones. In 2018, Congressional Democrats’ top policy issues were reversing the Trump tax cuts for the rich, protecting insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions, and doing universal background checks on gun purchases—not 90% top marginal tax rates, banning private insurance, and mandatory gun buybacks. Even in 2020, all the best-funded Democratic Senate campaigns were moderates, including Jaime Harrison (who ran against Lindsey Graham) and Amy McGrath (who ran against Mitch McConnell). This makes sense if you think Democrats were driven by negative partisanship, but not if you think they were obsessed with uber left-wing policies.

Fourth, even if you’re just considering the 2020 presidential field, the Democrats didn’t really veer that far to the left. A few candidates did, but for every leftist, there was at least one moderate who did better in the polls or fundraising. Joe Biden was outpolling Bernie Sanders throughout almost the entire campaign. By February 2020, Michael Bloomberg was beating Elizabeth Warren. Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg pulled in huge fundraising numbers and stayed in the race longer than either Kamala Harris or Cory Booker. A few of the lesser-known moderates even leveraged their presidential runs into high-profile Senate campaigns and ran equal to or ahead of Biden in their states. Compare this to lower-profile progressives, like Kirsten Gillibrand, Bill de Blasio, and Julián Castro, whose campaigns were the death knell of their national political ambitions.

Fifth, Biden’s victory hardly proves that the best strategy in 2020 was to be the Least Online. Before the party coalesced around him, Biden placed fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire. He consistently raised less money than far worse-polling candidates, and during the first month of the primaries he had worse fundraising than the absolute black hole of charisma Amy Klobuchar. Pete Buttigieg—who practically came out of nowhere, won Iowa, tied for first in New Hampshire, and outraised Biden in every single fundraising period before he dropped out—was a far savvier politician than Biden, Sanders, and probably everybody else in the field precisely because he could appeal to highly engaged Very Online voters without going off the deep end on policy. Klobuchar, too, although her momentum suffered because she was Less Online. If either Buttigieg or Klobuchar had been able to appeal to black voters, there’s no way Biden would have been the nominee.

Sixth—and here’s the one that really matters—Democrats are probably taking away the wrong lesson from the 2020 primary. True, Biden was likely the only candidate who could have beaten Trump. (Maybe Klobuchar?) But that doesn’t mean you have to buy into the whole flawed mythos of 2020 that says Being Online is electoral kryptonite. Harris and the Democrats seem to be doing that—they’re running a vibes-based campaign that’s light on policy, while hoping to placate Very Online party activists with coconut trees and brat memes. So far, they haven’t had major problems with keeping the largest part of activist class on board, but they’ve also unnecessarily alienated a lot of important people. Harris probably could have avoided a defection by the Uncommitted Movement, which represents hundreds of high-ranking activists and at least 200,000 voters across Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, simply by letting a Palestinian-American speak at the DNC. She didn’t do that, ostensibly because she thinks doing so would have given her a reputation for being Very Online—and she may pay a price for that in November.

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1. 52% federal income tax + 15.3% FICA tax + 0.9% Medicare surtax + 11.5% Medicare for All tax + 0.4% paid leave tax + 13.3% maximum state income tax (California) = 93.4% top marginal tax rate.