The Fake & Fraudulent Prophets Around the President
September 4, 2026 |
Daniel Henderson
It isn’t often that I can say, “I told you so.” Therefore, when the opportunity arises, I’m going to take it.
I’ll start by referring to two columns I posted recently as a post-mortem on the 2024 election. Then I’ll tie them back to a recent study conducted by the “Way to Win” organization, which has just released its findings on what happened and a path forward. Their results are essential for Democrats to understand if they want to achieve success in the coming years.
And they allow me to say….I told you so!
Most recently, I posted Affordability Is Not A Talking Point. (Today’s column is actually Part II of that article) In that column, I noted:
“Affordability is not a pricing problem. It is a structural inequality problem. If Democrats want to win in the next cycle and sustain those gains, they will need to come to terms with this reality. Ignoring this truth will spell doom.”
People who are worried about affordability aren’t concerned whether someone is moderate or progressive. Neither do they care if the candidate is conservative. They want someone to fix a rigged economy. They want someone to hear and understand their struggle and affirm them. They aren’t paying attention to someone’s particular brand or label.
Then, back in November, I posted an article titled The Mythical Middle. In the article, I argued that the conventional wisdom among Democrats that they must pivot to the middle to win is actually a losing strategy.
Here is a small portion of what I said:
“Political moderates, therefore, are seen as gatekeepers for the status quo, not change agents willing to challenge a rigged economic system. They are interpreted as part of the political elite who profit from corporate donations and outright bribes. The political ‘middle’ is where reform, innovation, and progress go to die.”
Many people believe that the 2024 election represented a shift to the right because a few more voters cast their ballots for Trump than for Harris. This just isn’t true. This election mainly turned on people who either didn’t vote because they felt the Democrats weren’t hearing their voices or switched to Trump for the same reason. A small but significant percentage turned back to Trump, but it wasn’t about ideology. The country didn’t turn right…it just stayed home.
Most elections don’t turn on ideology, and 2024 was no exception. It turned on affordability, credibility, and whether voters felt anyone was actually listening to them and fighting for them. The Democrats failed. They seemed tone-deaf.
Democrats didn’t just lose to Donald Trump — they lost millions of voters who either stayed home or switched sides because daily life felt harder, and sadly, they believed Trump heard them.
Let’s break down the numbers. In 2020, 81,283,501 people voted for Biden. However, in 2024, 75,017,613 voted for Harris, a net loss of 6,265,888 votes. Where did these voters go? Poof…they disappeared? Well, simply put, most stayed home.
And Trump? In 2020, 74,223,975 people voted for Trump, while in 2024, 77,302,580 voted for him, a gain of 3,078,605. It was a modest gain, but enough to give him an electoral victory in light of Democratic lethargy.
In 2024, politics felt increasingly disconnected from reality. Winning again doesn’t require chasing the political center or reinventing the party’s identity as progressive. It requires confronting a more uncomfortable truth: for too many Americans, the cost of living became the most tangible measure of political competence, and Democrats failed that test in voters’ eyes.
Democrats failed so badly at communicating their message that 5% of Biden voters from 2020 switched to vote for Trump in 2024. (Pew Research) In an election with slim margins in a few battleground states, that 5% was significant. It was a rebuke to the Democrats’ hearing loss.
(This is the part where I get to say, “I told you so.”) That conclusion isn’t speculation. It is reinforced by post-election research from Way to Win, which conducted extensive surveys and focus groups after the 2024 cycle. Their findings sustain my arguments about what happened in 2024. I encourage you to read their full report.
Their research shows that voters were not sorting themselves primarily along left-right ideological lines. Instead, they were responding to long-running economic pressure and a deepening belief that the political system no longer delivers material improvement in their lives.
Here is what the study said about the core problem Democrats faced:
“Voters are profoundly cynical about Democrats’ ability to deliver on these promises and create change… If Dems and the Harris campaign thought their message was addressing this broader context, that effort did not effectively reach voters.”
Cynicism, not ideological disagreement, is what hollowed out Democratic support. After all, Harris, who pivoted to the middle in typical Democratic fashion, was labeled a “far-left” progressive by the opposition. That will happen regardless of the label you try to place on yourself as a candidate. Republicans will target ANY Democratic candidate, no matter how moderate they are, as extreme far-left lunatics…so get over it. Ideological positioning does little to help a Democratic candidate.
We’ll start with the millions of voters who simply didn’t show up. These voters weren’t apathetic. They were exhausted.
Rent kept climbing. Grocery bills stayed high. Healthcare costs felt unpredictable and punitive. Wages lagged behind prices even as politicians pointed to macroeconomic indicators showing growth. When voters heard claims that the economy was “strong,” many translated that message into something else entirely: your pain isn’t real, or at least it’s not politically important.
Nonvoters don’t need lectures about civic duty or threats about authoritarianism. They need proof that participation changes the math of their monthly budget. When politics feels abstract, moralized, or managerial, turnout collapses. The central failure in 2024 wasn’t voter suppression or lack of mobilization infrastructure; it was relevance. Or irrelevance in the case of Democrats.
Way to Win’s research makes clear that voters do not process politics through policy white papers or ideological positions. They evaluate politics through lived experience.
