“It’s the Economy, Stupid” Is Never Just About the Economy

Amid the inevitable Democratic identity crisis this post–presidential election winter, there have been exasperated calls for the party to return to “the economy.” The op-ed writers, angling for their future role, are painting the usual scene. The party must sit once again at the kitchen table and talk pocketbook issues. It is a long-held idea. For years, whenever voters have rejected Democrats—say, after the 2004 election—leaders explained the catastrophe by nostalgically invoking the mantra of former President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

The vague shibboleth does nifty work. It does not really advocate for any specific policy. Focusing on the economy could mean more money for poor people, ending corporate greed, and expanding government. (Let us call that the Bernie option.) Or it could mean deregulation, cutting federal spending to balance the budget, and ending welfare “as we know it.” (A return to Clinton.) It could even mean a robust industrial policy pushed through and synthesized with an anti-China trade war (which would be Bideonomics, but, as the argument goes, Washington’s man did not—or could not—use his record to craft an effective campaign).

Importantly, the phrase often clarifies the villain in every Democratic defeat since the 1960s: the “culture.” In 2004, commenters groused at those who dared support gay marriage and abortion. In 2016, the problem was so-called identity politics. And this year, there has been frustration with “wokeness,” focusing on the defenses of trans rights and those who pushed on fear of migrants. It has led Democrats to warn, once again, that unless a politician exploits a Sister Souljah moment, liberals are doomed. (In 2024, that seemed to focus on condemning those protesting against Israel.)

Interestingly, in this pattern, materialism drifts away. Often, post-election calls for a focus on the economy somehow devolve into a critique of what Democrats say about everything but people’s bank accounts.

A good example of this evasion occurred when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) appeared on a recent episode of The Daily. In theory, the episode was a chance to demonstrate that perhaps Sanders was correct to hyper-fixate on income inequality. But that isn’t what much of the discussion focused on. Instead, the host Michael Barbaro spent a good deal of time asking Sanders if Democrats were talking too much about “things like race and gender and trans people” and if this left working-class voters “feeling alienated.”

Implicit in his question is dichotomizing the culture and the economy. The senator did not accept the premise. “It’s not either/or,” Sanders said. “It’s going forward in both directions.” 

This illustrates a dynamic that occurs with alarming frequency: those who want to talk about “the economy” often move to culture as soon as the discussion lands on our nation’s poverty. We can talk about the economy, but not like that! At the same time, the tactic subverts the conversation about critical social issues. It turns fighting for trans rights into something deemed worthy of political consideration only if moderate voters who swing elections find the issue palatable—or not. (I am sure lots of voters didn’t love integration in the 1950s.) The old, new idea here is—as New Yorker writer Jay Caspian Kang recently noted when pondering the way Democrats are dealing with self-reckoning—a “class reductionism” that “takes out the ‘class’ part.”

As Robin D.G. Kelley, a professor of American History at UCLA, has written, there is a misguided liberal assumption that “Trump is reducible to racism and misogyny or ‘false consciousness’ substituting for the injuries of class.” Such myths cloud an honest assessment of the next president’s victory. And set a wrong path for understanding how Republicans won.

Trump never discussed the economy without talking about the culture. Tariffs are intertwined with American identity, as is his hope to deal with housing by mass deportation. His 20 “core promises” include “CRUSH GANG VIOLENCE” and “UNITE OUR COUNTRY BY BRINGING IT TO NEW AND RECORD LEVELS OF SUCCESS.” These are not focused on raw numbers but on emotional appeals. Trump has made identity politics completely intertwined, and even synonymous, with his economic message.

The theoretical best messages for the Democrats going forward did the same. In 2004, “the economy” did not include abortion. In 2024, it seems obvious that it can. Abortion bans not only increased the likelihood of death or serious injury for pregnant people, but led to the potential loss of billions of dollars invested in health care in states where the procedure has become criminalized. Mass deportations, if fully implemented, could cause another Great Recession. Price gouging made a brief appearance. But, despite Trump saying recently the phrase “the groceries” is why he won, Democrats shied away from such class chatter. Instead, in this campaign, Harris and Biden often tried to make their arguments in Republican terms—with Republicans such as former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney present.

Again and again, the message appears to be that you cannot escape cultural politics. You can only really win the argument. Ironically, one of the best examples of this is the history of the phrase most often used to bat down such discussions. “It’s the economy, stupid” was never just about numbers. The phrase always had its own identitarian appeal. The command, coined by James Carville, was not about abandoning appeals to culture but deploying a successful one.

The creation of “it’s the economy, stupid” emerged from the work of pollster Stanley Greenberg. As my former colleague Tommy Craggs wrote, Greenberg is a “funny figure”—a former academic who studied apartheid South Africa and then, with the Clintons, sought to bring back the so-called “Reagan Democrats” from the GOP.

While running focus groups with these lapsed liberals, mostly white union workers in Michigan, Greenberg realized that “the economy” never just meant earning and spending money. It meant understanding the anger that other people—in this case, Black people—were getting too much from the government; it meant that Ronald Reagan, the movie star millionaire, was approachable as he demonized “welfare queens” but the patrician George Bush was an “out of touch” rich dude.

