A progressive campaign worked for Anna Hernandez. Democrats, take note

Democrats’ crushing defeat in the 2024 elections has sent the party and its pundits into a panic-induced shouting match over how they screwed up so miserably.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has tossed some shade on President Joe Biden for not stepping out of the race earlier. Plenty of folks have been quick to blame sexism and racism for holding Kamala Harris back. Longtime Democratic consultant James Carville has assigned national Democrats’ losses on going too “woke” — a term that no one has been able to define but tends to refer to progressive social views.

“The image stuck in people's minds that the Democrats wanted to defund the police, wanted to empty prisons," Carville said.

To that, Anna Hernandez can only laugh.

As much of the country — including Maricopa County — shifted red in the election, Hernandez won a race that represents the exception. The state senator ran an unabashedly progressive campaign to represent a large chunk of west and central Phoenix on the city council. Taking on three centrist Democrats, including one recruited to run by Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, Hernandez secured 53% of the vote.

That vote share eliminates the need for a runoff election in March. It also signals that voters responded to many of Hernandez’s left-of-center views on policing, housing and more.

And while even Hernandez didn’t think she’d win by that much — “I was shocked,” she told Phoenix New Times on Wednesday — she also thinks the Democratic Party could take a few lessons from her win.

As a progressive, she blew the centrist candidates out of the water. The second closest vote-getter in her race was former state Rep. Marcelino Quiñonez, the Gallego favorite who managed only 21.4% of the vote.

“Our victory is a bold statement for progressive values and policies,” Hernandez said during a press conference Wednesday. “And our victory could not have been timed better given the national and state-level results. Trump’s victory and losses in Congress and the state legislature mean that the city will have to step up and fight for our communities.”

‘Not rocket science’

Nationally and in Arizona, the losses for Democrats were bad. Donald Trump defeated Harris by six points while Republicans gained ground in the Arizona Legislature. Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego’s defeat of Republican Kari Lake in the state’s U.S. Senate race was an exception to the rule, though it may say more about Lake’s unpopularity than anything else.

But as Democrats across the country point fingers for the loss — blaming it on wokeism or pushing a trans agenda or Harris hewing too close to Biden’s record — the idea that the left wing of the party holds too much influence doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Few “leftists” hold any actual power in the party, and Harris spent the last months of her campaign touting endorsements from Republicans such as Dick and Liz Cheney, not from progressives like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

While Democrats’ messaging cast Trump as a threat to democracy — accurately so — Hernandez said those ideas are too remote for many voters who are worried about issues much closer to home.

“Democracy can be alive and well, but if people can’t afford rent?” Hernandez said, shrugging and raising her eyebrows. “I don’t think it’s rocket science. Elections take a lot of work to win, but it’s not complicated. The biggest thing is we have to pivot back to community-centered visions so people of the communities are at the center of the movement.”

Hernandez credited her victory to her campaign’s focus on engaging the community in authentic discussion about their concerns and the “working-class people who showed up and did the work” to talk to voters. She knocked on a lot of doors in her district, finding that many voters said she was the only city council candidate who had bothered to drop by.

And though many of Hernandez’s policy goals might be labeled “progressive,” they’re also broadly popular with voters.

“Housing, homelessness, public safety, affordability — these were the things that were top of mind for them,” Hernandez said. “I feel like on a national level, we got away from those kitchen table issues. For me, it was so important to talk about those.”

As she enters office next year, those are the issues Hernandez plans to tackle. During her press conference, she said her priorities are to improve the economic position of working-class people, fight predatory landlords, take care of parks, make sure air is clean and fight back against potential national and state crackdowns on immigrant communities.

And as the Democratic Party tries to figure out its priorities for the next few years under a Trump presidency, Hernandez offers a prescription for what went wrong this year.

“We have to get back to knocking on doors,” she told New Times, “talking to voters directly and sharing how we’re going to improve their conditions.”