I’m on record as suggesting that Democrats not waste too much time on recriminations over 2024 while the wolf of Trump 2.0 is at the door. But there are some lessons relevant to the challenges right before them, and I tried to discuss at few at New York:
The ritualistic “struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party” that ensued after the Republican election victory of 2024 was cut somewhat short by the brutal realities of the real-life consequences of letting Donald Trump regain power with a Republican-controlled Congress and all sorts of ridiculous claims of an absolute mandate to do whatever he wanted. But, in fact, while factional finger-pointing might have been are a self-indulgent luxury an opposition party living under the MAGA gun can’t afford, there are some lessons from the election results that are important to internalize right now. Here are a few.
For much of the 2024 campaign, a lot of observers believed that the only way Trump could win was if Democrats failed to mobilize their party base, either out of complacency or because key constituencies were disgruntled with Joe Biden (and, to a lesser extent, with Kamala Harris once she became the presidential nominee). An enormous amount of money, time, and effort went into securing maximum turnout among young, Black, and Latino voters on the theory that if fully engaged, they’d win the day. And in the end, these constituencies did turn out reasonably well (a bit less than in 2020, but more than in 2012 or 2016). Trouble was, too many of them voted for Donald Trump.
No, Trump didn’t win Black, Latino, or under-30 voters overall, but his performance in all those groups improved significantly as compared to 2020. Among Black voters (per AP Votecast, the most reputable exit poll), he doubled his percentage of the vote, from 8 percent to 16 percent. Among Latinos, his percentage rose from 35 percent to 43 percent. And among under-30 voters, his share of the vote jumped from 36 percent to 47 percent. Meanwhile, the GOP advantage in the Donkey Party’s ancient working-class constituency continued to rise, even among non-white voters; overall, Trump won 56 percent of non-college-educated voters. The Democratic base fractured more than it faltered. And there were signs (which have persisted into early 2025 polling) that defections have made the GOP the plurality party for the first time in years and one of the few times since the New Deal.
While rebuilding the base (while expanding it) remains a crucial objective for Democrats, just calling it into the streets to defy Trump’s 2025 agenda via a renewed “resistance” isn’t likely to work. Many former and wavering Democrats need to be persuaded to remain in their old party.
Republicans have massive incentives to pretend that all their messages struck home, giving them an argument that they enjoy a mandate for everything they want to do. But the honest consensus from both sides of the barricade is that demands for change to address inflation and immigration were the critical Trump messages, with doubts about Joe Biden’s capacity to fulfill the office and Kamala Harris’s independence from him exacerbating both.
What we’ve learned in 2025 is that Trump has considerable public backing to do some controversial things on these issues. A 2024 poll from Third Way showed a majority of swing voters agreed that excessive government spending was the principal cause of inflation, a huge blow to Democratic hopes that rising costs could be pinned on corporations, global trends, supply-chain disruptions, or, indeed, the previous Trump administration. But this wasn’t just a campaign issue: Trump took office with some confidence that the public would support serious efforts to reduce federal spending and make government employees accountable. And the fact that (so far) his approval ratings have held up despite the chaotic nature of his efforts to slash federal payrolls is a good indication he has some wind at his back, at least initially.
If that’s true on inflation, it’s even truer on immigration, where solid majorities in multiple polls support (in theory, at least) the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. If the administration was smart enough to limit its deportation campaign to those convicted of violent crimes, it would have overwhelming public support. But Democrats should fully accept they didn’t just lose votes on this issue in 2024: They lost an argument that persists.
That is why it is critical that Democrats point to evidence that Trump’s own agenda (particularly his tariff policies) will revive inflation that had largely been tamed by the end of the Biden administration, while focusing their immigration messaging on vast overreach, inhumane excesses, and ethnic profiling of Latinos by Team Trump in its efforts to deport immigrants.
Joe Biden in his 2024 presidential campaign (and, to a slightly lesser extent, Kamala Harris as his successor) put considerable stock in playing on public concerns about the threat to democracy posed by Trump as evidenced by his conduct on January 6, 2021, and his lawless behavior generally. While these arguments found traction among voters already in his corner, there’s little evidence they mattered much at all to the voters who decided the election in Trump’s favor. Indeed, a considerable percentage of voters worried about a broken political system viewed Trump as a potential reformer as much as an insurrectionist or autocrat.
At the moment, most office-holding Democrats and (more quietly) many Republicans are aghast at how Trump has gone about pursuing his agenda early in 2025, with a blizzard of executive orders, a federal funding freeze, and a blank check issued to eccentric billionaire Elon Musk to disrupt federal agencies and intimidate federal employees. Again, Trump is drawing on long-standing public hostility toward the federal government and to the size and cost of government as a spur to inflation and a burden on taxpayers. Fighting him with alarms about his violation of legal and constitutional limitations on presidential power is unlikely to work with an electorate unmoved by Trump’s earlier scofflaw attitude. Voters must be convinced in very concrete terms that what he is doing will affect their own lives negatively. As with tariffs and the immigration policy, Trump’s tendency to overreach should provide plenty of ammunition for building a backlash to his policies.
In 2024, as in 2016, Trump managed to win because unhappy voters who didn’t particularly like or trust either presidential candidate (or their parties) in the end chose to produce a change in party control of the White House and of Congress. In office, Trump and his allies will try to perpetuate as long as they can the illusion that they are still fighting for “change” against powerful interests aligned with the Democratic Party, even though it’s Republicans who control the executive and legislative branches of the federal government and also dominate the U.S. Supreme Court. The idea that Team Trump is a brave band of insurgents speaking truth to power is undermined very specifically by the fact that its chief disrupter, Musk, is the richest man in the world and the first among equals of a large band of plutocrats surrounding the president.