This, the campaign realized, gave Clinton a chance to end a streak of Republican wins. Reagan had seemed to nail down a dominant new era. By 1992, the Democratic Party seemed adrift. Only one liberal, Jimmy Carter—who was quickly ousted—had won the presidency since 1964.

Carville, the political consultant running Clinton’s campaign, was determined to end Reaganism. Losing ground during the 1992 campaign, he put three reminders on the wall of campaign headquarters to guide the message and appeal to a “vast middle class of Americans who decide every Presidential election.” The sign read: “Change vs. more of the same.” “The economy, stupid.” And, “Don’t forget healthcare.”

Only the middle phrase endured. Clinton’s more progressive demands of the campaign—attack the status quo and give people health care—were eclipsed by scandals, a pugnacious GOP Congress, and a turn to “triangulation” to win in 1996. Once in office, as labor historians Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein argue, Clinton betrayed the progressivism he presented during the campaign. For all his talk of running on “the economy,” Clinton’s policies dealt a crushing blow to the working class. It was he who signed the North American Free Trade Agreement that contributed to more than 90,000 factories closing in 13 years. Perhaps more importantly, the shift to appeal to the moderate right made Democrats seem politically aligned against workers. Notably, in the Clinton era, the party made concerted efforts to shed its “big government” label, so it helped Republicans pass welfare reform that gutted protections for the poor.

This is why calls to return to Clinton’s messaging seem odd at the moment. We’re living in the wake of the backlash to his policies. But, also, we’re told to come home to his rhetoric. Where does that leave Democrats when it comes to actually doing something?

Take inflation. After the election, rises in prices have dominated discussions about why Democrats lost. Amid a real cost-of-living crisis, all woe has been pegged to inflation. (Historically, this has led to proposals for austerity measures and calls for cutting government programs.) Democrats have been charged with ignoring the suffering that working-class voters have endured.

But the causes of inflation, or the steps taken to combat it, often aren’t attached to those gripes. In fact, the government’s attempts to stop inflation by raising interest rates created additional hardship for many voters. The same can be said of politicians ending Covid-era government programs.

“It was a weight lifted like I can’t describe. I could actually buy what I wanted to at the grocery store,” one woman said to the Washington Post, explaining her experience of the federal stimulus during Covid. “But now I keep telling my boyfriend that I’m stuck. Living is so much harder now.”

As the writer Gabriel Winant noted in Dissent, “By the middle of his term, Biden had become a de facto austerity president.” A Democrat had presided over “the lapse of welfare state expansions, including not just the loss of the child tax credit and temporary cash relief but the retrenchment of SNAP and the booting of millions off Medicaid.” Yes, Biden did pass several measures to economically benefit the working class. But, as economics professor J.W. Mason noted, many of them were only temporary. Biden was in office when the expanded child tax credit cut child poverty nearly in half; he was also in office when the program ended. Trump signed stimulus checks; after the election, Biden says he regrets he did not follow suit.

This meant, as James K. Galbraith wrote in the Nation, an “early curtailment of direct Covid relief” hit “just as prices rose” and interest rates forced people into taking bad jobs to pay for the skyrocketing price of eggs and gas. “Should we really be surprised that the affected families having briefly tasted a better life for their children, were unhappy?” he asks.

Saying we should focus on the economy is easy, obvious, and usually only a way to obscure a desire to push away positions centrists do not like. How Democrats focus on the economy is what matters. Taking on inflation by raising interest rates likely will not be popular with voters. Taking on greed might be. And deciding what constitutes good policy between those options is the balance of politics. What economic message resonates—that we stupids should focus on—is the point. And it involves looking at the culture—or, to put it another way: the actual lives of people—to see what matters to them. That’s the lesson of “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Even Rahm Emanuel, the bruiser of the Obama era and ur-centrist, said as much recently. “There is more to people than the collection of their wallet and their checkbook,” he told Ezra Klein on his eponymous podcast. You have to tell a story. Being able to articulate a broader, compelling story about “taxes” or “stimulus”—making those words connect with family, anger, hunger, love, or disappointment—is the entire game.

Trump has always realized this. It was why he talks about economic woe very differently, fusing policy with cultural anxieties. Think of his most famous ad this cycle: “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

In that simple turn of phrase, Trump once more weaponized the power of the outsider against regular, hardworking Americans. There are those Democrats, helping trans people, migrants, and demonstrators. And then there is you. Trump’s economic policies centered on removing migrants. New policies—no tax on tips, for instance—were not built to change lives but to appeal to the idea of being for you. (Or at least not against you.) Policies were not made to be effective in practice but in messaging. There is them and there is us.

“It is certainly not the case that Trump brims with solutions to the bleak economic horizon,” as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor noted in the New Yorker. “But, when millions of working-class people have endured so much continuity in hardship, have endured rising rents, crushing debt, and jobs they hate, it can feel as if no matter who you vote for, not much will change. The biggest problem the Democrats face is the belief that voting for their Party won’t help solve working Americans’ major problems.”

