Note: My daughter was born a couple of weeks ago, and the resulting domestic chaos has naturally slowed the pace at which I write. But I’m still noodling away at posts like the following when I can, mostly as a way of keeping my brain semi-active between marathon baby care shifts.

If you’ve paid any attention to the Democrat-on-Democrat recriminations that have inevitably followed Kamala Harris’s loss, then you’ve probably heard at least a handful of references to The Groups. That cryptic name is shorthand for the sprawling network of progressive nonprofits and advocacy organizations that surround the Democratic Party: institutions like the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, and so on. In an era of weak party organization, The Groups are something like the party outside the party: they mete out rewards and punishments to elected officials, attempt to mobilize grassroots liberals, provide stable employment to White House regulars when they are out of power, and shape the national Democratic agenda to a large degree.

These are all important functions. But because The Groups are not part of any formal party apparatus, their incentives differ from those of the party as a whole. They aren’t necessarily trying to win elections; instead, they’re trying to enhance their own prestige, grow their own budgets, and push their own substantive priorities—sometimes even when foregrounding those priorities is bad for Democratic candidates.

Over the past three weeks, a number of Democratic insiders have suggested that The Groups share some of the blame for Trump’s reelection. In the view of these insiders, The Groups raised the salience of broadly unpopular “culture war” issues, particularly trans rights and visibility. They pushed Harris and some down-ticket Democrats to embrace those issues, and thereby alienated a critical mass of independent voters.

There are more and less sophisticated versions of this argument. Here’s the less sophisticated version, from Democratic congressman Tom Suozzi:

And here’s the more sophisticated version from Adam Jentleson:

The Suozzi version of this argument is both morally disgraceful and tactically shortsighted. But I’m not completely unsympathetic to what Jentleson is saying here. Following the political scientist Theda Skocpol, I’ve written elsewhere that professionally managed nonprofits are no substitute for member-led, grassroots party organization. And while I think it’s entirely appropriate for advocates to champion morally righteous but politically inexpedient causes (something I have a little experience doing), both The Groups and the candidates they lobby need to be thoughtful about what it will take to win and retain the power to do something about those causes.

But I see no evidence that Harris’s support for trans rights was a liability. For one thing, her campaign didn’t really emphasize the issue; it is unintentionally revealing that Jentleson needs to cite a single checked box on a survey to make his case. For another, transphobia’s electoral record in the United States is actually pretty poor; when North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory leaned into anti-trans panic during his 2016 re-election campaign, all he won was the distinction of getting fired in what was otherwise a very good year for Republican incumbents. Similarly, Sarah McBride—soon to be the first openly trans member of Congress—appears to have slightly outperformed Harris in her district. This isn’t to say that transphobia is a marginal issue in American society, just that there is little reason to believe it has a significant effect on electoral outcomes.

More broadly, I suspect that any 2024 autopsy that focuses on campaign communications has missed the point. This election wasn’t decided by stump speeches and ad buys; it was more likely decided by larger structural factors, most notably the long hangover from inflation and the COVID-19 pandemic. That doesn’t totally exonerate The Groups of responsibility for Trump’s return to power, though. My gripe with Jentleson isn’t that he maligns The Groups, but that he’s attacking them for the wrong reasons.

The Groups and Urban Governance

In an earlier post, I noted that both California and New York—and in particular San Francisco and New York City—took right turns on November 5. Subsequent analyses have found that Harris also underperformed in the battleground states’ major cities, and particularly in neighborhoods comprised largely of working-class, Black and brown households.

The red shift in these regions does not appear to be driven primarily by blue-to-red voters. Instead, it is probably the result of low turnout among usually reliable Democratic constituencies. And while I suppose it is possible that the blue-leaning voters who stayed home this year were angry about wokeness, the available data fits a different story better: that these voters felt that the Biden administration did not deliver on its promises, and so they saw no reason to vote for Biden’s anointed successor.

Now, I happen to think that Biden did, in fact, deliver. Working-class wages saw impressive growth under his administration, even when you factor in inflation. And the Inflation Reduction Act will likely fuel a green energy and green jobs revolution that will make everyone better off. Still, disaffected urban voters are right to insist something is off: housing costs inflation remains out of control in most large U.S. cities, even as other types of inflation have slowed. Large homeless encampments are an increasingly common sight in many of these same cities. Traffic violence, already bad before the pandemic, has gotten even worse. Violent crime is down, but an ambient sense of disorder persists.

