Breaking the Democratic Double Standard

The Democratic Party's most damaging structural disadvantage is one of their own making.

President Donald Trump’s mug shot, August 2023.

Though not entirely unexpected this time, President Donald Trump’s election victory has once again rocked the country. The political storm now finally over, we’re left to wade waist high through the obligatory flood of victory laps, finger-pointing, and postmortems in its aftermath. There are any number of factors one might invoke to explain why Trump won and Kamala Harris lost. For one, President Joe Biden should never have run for re-election, or, at the very least, should have withdrawn far earlier. For another, Harris was an unpopular vice president thrown into the race at the eleventh hour in a year when dissatisfaction from residual pandemic effects saw incumbents ousted around the world. Trump also capitalized on some opportunities while Harris made strategic mistakes. Issues like immigration, inflation, and foreign policy also played a role. And of course, the old reliable: culture wars, wedge issues, and “wokeness.” Commentators will continue to agonize over what the Harris campaign should or shouldn’t have done, but there’s a deeper asymmetric rift in American electoral politics of which the 2024 results are simply a symptom.

I started writing this piece before the polls opened and before a single vote was counted, not because I was confident of a particular outcome, but because these asymmetries are just as relevant and striking regardless of who won. The Democratic Party has three structural disadvantages compared to Republicans. These account not only for the fact that Trump won in 2024, or in 2016, or even that 2020 was close, but that he was ever a viable political candidate to begin with. Trump should not merely have lost in 2016, he should have been trounced in a 49-state landslide like Mondale in ‘84. He should have been collectively forgotten as a bizarre aberration. Instead, these asymmetries allowed him to define a political era. The most consequential of these disadvantages is also the most recent: Democrats are held to a higher standard than Republicans. The problem is, this is a self-inflicted wound. The Democrats are the ones who created this double standard, and it’s the Dems who must break it if they ever want to compete on an even playing field.

The other two structural disadvantages the Democrats have are far older and more intractable. The first is that left-leaning policies always face an inherent uphill battle that right-leaning ideas do not. They are more complicated, more ambitious, less familiar, less intuitive, and take considerably more time and effort to explain and sell. The case for why to do some new thing will always be harder than the case to do nothing or to revert to some past iteration. Inertia, caution, and “the devil you know” are powerful psychological forces that work against left-leaning parties at every turn. Worse still, these attitudes typically intensify with age, and age correlates with voting. This dynamic isn’t going away anytime soon, as it’s an innate feature of the political spectrum. 

Likewise, the Democrats’ second structural disadvantage, the electoral college, is here to stay. The electoral college elects presidents via delegates allocated by states rather than relying on a national popular vote. These delegates are distributed in such a way that allows Republicans to win elections even if they lose the popular vote, as has happened twice so far in the 21st century. By contrast, it is functionally impossible for a Democrat to win the electoral college without also winning the popular vote by a healthy margin.¹ To overturn or circumvent the electoral college would require a level of support, either in Congress or across the states, that will remain unattainable for the foreseeable future.

But these hindrances pale in comparison to the colossal double standard. Republicans can get away with things no Democrat could politically survive, and any blunder by Dems can be successfully used to negate a tsunami of GOP wrongdoing.

Donald Trump has told more documented lies than perhaps anyone in recorded history, but Harris flip-flopped on some policies, so “everyone lies.” Trump barged into the dressing rooms of teen beauty pageants in order to catch glimpses of underaged girls, cheated on his pregnant wife with a pornstar, and was found liable of sexual abuse in a court of law. But Joe Biden smelled someone’s hair, so it’s a wash. Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, but Harris covered for an ailing Biden, so they cancel each other out. Trump denied the 2020 election, inspired the 2021 US Capitol Riots, and literally tried to steal an election by pressuring officials to “find” him more votes. But Stacey Abrams never conceded her gubernatorial loss in 2018 and Kamala Harris was anointed without a primary (which is both legal and constitutional), so I guess the Democrats are no better. Trump’s healthcare platform was non-existent — in his words “a concept of a plan”, but what voters said over and over was that they felt they didn’t know what Harris’s policies were.

And on and on it goes. It’s barely an exaggeration to say that in American politics, a Republican serial killer and a Democratic jaywalker will be effectively equated by vast swaths of the electorate. And it’s entirely the Democrats’ fault.

