Thomas B. Edsall has a must-read column, “Trump’s Return Is a Civil Society Failure” at The New York Times. Among his insights: “A key question emerging from the 2024 elections is whether the Democratic Party is significantly — or even permanently — wounded. Can it return to fighting trim in 2026 and 2028?….A post-election YouGov poll commissioned by the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank, sent a clear message to party loyalists….YouGov asked 5,098 working-class voters (defined as those without college degrees) — primarily in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, along with 881 people elsewhere in the nation — to evaluate the political parties on measures of trust and commitment….Asked which party they trusted “more to improve the economy, protect Americans from crime, handle the issue of immigration,” majorities of respondents chose the Republican Party, ranging from 55 to 34 percent on the economy to 57 to 29 percent on immigration….Asked whether the Democratic Party or the Republican Party was “in touch or out of touch” and “strong or weak,” majorities of working-class voters described the Democrats as out of touch (53 to 34 percent) and weak (50 to 32) and the Republicans as “in touch” (52 to 35) and “strong” (63 to 23).

Edsall continues, “More significant, on two survey questions that previously favored Democrats — whether the party “on my side or not” and which party respondents trusted “to fight for people like me” — the Democrats lost ground to Republicans. Fifty percent of voters participating in the survey said that the Republican Party would fight for people “like me,” while 36 percent said the Democratic Party would….Thirty-four percent of those polled said that the Democratic Party was on their side, and 49 percent said it was not. Fifty percent said that the Republican Party was on their side, and 37 percent said it was not….In an essay accompanying the release of the poll, Will Marshall, the president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, wrote:

The most lethal attack ad of the presidential campaign was a clip from a 2019 interview in which Kamala Harris explains her support for publicly funded sex-change surgery for prisoners, including detained immigrants. The kicker: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”

Edsall poses the big question, “Did the Trump campaign’s focus on inflation, immigration, crime and transgender rights succeed in pushing the public image of the Democratic Party farther from the mainstream, no longer concerned with the day-to-day issues of the middle class?”

Edsall adds, “One clearly troubling development for Democrats is the failure of President Biden’s economic initiatives to win votes in either red or blue counties….While inflation was profoundly damaging to Democratic prospects in 2024, Biden administration programs like the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act paid large dividends to the regions of the country that had been economically suffering the most ­— red America……..Stanley Feldman, a political scientist at Stony Brook University, wrote by email that

a substantial fraction of Trump (MAGA) supporters believe that demographic change and changes in gender norms are a threat to their way of life and to their status in American society. Most importantly, Republicans (and influencers) have successfully convinced many people that Democrats and liberals are directly responsible for creating and supporting the social forces that they are frightened of.

Edsll notes further, however, that  “In a reflection of the scope of dispute on these issues, Charles Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, declared in an email: “I fundamentally disagree with the proposition that Trump’s re-election is a watershed moment marking the demise of the progressive cause.”….Instead, Kupchan argued, “Trump’s victory reflected an anti-incumbent wave, not a decisive rightward shift.”….Neil Malhotra, a political scientist at Stanford, wrote by email that

the idea that the Democratic Party is a tarnished brand or that the Democratic Party is nearing collapse is highly overrated. An unpopular incumbent administration lost a close election. This has happened countless times in American history, and we have not claimed that a party was on its deathbed.

The 2024 elections, Malhotra continued, were

nothing compared to the 1980s when the Democrats lost three consecutive landslide presidential elections. In the 1930s, the Republican Party was shut out of power across the country except for the Supreme Court, and the party survived.

Edsall quotes James M. Lindsay, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Affairs, who argues, “The question, then, is not why the Democrats lost the White House, but why the center is not holding across industrialized democracies. The list of culprits is long. Rapid globalization. Waves of immigration that exceed the capacity of countries to absorb them. Growing income inequality. Technological change that diminishes the employment prospects for unskilled workers and will soon diminish the prospects for skilled workers. Social media that give disproportionate attention to extreme voices….So, yes, the liberal project is endangered, but it is endangered in both its right-of-center and left-of-center versions.”