Politics

The Democrats’ Fear Factor

It’s the consultants, stupid! Future candidates need to be themselves, take control on social media, and immediately push back on right-wing spin.
Image may contain Donald Trump Joe Biden Kamala Harris Crowd Person Electrical Device Microphone and Accessories
US President Donald Trump speaks as former US President Joe Biden and former US Vice President Kamala Harris look on during inauguration ceremonies in the Rotunda of the US Capitol on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC.by Chip Somodevilla / POOL / AFP / Getty Images.

As we enter the second week of “Trump II: The March Toward Authoritarianism,” it’s becoming clear that Project 2025 was always the agenda, as Donald Trump has been flooding the zone with extreme actions, tariff threats, and other news-making moves. “Trump is everywhere again,” declared Politico on Saturday, while Steve Bannon gushed to The Washington Post about how the new administration is “overwhelming the system.”

With Trump once again dominating public attention, it’s worth reflecting, once more, on the horrible hellscape that was the 2024 cycle—if only to consider how Democrats can more effectively take the megaphone going forward. Since Barack Obama’s two successful runs, presidential campaigns, in my view, have been too careful when it comes to allowing candidates to be themselves. Kamala Harris did an excellent job last September in her one debate against Trump, before seeming to disappear in the weeks to come. As Politico framed it back then, “Trump is everywhere. Anxious Dems wonder why Harris isn’t.”

Her running mate, Tim Walz, who emerged on the national stage by hammering “weird” Republicans on cable news, also became less visible in the campaign’s final stretch. Admittedly, Walz didn’t do as well in his debate against JD Vance, but instead of pumping out content to move beyond it—whether in the form of TV hits or videos—Walz kind of receded from the headlines. As one Democratic strategist put it to me in a text, “Walz is a Ferrari. The Harris campaign hopped in the driver’s seat and drove it around the track in the lowest gear until the engine stalled.”

The Harris-Walz campaign, despite the initial burst of excitement—and joy—wound up being perceived, like recent campaigns from Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, as too risk-averse when it came to engaging with the news media or using social media. That’s not to say that Clinton didn’t do interviews, but NPR’s question of whether she was “dodging the press,” posed in the final months of the 2016 race, showed there was a perception, at least, that the candidate was closed off. (The NPR review of the campaign’s claims about accessibility found them to be “at once true and somewhat misleading.”) Biden, of course, won the 2020 election. But during the 2024 election (which he ended up exiting), an Axios headline blared, “Biden’s media evasion”; the same site, months later, described Harris’s approach to the press as resembling “Biden’s strategy of ducking tough interviews.” Sure, you can quibble with some of these headlines, and their framing, but they contributed to the perception that Democratic candidates are more closed off.

To me, the Democrats’ biggest failure is not at the candidate level, but at the people-telling-the-candidates-what-to-do level—a consultant class that seems to insulate the people running for president from getting more personal. There may be well-meaning advisers urging candidates not to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast or write that spicy tweet. But the result is a campaign that appears timid—especially against a guy who is sitting down with Rogan and posting all sorts of head-spinning stuff on social media.

The Harris team has defended not responding to some of the attacks from the right, including the one in which Trump and his allies seized on the candidate having said in 2019 that she supported gender-affirming care for prisoners. “There’s a belief that if only we had responded to this trans ad with national and huge battleground state ads, we would have won,” David Plouffe, a top adviser, said after the election on Pod Save America. “I don’t think that’s true.”

But a second Democratic strategist suggests the campaign should have responded more forcefully to the Trump ads. “Fear is making our party too slow,” the strategist tells me. “Future candidates have to immediately challenge right-wing framing of their positions. If they say you care more about transgender surgeries for inmates than costs, that needs to be set straight in minutes.”

The mainstream media, of which I’m a member, doesn’t play the same gatekeeper role it did just a few campaign cycles ago. Candidates have more opportunities than ever to respond in the moment via social media, to quickly push back on a narrative before it solidifies or wade into public debates.

And if Biden, or later Harris, wouldn’t grab the spotlight, you could bet that Trump would fill the void with controversial comments and wild claims, which would spread on Truth Social or X, YouTube or TikTok. As for Democrats who do make their presence felt on social media, just look to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a politician who lives online and entered the fray this past weekend amid Trump’s tariff threats toward Colombia.

One thing that unites Clinton, Biden, and Harris—three different personalities with their own unique skill sets and challenges—is the consultant culture that seems to rein them in. It’s the McKinsey-ing of Democratic candidates. “Campaign messaging isn’t anything like following a recipe. Campaign messaging is like jazz,” Stu Loeser, a veteran Democratic communications strategist, tells me. “You have to feel the rhythm of what’s going on around you and weave your notes in. It’s Coltrane, not cold calculations.”

The obsession with data, the fear of negatives, the trying to control every possible moment—these are things that are holding Democratic presidential candidates back. A culture of second-guessing gets you candidates who may have fewer negatives, but also can struggle with seeming authentic to voters. We’re miles away from the 2028 cycle, but the ethos of “stop being fearful” should serve Democratic politicians today as Trump barrels ahead with a radical Republican vision for America.