This double standard is created by the politics of morality, a rhetorical ethos that places primary emphasis not on effectiveness, leadership, competence, vision, or policy substance, but on morality. It is a politics in which the primary selling point is that “we are more moral, righteous, and virtuous than those people over there.” To be clear, this is nothing new in politics. For many decades, the Democrats have used straightforwardly moral appeals aimed at contrasting themselves favorably with Republicans, and vice versa. The Dems were the party of the downtrodden and of humanistic morality, while Republicans were the party of “family values” and Christian morality. Each balanced the other out for the most part.

Then Trump came along and flipped the script, jettisoning any pretense of morality. He transformed the GOP from a party in which a “family values” Republican could be destroyed if he was caught pressuring his mistress to have an abortion to one in which “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters.” In response, Democrats leaned into the politics of morality to a degree not seen in living memory.

Kamala Harris made a concerted effort to pivot away from the moralistic social justice albatros that has been hanging around the neck of the Democratic Party for the past decade. She veered away from racial identity politics, did not frame her candidacy around her sex, and avoided far-left jargon and buzzwords. Her pivot, though admirable, was unsuccessful. It was emblematic of a party that obviously saw certain tactics weren’t polling well, but clearly didn’t understand why. What makes woke identitarianism so repulsive isn’t anything unique to those issues. It’s a political loser for the same reason that performative moral indignation, slamming Trump’s ethics, rhetoric about the “soul of America”, invocations of voting for “because I have daughters”, and proclaiming oneself to be the defender of democracy ring hollow with the electorate. They are all different manifestations of the same thing: moralism.

Visualization of the political shift of the electorate. Source: The New York Times

Moralism not only pisses people with its insufferably self-righteous condescension, it seamlessly translates into a double standard. If one party claims to be morally pure, and the other proudly owns being a son of a bitch, people will not judge them equally. The SOB will be forgiven most of his blunders and praised for adhering to even the most baseline decorum. “Oh look, he isn’t throwing his feces around, how presidential!” The self-styled saint, meanwhile, will be raked over the coals for the slightest misstep while all of their virtues are simply taken for granted. Framing yourself as more moral than your opponent sets you up in the eyes of the public as someone on a high horse who thinks they’re better than the rest of us. The American people don’t have much of a problem with immorality — at the very least, it’s not a dealbreaker. But what they can’t abide is hypocrisy. And what they find delicious above all else is seeing the high and mighty brought low.

Breaking this double standard is simple, but by no means easy. The Democrats must abandon their self-conception as the more moral party in American politics. That doesn’t mean becoming less moral, it means shutting the fuck up about it and letting actions speak louder than words. It means uprooting the moral rhetoric and moral language. It means an end to the sanctimony, scolding, pearl-clutching, preaching, and soaring pomposity. It means shifting the Democratic Party’s ethos away from all traces of “we are more moral than you” to “we will listen to you and materially help you more than they will.” Humans, especially in large groups, are not moral. There’s a reason the literature on mob psychology rarely describes good behavior. For all the ways in which “the people” are romanticized and glorified, they are, at bottom, mostly transactional. Deliver the goods and make them feel seen, and they’ll deliver the votes. Make them feel morally judged, and they’ll vote for an actual clown in actual makeup just to spite you.

Of course, for this transition to work, it would need to be adopted for at least a few years in order to percolate through the culture and take root. Before that can happen, however, it would first need to be embraced, and I have trouble seeing the tens of millions of human NPR tote bags letting go of the moral superiority that is now an entrenched part of their identity. For any durable change to work, it has to be led from the top. From the Democratic Party on down.

There’s an oft-cited aphorism one hears every four years, often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson: “The government you elect is the government you deserve.” That’s perfectly true. Responsibility ultimately rests with the voters, and if they allow themselves to become blinded by a double standard, they must accept what comes of it. But given the power of major political parties to shape expectations, it’s just as true to say that the electorate you get is the electorate you deserve.

See also: “‘The People’ Are Morons — But We Must Trust Them”

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1. As of the time of writing, Trump is ahead in the 2024 popular vote. Votes are still being counted, mostly in blue states, so the margin has already shrunk slightly, and is likely to shrink more, but it doesn’t seem as though Harris will catch Trump.