What the closure of The Liberal Patriot says about a party that can’t stop #Resisting.

This article by Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin is cross posted from The Boston Globe:

John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira are the cofounders of The Liberal Patriot, an online political newsletter that was published from 2021 to early 2026.

After the 2024 election, there was a moment when Democrats seemed mildly reflective about their political situation. The reality was stark. After vanquishing Trump in 2020, the party had managed to squander unified control of government with acute policy failures on issues ranging from immigration and the COVID response to inflation and the overall economy. And Democrats compounded the problem with far-left positions on issues like crime, transgender rights, and race that turned off more voters than they attracted, contributing to a strong perception that the party was woefully out of touch with working- and middle-class values.

As much as voters did not like the prospect of a second Trump term, they despised the Biden and Harris administration even more, particularly after an aging President Biden’s highly visible decline. Subsequently, Democrats lost voters across the board in 2024, with notable declines among Black and Hispanic men (22-point and 19-point shifts to Republicans, respectively), lower-income voters (a 14-point shift to Republicans), 18- to 29-year-olds (also a 14-point shift to the right), and non-college educated voters (a 7-point shift). The only two demographic groups of note that moved toward Democrats in the last election were white women (a 1-point shift) and women 65 years or older (a 5-point shift).

The historic party of America’s working class had reduced itself to a caricature of decrepit leaders, policy incompetence, and cultural elitism disconnected from the economic needs and social desires of everyday families. You would think this situation would lead party officials to confront what went wrong and to go through a serious process of policy and political regeneration. You would be wrong. Although some party members considered the dire state of their brand and economic message among voters in the aftermath of their defeat, many party officials and activists downplayed the second loss to Trump as merely an inflation-related fluke outside their control.

The Democratic National Committee deep-sixed its official autopsy of the 2024 election, saying it would be a “distraction” from helping the party move forward. Democratic heads went firmly into the sand. “Resistance” mania took over the party as Democrats chose to unite around nonstop criticism of Trump rather than devise a popular vision for governing that could win back the working-class voters of all races they’d lost to the president. The left grew in confidence — or arrogance depending on your point of view — insisting that economic populism alone would win the day and that few changes if any were needed in the party’s social agenda on immigration, transgender rights, race, and crime. The left’s basic strategic goal remains dispensing with moderates, displacing the establishment, and bashing “billionaires” and Israel repeatedly — not reforming the party to make it more attractive to a broad swath of working Americans who hold more conservative cultural views.

Yet how can Democrats move forward and build a sustainable electoral majority if they won’t even try to understand or accept what they did wrong in the first place?

This is where our publication The Liberal Patriot (TLP) came in. Started at the beginning of the Biden administration, TLP sought to help the Democrats reform themselves to better reflect the interests and values of working-class Americans — the vast majority of voters in this country — and to reject the extreme ideas of the college-educated elites who had taken over the party in recent decades.

The Liberal Patriot warned Democrats about the political effects of their open asylum policies on immigration. We warned them about the negative consequences of spending gazillions of dollars on dubious social schemes like “net zero” climate mitigation and student debt relief. We warned them about the limitations of “Bidenomics” and the political dynamics of soaring inflation. We warned them about negative reactions to their extreme positions on transgender rights, including their support for biological males playing in female sports. And we warned them that young people and working-class voters of all races were turning from the party and toward Trump.

At every turn, party elites and activists rejected our analysis and counsel and instead chose to pretend as if nothing were wrong with the Democratic brand and its approach to elections and majoritarian politics. Others said our diagnosis of the party’s problems might be correct, but since we didn’t embrace a narrow vision of populism fervently enough, we were “old and out of touch.”

They believe that “thermostatic” opposition to Trump has put the party back in the driver’s seat and that the more “authentically” left its candidates behave, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the better the party can beat back the “fascists” and “authoritarians.”

The Liberal Patriot way of being “pro-worker, pro-family, pro-America” — or economically nationalist and culturally moderate — did not find many adherents in the Democratic Party. So we recently folded the publication after more than five years and nearly 1,500 newsletters published.

We have no regrets about the analysis and political advice we offered Democrats. We grounded it all in empirical facts about the electorate and commonsense policy solutions to help Democrats rebuild a truly working-class party. Maybe they just aren’t interested in this approach. That’s how politics often works out.

Democrats will almost surely win one or both branches of Congress this fall and then will face a monumental choice in 2028: Reform the party to garner a broad mandate from the center-left and center-right of the electorate or continue to resist the current government and attempt to turn hatred of Trump into an Electoral College victory. We believe reform is the only way to fix the long-term challenges facing Democrats and begin the arduous process of regaining the trust of American voters. But we’re also realists and recognize that this advice may go unheeded by an elite political class that too often values resistance and orthodoxy over reason and heterodoxy. Let’s hope that some 2028 candidates are at least open to reconsidering Democrats’ strategic and policy objectives, for the country needs two strong and viable political parties to best represent the diverse interests of Americans.

