Last November, Donald Trump recaptured the presidency and helped his party gain control of both chambers of Congress. He and his MAGA backers heralded it as the beginning of a realignment that would give the GOP a long-standing majority and give the president a popular mandate to do many unprecedented and unspeakable things. Democrats largely believed this spin and fell into mutual recriminations and despair.
Just a year later, everything’s looking different.
Democrats swept the 2025 elections in almost every competitive venue. They flipped the governorship of Virginia and held onto the governorship of New Jersey, in each instance crushing their Republican opponents. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani won easily on a wave of high turnout and voter excitement. At the same time, Democrats stopped efforts to purge their judges in Pennsylvania and rig voting rules in Maine. One of their most vulnerable candidates, Virginia attorney-general nominee Jay Jones, beset by a text-message scandal involving violent fantasies about Republicans, won anyway. Everywhere you look, the allegedly unbeatable Trump legacy is, well, taking a beating. The tide even flowed down to Georgia, where Democrats won two statewide special elections, flipping two seats on the utility-rate-setting Public Service Commission.
Exit polls show that those elements of the electorate where Trump made startling gains in 2024 are now running away from him and from the GOP. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger is winning 67 percent of under-30 voters, 64 percent of Latino voters, 61 percent of Asian American voters, and 90 percent of Black voters. Up in New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill is winning under-30 voters by better than 2-1, Latinos by exactly 2-1, Black voters by better than 10-1, and Asian American voters by better than 4-1. She’s also winning 90 percent of Black men and 57 percent of Latino men. These are also demographic groups that have begun turning their back on Trump in job-approval polls. And Trump got another very direct spanking as Californians overwhelmingly approved Prop 50, a measure to gerrymander the state to give Democrats more seats, meant to retaliate against Trump’s earlier power grabs. There, too, the issue became entirely a referendum on the turbulent president.
Some MAGA folk will argue Trump can’t be blamed because he wasn’t on any ballot. But Republicans everywhere embraced him fiercely and counted on his assistance to win the day. And no major party has ever so completely turned itself into a cult of personality for its leader, or been so eager to give him total power. Trump’s domination of political discourse throughout 2025 — right up until this week, when he’s rejected any compromises with Democrats in a gridlocked Washington, D.C. — means the election is inescapably a setback that bids ill for his efforts to maintain total control of the federal government in the midterms next year. Democrats may finally turn to the future rather than the past, the struggles for the party’s soul forgotten for a while.
We’ll soon see if Mamdani can redeem the hope he has instilled in so many discouraged and marginalized voters, and if the women chosen to lead New Jersey and Virginia can cope with rising living costs and terrible treatment from Trump’s administration. The GOP gerrymandering offensive isn’t done, and the Trump-enabling chambers of the Supreme Court could provide new setbacks for those resisting Trump’s creeping authoritarianism. And yes, in 2026 Democrats must more clearly articulate their own agenda while providing running room for different candidates in different parts of the country.
But for now, Trump and his party look far less invincible than before and far more likely to harvest anger and disappointment for his second-term agenda than to build anything like a permanent majority. The opposition can now emerge from the shadow of an especially cursed year and fight back.
I agree that this is unacceptable, yet it is not surprising. The old Democratic establishment does not want to reform its party “from the grassroots down” because they would loose power. The people would be in control, not the McAuliffes.
More here: http://www.politicalthought.net
With his habit of hurling epithets like “Republican lite,” Howard Dean is the best prime example of somebody who (in Nick’s words) “is deeply invested in restarting the DLC/liberal food fights” and would therefore be part of what Nick calls “the rump establishment.”
Dean has done much at the grassroots level and has much to contribute to the party, but he is far too polarizing a figure to be a plausible candidate for DNC chair.
It’s not a left-right thing really … what does that mean anyway? There are probably some “right” things that I could get behind. From where I am, a blue area in what once was a blue state, the party needs to remember its real roots — the people. Those inside the Beltway haven’t a clue, and because of that all they manage to do is try to emulate Republicans. Well, I’m not a Republican. And if someone doesn’t take this party away, far away, from that, I’d say it’s time for a true third party. Read Adam Werbach’s Nov. 3rd Theses (http://www.3nov.com/images/Nov3Theses_letter.pdf) for an idea about that. And forget about any nudges to the center. The party has gone too far in that direction already. And you know what it says to voters when one party keeps trying to look like the other party? That the other party’s right. And it’s not.
To me it’s completely about wresting the party away from the corporate/beltway leadership and building a grassroots party. That’s why I think Dean, Ickes and Rosenberg are the only acceptable candidates.
But really, I don’t think that there is any question that it should be Dean.
