It’s only been two and a half weeks since the 2016 election, and Democrats are still hotly debating what went wrong. Could a different platform or messaging strategy have helped lead Hillary Clinton to victory? Would, perhaps, a more economically populist candidate have performed better? These questions will be picked over for years and are probably impossible to settle conclusively.
Will economic populism lead Democrats to victory? Senate results should make us skeptical.
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
But as a first pass, it’s at least worth noting how Clinton performed compared with other Democratic candidates on the ballot with her — for instance, the party’s Senate candidates. Here’s how much their margins were better or worse than Clinton’s margin, according to the latest vote totals:
Interestingly enough, in two of those crucial Midwestern states that flipped to Trump, Democratic Senate candidates campaigned on economically populist platforms — but they did notably worse than Hillary Clinton. Russ Feingold underperformed Clinton by 2.4 points in Wisconsin, and Ted Strickland underperformed her by 12.8 points in Ohio. Feingold amassed a populist record of challenging big money and special interests when he was in the Senate, and Strickland harshly condemned trade deals during his campaign against Rob Portman (who served as George W. Bush’s US trade representative).
Meanwhile, the two Democratic Senate candidates in competitive races who outperformed Clinton the most both self-consciously presented a moderate image rather than running as liberal firebrands. In Missouri, Jason Kander overperformed Clinton by 15.9 points, and in Indiana, Evan Bayh did 9.6 points better than her (though they both lost).
Now, there are idiosyncratic factors in all of these races. These candidates all had different opponents, none of whom were named Donald Trump. Kander was a fresh face who was running on a strong anti-corruption platform against a lobbyist-friendly incumbent, Roy Blunt. Bayh seems to have benefited from his past reputation in the state and started off with a huge poll lead that gradually dwindled. Strickland happened to be governor of Ohio during the Great Recession, and was attacked on that record (plus he was generally judged to have run a horrible campaign). And it’s worth remembering that back in the 2012 elections, economic populist Sherrod Brown outperformed Barack Obama by 3 points in Ohio — though Elizabeth Warren underperformed Obama by 15.7 points in Massachusetts.
Still, as Democrats debate whether to follow Bernie Sanders’s advice and move to the left on economics with the goal of winning back working-class white voters, it is surely at least worth noting that the two Senate candidates most identified with that strategy who ran this year did worse than Hillary Clinton despite her much-discussed weaknesses, and the two Senate candidates who tried hardest to frame themselves as moderates did better than her in their respective states.