Can anyone say Trump’s plan—which seems at this point to consist of punishing tariffs and more punishing attacks on immigrants—would stop inflation? Tariffs are often a regressive measure. And some say they could lead to $1,200 in lost purchasing power for the average American. The problems may be real but the solutions presented by Trump are performative. Often contradictory, they easily can be summed up: America First.

So what was Harris’ economic plan? The campaign rolled out a major change in Medicaid to include homecare aid; it doubled down on national YIBMYism, hoping to decrease housing prices by building more housing. It toned down anti-corporate messaging, supposedly at the counseling of her adviser who was a top exec at Uber. Here was “middle-class capitalism.” Not exactly a winning phrase. The pitch felt calculated and distant. And it hurt Harris who already was seen by some voters to be an “empty vessel.”

Democrats attempted to create a winning coalition by poll-tested treats doled out to certain groups. The super PAC Future Forward was given $700 million and, according to the New York Times, stood at the “pinnacle” of Democratic politics. It was obsessively analytical, slicing and dicing voter surveys to try to find the best messaging. After the loss, the same strategy was pushed again: more data and appeals to the middle. “Rather than engage in some self-examination as to whether or not this brand of micro-targeted, capitalism-friendly consultancy-speak had any flaws,” Adam Johnson wrote in In These Times, Democrats went back to “blaming woke.”

Such data-heavy speak can likely never beat clear themes. Trump chose one of the most compelling myths in our nation’s history: cross-class nativism. One of the original Republican scorched-earth strategists, Lee Atwater, realized that invoking “patriotism” usually suffices for a message.

In 2024, when Bernie Sanders rails about class war, his economic message is directly linked to a narrative about what it means to be an American. And it feels authentic coming from him, instead of some obligatory attempt to appeal to as many niche polling interests as possible.

Of course, we have been here before. In the 2004 book What’s The Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Thomas Frank, a historian and journalist, argued that the working classes were inflamed by cultural issues such as abortion and gay marriage into voting against their own interests. I have always liked the rebuttal from leftist journalist and political commentator Ellen Willis.

“There is widespread agreement that the left must concentrate its energies on promoting a populist economic program, and that the Democrats, if they want to win elections, must stop being identified as the party of ‘upper middle class’ feminists, gays, and secularists,” she writes, “preoccupied by what [Michael] Lind calls ‘inflammatory but marginal issues like abortion.’…Libs to cultural rads: shut up.”

Willis does not say economic issues are not important. But, as this cycle repeats itself, she asks: Why are we stuck in this constant debate? One reason, Willis writes, is because these hopeful writers misunderstand the Democratic Party. The party has not been the New Deal coalition—labor unions, minorities, white Southern farmers, Democratic machines like Tammany Hall—since before Frank was even born in 1965. Cultural issues like abortion and gay marriage have been what people voted for and then they receive bad economic outcomes in return. “Vote to protect Roe v. Wade; receive NAFTA,” she writes. The truth is not that abortion or immigration cost the Democrats the election, or that they should not—as Bernie said—separate from the upper-class influences. It is instead, something more irreducible: The New Deal coalition is gone forever. “We need to look not to the New Deal but to a new politics,” she concludes, “one that recognizes equality and freedom, class and culture, as ineluctably linked.”

Willis notes that since Jimmy Carter lost, the left has engaged in a never-ending circular firing squad. The question is will the Democratic Party finally embrace the challenge and decide on what should be truly workable next steps. Can they embrace that link between class and culture?

The cultural theorist Stuart Hall famously made a similar point to Willis in an essay he wrote during the rise of Margaret Thatcher in England. Hall wrote about a “great” move to the right. He noted working-class complaints and frustrations about the economy had a “rational and material core.” It was not, Hall said, simply people tricked into voting against their interests—as appealing as this false argument may be to liberals. And, still, it was also not just a nifty bit of economic determinism—as attractive as that may be to class reductionist Marxists. 

The right’s “success and effectivity does not lie in its capacity to dupe unsuspecting folk,” Hall wrote, “but in the way it addresses real problems, real lived experiences, real contradictions—and yet is able to represent them within a logic of discourse which pulls them systematically into line with policies and class strategies.” Hall calls this an “ideological and political class struggle.” But let me simplify it. Explaining why people should join your movement, and connecting your ideas to a logic that pulls them in to vote for you, is the point of politics. 

Democrats will have to learn how to convince people to vote for them. They need to engage in both an ideological and class struggle, as Hall said. That means making left ideas appeal because they are plain, common sense—a difficult task in a world dominated by oligarchs and special interests. The Carville koan advocates against this introspection. And it halts the necessary reckoning. Sure, it’s the economy, stupid. But since the economy is—can be—just about everything, Democrats won’t find a way to beat the antidemocratic right’s dominance by returning to Clinton. If anything, this election proved that era is finally gone forever.