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.
An intelligent comment I read at the New Republic website suggests a particular line of attack: describe the Republican Party as “the bridge to nowhere.” That would work for Palin and McCain.
What follows is the entire post:
“Look, it is time, and it is necessary, to get over the surprise at the tactics of
the Republican party. Republicans believe in NOTHING. The Republican party is a
giant criminal organization devoted to one thing, no two: theft and ostentatious
displays of power. Other than the fact that we don’t live in a society where
extreme brutality is necessary to remain in power, there is very little that
separates Saddam Hussein from the modern Republican party. Their gassy patriotism
is bullshit. Their economic theology is bullshit. Their purported concern for the
little guy is absolutely laughable.
Given that the Republican party has no interest in governing the country, only in
stealing from the country, they have no more scruple about what they say and do than
the mafia would. Would anyone express shock at the “cynicism” of mafiosi telling
lies? Of course not. That would be ridiculous because we already understand that
they are criminals. The Republicans are criminals, one and all, including John
McCain. They will say and do anything, absolutely anything, that they think will
have the desired political impact. They do not even pause for a moment to think
about whether what they are saying is true because it is completely irrelevant from
their point of view. And they understand that, when you are caught lying, you just
repeat the lie louder and with a great display of outrage at being called a liar.
Time for the Democrats and Obama, at the least since there is not much hope that the
press will awake from its stupor in the face of these vicious tactics, the see the
enemy for what it is — THE ENEMY of our country — and be prepared to do what it
takes.
It is not necessary for the Democrats to lie. It is only necessary for them
relentlessly and singlemindedly to smear John McCain with all of the shit that he
has left in his wake during his political career. Display him lying and ask why a
man who claims honor is the most important think stoops to such blatant lying
tactics. Hang him over and over and over again with Phil Gramm sneering at
Americans as “whiners.” Hang him with his incestuous relationship to Washington
lobbyists and corruption. You don’t talk about Republican hypocrisy, you display
it, and since the Republicans contradict themselves at every turn without batting an
eye — like all good Stalinists — you SHOW them contradicting themselves and you
impugn their honesty, their competence, and their devotion to duty, country, or
anything but pocketing as many millions as they can for bridges to nowhere. The
Republican party IS the bridge to nowhere. That’s a good theme. “The Republican
party didn’t just try to build the bridge to nowhere at a cost of hundreds of
millions of dollars, the Republican party is the bridge to nowhere. It cannot
protect us from our enemies. It cannot protect us from falling behind in global
competition. It cannot protect us from the storms and natural disasters the result
from climate change. It is not just the party of the past, it is the party of no
place, no program, no values.”
It is time for the Democrats to recognize that they cannot win a dirty war and
expect to be clean. You cannot win an actual war without killing people, innocent
people. Any decent human being should feel soiled by that and recoil at the
necessity. But it is a necessity. Kicking out the disgusting, predatory Republican
party requires getting down in the muck where it lives and defeating it there. We
will not feel clean when we have done so, but our civic responsibility is to kick
these bums out, NOW, before our the economic, military, and moral decline of our
beautiful country goes any further.”
roidubouloi
Agreed. The oratory of Obama is one of those surface shiny things Dems can actually use, and use effectively, to get the attention of the lazy voters. It has that bad side to it, but unlike most of our stuff, there is another edge to this sword. We should carpet bomb that kind of stuff.
Same with the debates. The MSM is a huge problem, but if they right small things are said, someone will catch on to it, because it’s easy to cover.
He must dumb down from the debates in the primary..as they have proven election after election, the voters are neither sophisticated nor intelligent creatures. Keep them busy.