The way American federalism is set up, these are largely state and municipal issues; governors and mayors have more responsibility than presidents for addressing them. But I would submit that urban dysfunction is nonetheless driving urban voters’ perception of the national economy—and, as a result, it is driving their assessment of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

What does this have to do with The Groups? A whole lot. In a lot of deep blue cities and states, progressive nonprofits and advocacy groups have a far larger and more direct role in governance than they have ever enjoyed at the federal level. And they’ve helped to render a lot of blue metropolitan areas effectively ungovernable—both by promoting an “everything bagel” approach to policymaking and by actively opposing necessary reforms. (Two California-specific examples of the latter off the top of my head: the nonprofit industrial complex’s efforts to stymie CEQA reform, and the ACLU of Northern California’s opposition to automated traffic enforcement).

What I’m describing is not a campaign messaging problem; in fact, it is at its worst in regions where Democratic officials have a stable lock on power. I’m talking about what happens between elections: the off-cycle work that actively undermines progressive policymaking. This work has a much bigger impact on voter quality of life than the difference between Kamala Harris saying “Latino” or “Latinx” in a speech. And I believe it also has a much bigger impact on voter behavior, albeit in an indirect way.

Let me pause for a second to make sure everyone understands what I’m not saying. I am not arguing that Democratic voters consciously penalized Kamala Harris over the poor performance of Democratic mayors and governors; nor am I arguing that people are making decisions about how to vote in the presidential election based on housing policy. (Even for a deviant like me, housing policy was not one of the top issues in the presidential election.) I’m a policy guy, but I am not, strictly speaking, a policy literalist; policy does not mechanistically electoral outcomes, but it does influence the material context in which campaigns deliver their messages and voters pick their candidates.

I am also not trying to suggest that all liberal advocacy groups are alike, or that they are all bad. Even within some of the larger Groups, there can be quite a bit of ideological and strategic diversity: many local Sierra Club chapters are dominated by NIMBYs, for example, but a few are very YIMBY in orientation. And while I think the ACLU has done quite a bit of damage on certain issues, there is no question that it will continue to serve as an important bulwark against MAGA authoritarianism—including state harassment of trans people.

But the overall system of blue city and state governance, and the role of The Groups in it, is profoundly broken. And it’s broken in a way that has very little to do with the hot button issues that so preoccupy Democratic strategists.

Abundance versus “Culture War Issues”

So why have so many campaign postmortems dwelled on Democratic support for trans rights? It largely comes down to who is conducting these postmortems, for the most part: campaign strategists who are used to thinking about Democratic strength in terms of campaign messaging and strategy. These larger issues of political economy are outside the control of any one political campaign, and so they are outside these strategists’ wheelhouse.

Less charitably, I would note that many of the people writing these postmortems are affluent, Atlantic-reading homeowners. The relationship between politics and their own lives is, to an unusually high degree, post-material; bad housing policy does not compromise their ability to make the rent, and bad transportation policy doesn’t raise the risk that they’ll get fired for routine tardiness. Unburdened by those distractions, they can spend a lot more of their time getting riled up by the woke pieties of their highly educated colleagues and acquaintances. As always, people are naturally smuggling their own ideological priors into their analysis of what went wrong; I’m almost certainly doing that myself, though I’m trying to keep my argument as grounded as possible in whatever evidence is available.

To be fair, Jentleson endorses “supply-side progressivism” in his essay about The Groups, but he does so in such a way as to implicitly pit abundance-friendly messaging against a vigorous defense of trans rights and other “culture war” issues (note the scare quotes). I’m a little mystified as to why we need to pretend there’s a binary choice between the two, when some of the most important voices on abundance progressivism—California State Sen. Scott Wiener comes to mind—are also leaders when it comes to LGBTQ rights. I fear that the upshot of insisting on this this false dichotomy will be to needlessly fissure the Democratic Party around abundance issues, thereby isolating abundance-friendly members of the left like AOC.

I confess, I also find this whole conversation a little personally aggravating as someone who is deeply concerned about both the right-wing assault on trans people and the corrosive role of The Groups in urban governance. I want to pick a fight with The Groups, but you can count me out of this one. And while I certainly don’t think every member of a broad, diverse coalition like the abundance movement needs to share precisely my values, I’m not going to cosign any version of the abundance agenda that requires that I abandon them.

So I beg you, let’s have a conversation about The Groups that focuses on the areas where their work directly shapes material outcomes. And let’s stop blaming trans people, implicitly or explicitly, for Trump’s reelection. I suspect that any effort to appease MAGA on so-called culture war issues will have little to no electoral impact, other than perhaps further depressing turnout from marginalized people who (justifiably) feel abandoned. But while appeasement won’t fix the Democrats’ real problem, validating anti-trans attacks threatens to do a lot of real-world harm—and stain the party in a way that won’t be so easily erased.