As the New York Times’ Nate Cohn observed during the transition to the second Trump administration, many of the same anti-incumbent tendencies that put a thumb on the scale for the GOP in 2024 will now work for the opposition:
“The president’s party has retained the White House only once since 2004, mostly because voters have been unsatisfied with the state of the country for the last 20 years. No president has sustained high approval ratings since [George W.] Bush, in the wake of Sept. 11 …
“Looking even further back, the president’s party has won only 40 percent of presidential elections from 1968 to today. With that record, perhaps it’s the winning party that really faces the toughest question post-election: How do you build public support during an era of relatively slow growth, low trust in government and low satisfaction with the state of the country?”
Based on his conduct since returning to the White House and his well-known narcissism, it’s not all that clear that the 47th president even cares about building public support as he ends his political career. That may give him the freedom of the true lame duck, but it also means Democrats can batten on his broken promises and the disappointments they will breed. The 2028 presidential candidate who may be in real trouble is the Republican who succeeds the 2024 winner.
The key to influence won’t just be a correlation of size. Rather progressive bloggers and their readers will influence political discourse to the extent that our concerns reflect those of the people.
The right wing has influence because it serves corporate profit and not because it either reflects or doesn’t reflect public opinion on an issue.
I.E. on the right, money is a substtute for accurately reflecting what people want. Mainstream corporate media continually tell people what they “should” want rather than what they do want.
The left-blogsphere may be small but it’s influence will depend on how closely it mirrors what people want, talks authentically to people about their real concerns and enrolls them in creating change, because we cannot compete with the right in terms of pure $ power.
An example is the single-payer health care issue. A majority of the people in this country according to the latest polls actually want the government to take over and provide health care, and are actually willing to see a tax increase to pay for it.
But this idea simply isn’t remotely on the agenda. No politician is even talking about it and there is never an article in any mainstream media promoting it. Corporate elites are opposed, therefore the very idea is a non-starter – “not viable”.
This morning’s NYT article provides a good example why this dynamic continues despite being opposed to what a majority of the American people want:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/12/nyregion/12donate.html
Once an Enemy, Health Industry Warms to Clinton
“Senator Clinton has received $150,600 in contributions from insurance and pharmaceutical companies, which she accused in 1993 of ‘price gouging’ and ‘unconscionable profiteering.’”
Politicians’ need for money for campaigns makes them toe the corporate line. Hilary now says to her corporate sponsors“We tried to do too much too fast 12 years ago, and I still have the scars to show for it,”
The American people who are still waiting for affordable health-care would hardly agree that “we tried to do too much”, but they don’t count. This statement is Hilary’s acknowledgment that she made a mistake in trying to buck corportate opposition to her health care reform.
What’s changed over time? Hillary is now just another cog in the system, so they give her money. “Mrs. Clinton is receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from doctors, hospitals, drug manufacturers and insurers. Nationwide, she is the No. 2 recipient of donations from the industry, trailing only Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a member of the Republican leadership.”
Why has the health care industry warmed to Hillary?
“The rapprochement partly reflects how Mrs. Clinton has moderated her positions from more than a decade ago, proposing legislation to increase Medicare payments or stave off cuts in payments to doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, managed care companies and home health agencies.”
In short, she now supports increased industry profits rather than any real change in the broken health care system.
Hillary Clinton is hardly unique, and the point isn’t to single her out.
Nothing will change unless people organize and demand change. On-line commmunity is just one way. But it will only continue to grow if people see it as an access to power for change rather than an on-line debating society or cheering section.
a different but somewhat related argument is found here.
and to quote an old time blogger friend of mine: interest groups think of themselves as devoted to the issue, but the netroots is devoted to being a party.
the more serious of us out there have nothing less than a takeover of the party in mind, a ground up movement that removes the corrosive and failing influence of “centrist” DLC types who’ve relied far too much on advice from professional (and apolitical) paid consultants. we want to replace it with the new politics, which is basically just another way of saying populist driven, and make it responsive to the issues that a majority of americans outside beltway (cocktail)party circles care about most.
we have other goals, but like the Gay Agenda, if i told you i’d have to kill you. 😉
you should check out mark’s work at TPMcafe and mydd too, they’ve done a lot on this.
if there’s one thing i have learned of late, it’s that small numbers mean a whole lot less when contextualized in the greater mass of “who is getting it done.” at the local level, and often higher up as well, the number of people “making a difference” can be shockingly small. perhaps it’s worth your while to toss in some numbers relating to things like fundraising, and party membership, and similar groups of movers and shakers.
Read a series of postings on the risks associated with the netroot efforts in the Lieberman v. Lamont race and what impact the outcome will ultimately have upon the movement and the ability of the Democratic Party to win this coming November…here:
http://www.thoughttheater.com
Off topic — sorry — but there is no excuse in 2006 for having a font this absurdly tiny. You want only people with 20/20 vision reading?
Scott,
Any idea what the growth in the group of self-identified liberals who read blogs, etc. since 2004. My guess would be that it has been significant. I’m sure alterman, kos, FDL, TPM or donkey rising could give you some raw data on hits-per-day. I know I never read much if any of this stuff until recently.