Except for being prematurely right about Iraq and bold about his criticisms of the Bush administration, Dean is not particularly liberal. He was part of the DLC at one point. It was however, his strong criticisms of Bush that got the Dems back in the race.
In this last election most of the volunteers on the Kerry campaign started in the Dean campaign. When his candicacy tanked, Dean started DFA, the organization raised $5 million contributed to over 700 candidates up and down the ballot and made a difference in some long shot and pivotal races.
What did Leo Hindery do in ’04? What did Wellington Webb do?
Moving left or right could pull in some swing voters is the classic political theory. But it’s wrong, most people are just not ideological. More important to the vast majority of people is: Does this party or candidate really stand for something? And that’s what Bush succeeded on making the election about: And more people thought they knew where Bush was coming from.
What the Democrats failed to do is to position the central question as simply: Does this guy have any clue about what he’s doing?
Those are the simple things that most people vote about, not ideological tests. And focusing too much on ideological tests detracts from the clear message on other items.
So definitely the most important thing is to stand up for something. That to me is the core problem right now – can one point at anything which the Democrats have stood their ground on in the past 4 years?
First , Kerry did not lose…the election was stolen through frudulent manipulation of the electronic voting system.
That said, Howard Dean is the only possible person to lead the Democratic Party.
We do not need to move ANYMORE to the center. The Democratic Party is already Republican lite!!!
It has to be Howard Dean…there is no one else articulate, passionate or honest enough. All this pontificating is diplomatic and appeasing but too corporate!
I agree with Nick Confessore that this is more a battle between an entrenched establishment and reform forces, with both sides having their fair share of both liberals, moderates and even a few conservatives.
Where I disagree with Confessore’s opinion is his suggestion that it is the OUTSIDERS, the REFORMERS who want to make this a battle about ideology. That may have been true a few years back, but my experience in the Dean campaign has taught me that the #1 reason people got involved in that effort was because they were sick and tired of Democrats rolling over every time the Republicans or the establishment media barked.
It had nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with testicular fortitude.
On the other hand, we have people like Al From and Peter Beinert who continue to frame the debate as one about ideology, as if they are the great defenders of the Democratic big tent against the crowd of pitchfork wielding radical lefties.
I suspect this may have something to do with where both Confessore and I are coming from. He is closer to the insiders than I am, so he can’t see what is so painfully obvious to us out here in the “heartland”.
“Pretty much anyone who is deeply invested in restarting the DLC/liberal food fights is by definition part of this rump establishment, since the distinction of vision between Democratic centrists and liberals pale next to the differences between the Democratic average and the Bush-era conservatives.”
I disagree. There a fundamental differences between DLC and progressive Democrats over, for want of a better term, economic populism that goes to the core of the party’s beliefs. While I would not dispute the need to shake up the party’s beltway establishment, that pales in the face of resolving what the party stands for.
I also thought the TAP piece presented a caricature of progressive Democrats, then and now. Gee, I remember when TAP wasn’t trying to emulate TNR’s rush rightward. Now with such items as this Tapped piece and the presence of people like Matthew Yglesias, I’m beginning to wonder.
Lead, follow, or get out of the way. From where I was working (for the first time ever, in a very red Florida county) all of the leadership and most of the effort came from DFA and MoveOn. I am shocked and infuriated that Kerry lost, that the entire national slate was beaten so badly, with a few brilliant exceptions. When someone suggests Joe Lockhart for chair, I want to scream.
. Top-Down or Bottom-Up .
I think that in addition to the Liberal/Dino conflict and the Washington/Heartland struggles there is the Top/Bottom struggle.
In the past the parties have been lead by the people on top, but with the Dean/Trippi group there was the start of a leadership from the Bottom. Many of us in the Virtual community are starting to suggest that it is possible to have a party that interacts with us rather than just uses the WEB as a way to gather money and foot soldiers.
It may be that this time the struggle for the DLC leadership is between those who want a classical party structure and those who whould like to explore if the party can really be organized as a Bottom-Up representative group.
If the Bottom-up’ers are represented then perhals we can develop the tools, community, etc. so that we can really separate the CORE democratic/progressive/populist… issues from those that are desirable or wedge issues, and then ofcourse proceed to properly frame/communicate these to the people who also believe in them.
It is hard not to come across as a sychophant, great post Ruy, I wish this could be fed into an amplifying circut.
I can’t say I agree. Since we live in an age where just a slight nudge to the center on a few key issues (partial-birth abortion? terrorism? gay marriage?) could mean the difference between getting a Democrat elected–both as President and to Congress–those small policy differences between Democratic centrists and liberals become very much personified, though they pale materially in comparison to the average Democratic views the Bush-era conservatives. Love the site and the book. thanks.