Here is how Way To Win identified how voters actually decide:
“When you go knock on doors, you hear all kinds of stories, but they almost never have to do with detailed policies or ideological framing… Voters want a stronger economic message and want Democrats to fight for them.”
When that fight isn’t visible, people disengage. The Democratic message seemed to be, “Things aren’t that bad, and if you stick with Biden’s approach, adopted by Harris, things will continue to improve.” Many voters felt gaslighted.
Then there are the voters who supported Joe Biden in 2020 and switched to Donald Trump in 2024. These voters didn’t suddenly become ideological conservatives. Many backed Biden, believing competence, stability, and experience would translate into improved living conditions.
However, by 2024, they felt worse off, and more importantly, unheard and dismissed.
Trump didn’t win these voters by offering coherent or realistic policy. He won them by validating their frustration. He named their anger, blamed elites, and promised disruption.
Democrats, by contrast, often sounded defensive, explaining why the economy was “actually doing well” rather than acknowledging that affordability was collapsing for millions of households. It didn’t help to repeat the oft-quoted phrase, “Biden’s economy was the envy of the world.” The incongruence didn’t match the lived reality for millions of people.
This reality gap matters. Voters don’t expect miracles. They do expect honesty.
A party that insists voters are misreading their own financial situation forfeits trust. Once trust erodes, persuasion becomes impossible. The Republicans are now discovering his phenomenon.
After every Democratic loss, the same advice resurfaces: move to the middle. Moderate the message, trim ambition, and avoid confrontation. In theory, this is supposed to win back swing voters. In practice, it has repeatedly failed and helped produce the 2024 result.
The reason is straightforward: the “middle” most strategists imagine doesn’t exist as a coherent or stable bloc. What does exist is a large population of economically anxious voters who are not ideologically moderate; they are materially insecure. When Democrats pivot toward the center by softening economic conflict, these voters don’t feel reassured. They feel ignored.
For nonvoters, moderation sounds like stagnation, or worse, excuse-making. Incrementalism and bipartisan signaling read as evidence that nothing fundamental will change. There will be no meaningful check on rent hikes, no serious challenge to corporate consolidation, no urgency around healthcare costs. If politics only promises marginal improvement while the cost of living keeps climbing, many voters reasonably conclude participation isn’t worth the effort.
For Biden-to-Trump switchers, centrism often looks like evasiveness. When prices rise faster than wages, voters don’t want balance; they want someone to name the problem, pick a side, and then fight like hell for their position and values. A politics that avoids confronting powerful interests in the name of moderation feels less responsible, not more.
Way to Win’s analysis explicitly warns against this reflex:
“It’s not that we need to move more left… We need to actually go towards strength — standing for what you believe in… It will make it worse if we keep trying to look more like Republicans or triangulate.”
Moderation reduces contrast, and low contrast depresses turnout. Voters who feel squeezed don’t reward caution; they reward clarity and boldness.
Democratic victories don’t come from trimming ambition; they come from expanding the electorate. The New Deal didn’t win by triangulating between workers and industrialists. It won by strengthening labor rights, regulating finance, and using government to lower household costs.
The Progressive Era didn’t succeed by reassuring monopolies. It succeeded by confronting them. Even Barack Obama’s 2008 victory wasn’t built on ideological moderation so much as a promise of systemic change after economic collapse.
By contrast, periods of retreat toward the center tend to demobilize more voters than they persuade. They drain politics of urgency at moments when urgency is exactly what voters are demanding.
The core mistake Democrats made in 2024 was treating affordability as a communications challenge rather than a structural crisis. Rising costs weren’t just inflation aftershocks. They reflected deeper problems: housing markets distorted by speculation, healthcare systems built around profit extraction, weakened labor power, and corporate concentration with little accountability.
When leaders avoid naming these structures, or proposing visible counterweights, voters assume the party either doesn’t understand the problem or doesn’t want to confront it. Regaining trust requires offering solutions that are tangible and enforceable, not technocratic abstractions.
Democrats tended to address economic matters from a macroeconomic perspective. “Look at how low employment rates are and how far inflation has come down.” These leading indicators were inconsistent with the everyday practicality of the cost of living.
Voters want policies they can see, feel, and affect their lives, such as:
Focusing on these issues is what allowed Mamdani to win in New York. Voters didn’t care about his label, a Democratic-Socialist; they heard his message of how he would address their economic woes. These aren’t ideological gestures; they are power shifts, and voters can tell the difference. Voters responded to Mamdani’s strength and message.
Finally, credibility doesn’t flow downward from Washington. It flows upward from the people and their lived experience. National figures alone won’t rebuild trust. People believe in mayors who stabilize rents, states that lower prescription costs, and workers who see paychecks rise. Local success stories aren’t just anecdotes; they are proof points that politics can still work.
The lesson of 2024 is stark but clarifying: voters didn’t reject Democratic values. They rejected the feeling that anyone was fighting for them. Pivoting to the so-called middle won’t fix that. It will only repeat the mistake of offering less contrast in a moment that demands urgency and more contrast.
Democrats can win again. But only if they stop chasing an imaginary center or naively adopting the label “progressive.” This isn’t a binary discussion. They must start building a durable majority around a clear promise: government will actively lower the cost of living by rebalancing power in an economy that has tilted too far upward.
Voters will rally behind anyone, conservative, moderate, or progressive, who embodies such a platform and strategy.
