Progressive overreach helped push many people away from the Democratic Party. But there also was something in Trump’s talk that attracted them.
At the end of the presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris and her surrogates placed a bet on a hard-edged closing argument: That Donald Trump is a fascist and friend of dictators. She offered herself as the alternative, a messenger of hope, aspiration, and good will. But her bet failed badly, prompting many Democrats to theorize that Trump voters had simply chosen autocracy over democracy, a bleak house over a bright one.
Perhaps that was true of many of Trump’s hardest-core, most right-wing supporters. But what if the Democrats got it wrong regarding the rest — the many working-class independents and former Biden voters who turned against Harris?
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Rob Henderson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. He has a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge and is the best-selling author of “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.”
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