Voters in Missouri tend not to give Democrats a second look. No member of the Party has won statewide office since 2018, and in last week’s election the Republican senator Josh Hawley, who had raised a fist to encourage the January 6th crowd at the Capitol, cruised to reëlection by about fourteen points. But on that same ballot Missouri’s voters enshrined the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution. And they passed Proposition A, which will institute a fifteen-dollar-per-hour minimum wage over time and guarantee paid sick leave to workers. (Voters in the red state of Alaska approved a similar hike in the minimum wage, and a successful referendum in Republican-heavy Nebraska will now require employers to provide sick leave.) The Missouri measure was opposed by the state’s Chamber of Commerce, a bulwark of the Republican coalition. And yet Proposition A won by a bigger margin than Hawley.
This is the kind of result—a couple of ballot measures in a smallish, distant, and deeply red state—that tends to register mostly with policy wonks, winding up on the third page of election memos sent to politicians. But it should resound more broadly, among politicians of both parties. The red-state minimum-wage and sick-leave measures are a helpful instance, in the midst of a momentous election, of voters revealing not just who they are aligned with but what it is they want. And their success suggests a little bit about how much the field of politics has, in the past decade, shifted.
Among the Republicans now angling for positions and power in Washington, there is intrigue and opportunity, because of how vague President-elect Donald Trump’s policy intuitions can be. Some of the most ambitious young politicians in the Party have spent much of the past decade arguing for a working-class conservatism that is both sharper-edged and more economically populist: Hawley, Marco Rubio, and, most significantly, J. D. Vance, the forty-year-old Vice-President-elect. Their ideas—among them an alignment with some of Joe Biden’s antitrust initiatives, promotion of the child tax credit, and a willingness to talk enthusiastically about labor unions—have had an enthusiastic reception among the Party’s young wonks. In Vance’s keynote address this past July at the National Conservatism Conference, he said that “the Republican Party is increasingly, aggressively, and with momentum rejecting” what he called “the Wall Street Journal editorial-page approach” that prioritizes globalization and corporate interests over the concerns of working-class Americans. So far, these policies haven’t really developed into Republican legislation or become key themes in the Party’s campaigns—tax cuts are still the guiding light for the G.O.P.—and when I travelled with Vance on the campaign trail for a Profile that was recently published in this magazine, I heard very little economic populism from him, and a whole lot of attacks on immigrants. But the minimum-wage and sick-leave ballot measures are a timely reminder to these younger Republicans that, if they are sincere about reorienting the Party around working-class voters, this is the time to do it.
And yet the real significance of these votes is for Democrats, for whom they should function as both a rebuke and an alarm bell, because the minimum wage and paid sick leave are core liberal priorities that the Party is in danger of losing touch with. As recently as 2016, doubling the federal minimum wage—which has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009—was a fringe left-wing position, pushed by Bernie Sanders and the most progressive unions. By 2020 though, it had become something like a consensus position among Democratic Presidential contenders, backed not just by progressives like Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but by the liberal pragmatists Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, the billionaire candidates Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer (with the latter vowing to raise it to twenty-two dollars), and the eventual victors of that year’s election, Biden and Kamala Harris. Once in office, however, Biden did not prioritize raising the minimum wage, and although fifteen dollars per hour was included in the initial proposals for the American Rescue Plan bill, it was opposed by several Democrats and was pulled after the Senate parliamentarian decided its inclusion in the package was against the rules. A bill to raise the federal minimum wage to seventeen dollars per hour, introduced by the eternally reliable Sanders last year, went nowhere.
The cost of this inaction is stark. Voters no longer know what economic changes the Democrats are fighting for. Celinda Lake, one of the Party’s most prominent pollsters, recently described her experience with focus groups of swing voters in this year’s election to the Washington Post: “Everybody knows what Trump economics is—China, tariffs, tax cuts. Then you go to them and ask, ‘What are Democratic economics?,’ and someone will make a joke about welfare and half the people can’t name anything. It’s nothing like the Republican brand.”
In the aftermath of a pretty crushing defeat, some Democrats have bemoaned the Harris campaign’s turn away from economic populism. Speaking anonymously to The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer, one Biden aide has blamed the influence of Harris’s brother-in-law Tony West, the general counsel of Uber. But Biden, Harris, and the whole 2020 Democratic field had run on doubling the federal minimum wage, and then during their four years in power they did not try very hard to achieve it. That failure is more powerful than campaign messaging, and responsibility for it falls on the Biden Administration and the Party.
It also left a yawning gap, visible from the perspective of Silicon Valley boardrooms. David Sacks, the venture capitalist and ubiquitous social-media presence close to both Vance and Donald Trump, Jr., recently wrote, “This election is a reminder that after all the manufactured drama and overheated rhetoric, politics is still about issues. Whether you agreed with him or not, Trump ran a substantive campaign based on issues like the border, inflation, crime, and war.” Harris, Sacks went on, “would neither defend the Biden-Harris record nor say what she would do differently.” Sacks is a liberal bête noire and a frequent troll. But on this point he is right.
If this liberal vulnerability made Lake frustrated and Sacks smug, it also made Sanders furious. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” the Vermont progressive said, in his statement reacting to the results of the election. Despite explosions in technology and worker productivity, Sanders went on, many young people will have a worse standard of living than their parents. “Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? . . . Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.”
One significant tragedy of the Biden Administration, contained within the more sprawling and general tragedy, is that at its outset the Party had enthusiastically accepted Sanders’s simplest idea for how to demonstrate that it can help the material prospects of the working poor. Voters can detect the gap between what a candidate promises to do when campaigning for office and what he actually accomplishes after his election. Liberals should take some solace this week in the successful abortion and wage referendums: a country that in the most obvious way has drifted further from them has, in other, quieter ways, moved toward their ideals. But the change on which Trump’s election depended, the turn of working-class voters away from the Democrats, has been coming for a decade, and was the source of the 2016 populist revolts. Democrats have taken the wrong lessons from it.
And maybe their voters have, too. Last week, just as Missouri and Alaska were voting to raise their minimum wage, voters in deep-blue California were considering the same thing. (There, the initiative proposed to gradually raise the minimum wage to eighteen dollars per hour, which makes sense, given how much richer and more expensive California is.) Not all ballots have yet been counted, but the California initiative might not have enough votes. For liberals hoping to win back working-class Americans to their cause, that counts as somewhere between a merely interesting development and a truly ominous one. ♦
