A Future Democratic Tech Agenda Requires Understanding Where Biden Went Wrong
The Democrats’ post-2016 “techlash” turned a historically pro-innovation party into Biden Administration governance that relied on novel regulatory ideas, was risk-averse about losing the left wing of their governing coalition, and often came across as culturally scolding about the technologies that shape daily life and high-wage jobs.
To the Democratic party’s credit, most people are looking forward to our future instead of back on our past. Which raises the question - why bother to look back at the Biden Administration’s tech policies at all?
We can’t move forward without understanding where we went wrong.
It is important to understand how far we have come from the tech-optimist strategies that worked well for President Clinton and President Obama. We are using the same playbook that alienated working class voters and opened up a 31-point gap in the presidential candidate preferences between young men and women.
The core governing lesson is pragmatic: Democrats win and govern best when they are the party that makes things work by modernizing government services, building opportunity pipelines into the tech and tech-enabled economy, defending U.S. innovation in global competition, and regulating for concrete consumer outcomes (privacy, security, scams, affordability) rather than ideological posture.
Learning from Past Success
Democrats have had a long arc of success by leaning into tech optimism from Atari Democrats to Clinton/Gore to Obama, and the party’s recent anti-tech turn was an avoidable break from a winning tradition.
Post-2016 scapegoating of Facebook and “do something about Big Tech” politics encouraged hostility toward the very digital tools Democrats used to dominate during elections and weakened Democrats’ online competitive edge.
President Biden ran for president very much on the theme of normalcy after four years of Donald Trump and on his key role in shaping the Obama presidency. But once Biden was elected, the staffing choices driven by a desire to avoid conflict with Senators Sanders and Warren, along with their affiliated outside organizations drove “purity test” staffing norms, shutting out key private-sector and technical expertise even when voters broadly value business experience in government.
The anti-tech regulators of the Biden Administration practiced a form of “faculty lounge populism” that was intended to win back working class voters by applying novel antimonopoly and consumer protection theories to the tech industry, but the approach backfired. Instead, focusing regulators on niche fights over mergers and ads rather than bread-and-butter consumer protection, the Biden Administration created a lose-lose politics that alienated tech allies without winning back working-class voters.
Technology policy is most durable politically when it is genuinely pro-consumer and pro-safety. Democrats across the country should campaign and govern on the promise of safer roads through autonomous vehicles, cheaper and faster deliveries with drone technology, and lower costs through increased efficiency.
Lessons for Politics
While Democrats are poised to make significant gains in the midterm elections, the prospect of an overwhelming blue wave is still tempered by the enduring unpopularity of the Democratic brand, with just 28% of Americans holding a positive view of the party.
Democrats can help shed their image as being out of touch on economic issues and far-left scolds, by taking some specific actions.
First they can focus on embracing tech that lowers costs and saves lives in economic messaging. The lowest-hanging fruit here is to embrace the deployment of AVs and new rules that make it easier to get them on the road. This is a pro-tech, pro-safety message that is aligned with much of the emerging Democratic coalition, may require taking on unions seeking to protect their narrow member interests. As fewer unions are endorsing Democratic candidates and using their organizing power to help them win, there is an opportunity to appeal to a broader base of support, which includes everyone interested in safer roads and neighborhood streets.
Second, Democrats should reject the disproven notion that “anti-tech populism” is an effective blue-collar turnout strategy. The party will need to recruit candidates with strong working-class credentials and ideas, and embrace policies that are popular with the median voters of their districts and states. There is no shortcut to wrestling with hard questions of culture, identity, and economics by just blaming “oligarchs or Big Tech”. It just doesn’t resonate with voters.
Similarly, there is no substitute for leadership in crafting the guardrails for kids’ use of social media, the building and implementation of data centers, and establishing clear rules for cryptocurrencies that embrace the technology while helping to eliminate scams. The key here is that all of this work will be far more effective when working with the technology companies and people with industry expertise to encourage best practices, understand tradeoffs and unintended consequences, and maximize the benefits for society.
Lessons for Governance
Staff for competence: normalize private-sector and technical expertise as a governing asset
A key lesson from the Biden Administration is to build a “Democratic talent pipeline” for appointments that includes experienced technologists alongside staffing from think tanks, law firms, and academia. In the face of left-wing critics, the Biden Administration did bring in the experts they needed to implement the CHIPS Act, which is likely to remain as a key legacy of effective governance and economic policy from the Administration.
Democrats should create clear norms for balanced engagement (meet competitors and critics, publish calendars, enforce recusals), rather than treating meetings themselves as corrupt.
Embracing expertise has a political payoff as well. Voters see business experience as a positive credential for governing the economy.
Make “government that works” a flagship: modernize federal digital service delivery at scale
The key contrast of the Obama and Biden Administrations was the extent to which IT modernization focused on service delivery, not procurement theater. Following the healthcare.gov rollout debacle, the Obama Administration focused on expanding and protecting digital service teams; scaling proven systems quickly; aggressively retiring high-risk legacy systems; and using funding vehicles like the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) with milestone-based oversight. While many of the same tools and teams remained in the Biden Administration, there was no senior-level White House push to make progress and these efforts languished.
Build a real tech jobs strategy that matches the actual labor market, not a nostalgia economy
In the modern U.S. economy, putting tech-enabled services and digital skills at the center of workforce policy. Every administration provides hollow promises of revived American manufacturing in sectors that are not feasible. If the promises are not hollow, the policies, such as massive tariff disruption, are worse than doing nothing.
Alongside a manufacturing strategy, an administration should have a clear technology policy to train and equip American workers for the most dynamic sector of the economy. A strategy should be focused on apprenticeships, community college pathways, portable credentials, and placement partnerships with employers, link broadband expansion to workforce pipelines, and support regional tech hubs so opportunity is not geographically gated.
Compete globally and deliver locally: defend U.S. digital exports while accelerating life-improving tech deployment
A future Democratic administration should treat the American tech industry as the major advantage in global competition that it is. The US lead in venture capital and technology startups gives us a security and prosperity advantage over the entire world and helps to cement our status and the global leader.
We must treat technology and innovation as strategic national assets in diplomacy and trade and push for non-discriminatory application of rules like the EU Digital Markets Act and sustained digital trade engagement. Allowing Europe to write the rules for American tech undermines our strategic advantage and hurts American companies.
Democrats do not have to choose between accountability and optimism. Democrats can be tough on real harms (fraud, privacy violations, unsafe products, abusive market conduct) while still being unmistakably the party of innovation, opportunity, competence, and state capacity. A tech-optimistic party is a key part of the playbook for rebuilding durable Democratic governing majorities, and governing effectively when we are in control.