Farewell to the “rising American electorate.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Right after the 2024 election, I wrote the following based on the limited data that were available at the time:

At one point in the initial rollout of Harris’s campaign, there was much happy (joyful?) talk of getting the band back together—the return of the mighty Obama coalition. The “rising American electorate” would have its revenge on Trump, the Republicans, and their retrograde supporters from declining demographics.

That’s not exactly how it worked out. Instead, Trump won every swing state and the election, carried the national popular vote and made dramatic headway among key demographics that were supposed to buoy the rising American electorate. In short, the rising American electorate didn’t rise, it crashed.

As Democrats dig out from their debacle, it’s important for them to understand just how far away they now are from the salad days of the Obama coalition. In 12 short years, they have lost two of three elections to Donald Trump and huge chunks of support from key demographics, including most of their rising constituencies. They need to face the uncomfortable fact that not only did the Obama coalition not come back, it’s likely never coming back. It’s time for a new coalitional strategy—a strategy that starts with rebuilding their support among working-class Americans of all races and forcefully jettisoning all the political baggage that is preventing them from doing so.

Since then, a lot more data have been released including just this week Catalist’s detailed estimates of demographic group performance and trends in the 2024 election. How does my analysis hold up in light of these more complete and reliable data? Pretty darn good I think. Here are some of the particulars from the new Catalist data which illustrate the extent of the Democratic coalition’s decline since 2012 (all figures based on the two party vote). There’s no sugar-coating it: these are disturbing data for a party that thought it was on the verge of a lengthy period of political dominance and now can’t beat a deeply flawed and widely disliked candidate like Trump.

Black voters. Obama carried black voters in 2012 by an amazing 93 points. Harris managed only a 71-point margin. Democratic decline: 22 points.

Latino voters. Obama carried Latinos by 35 points; in 2024, the Democratic margin was down to just 8 points. Democratic decline: 27 points. It is interesting that the overall decline since 2012 is fairly similar between blacks and Latinos; however, essentially all of the decline for Latinos was post-2016 while the black decline has been more or less continuous.

Working-class (non-college) voters overall. Obama was the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry the working class as a whole (2-point margin); every presidential election since then has seen steadily worsening Democratic performance among these voters. In 2024, Democrats lost them by a solid 10-point margin. Democratic decline: 12 points.

White working-class voters. The traditional trouble spot for Democrats; Obama lost them by 20 points, which went up to 27 points in this election. Democratic decline: 7 points (which contrasts with the 8-point gain over the time period with white college-educated voters). However, the white working-class decline pales in magnitude when compared to the decline among nonwhite working-class voters.

Nonwhite working-class voters. Obama cleaned up among nonwhite working-class voters, carrying them by 64 points in 2012. In the 2024 election the margin was down to 32 points, exactly cutting the 2012 Democratic advantage in half. This is perhaps the most remarkable trend of them all. A Democratic Party that can’t keep voters that are both nonwhite and working class in the fold is a Democratic Party whose presumed purpose is rapidly vanishing.

Latino working-class voters. The primary locus of this decline was among Latino working-class voters. These voters gave Obama a 38-point advantage in 2024, much higher than among the Latino college-educated. In 2024 this crashed to a mere 6-point advantage for Harris. Democratic decline: 33 points, two and a half times the decline among the Hispanic college-educated.

Young voters. Obama carried voters under 30 by 25 points; in 2024, the Democratic margin fell to 11 points. Democratic decline: 14 points.

Of course, this is comparing an age group that had a different generational composition in the two elections. But this should provide little comfort to Democrats. The 18-29 year old age group in the 2024 election was composed almost entirely of Gen Z voters, supposedly the leading edge of a generational shift that would make the voting pool ever more Democratic. In 2012, the 18-29 year olds who provided Obama’s 25-point margin were all members of the Millennial generation. In 2024, those Millennial voters were entirely contained in the 30-44 year old age group, where Democrats eked out only a 5-point advantage. So much for the generational theory of political dominance.

Black young voters. Black voters under 30 gave Obama a 91-point margin in 2012. Harris carried them by a comparatively modest 66 points. Democratic decline: 25 points.

Latino young voters. In 2012, Obama dominated Hispanic voters under 30 by 51 points. In 2024, the Democratic margin among these voters was just 14 points. Democratic decline: 37 points.

Male voters. Obama lost male voters in 2012 by 5 points; in 2024 the Democratic deficit among men reached 16 points. Democratic decline: 11 points. It’s important to note that the Democratic advantage among women was essentially the same over the two elections. Therefore, while it is true that the gender gap has widened over the time period (from 16 to 27 points), the widening of the gender gap between 2012 and 2024 is entirely attributable to Democrats doing worse among men, not to doing better among women. This is an uncomfortable fact for Democrats to face, but face it they must.

Black male voters. While black female voters have also shifted right over time, the shift among black men has been far larger—about two and a half times the size. In 2012, Obama carried black men by 91 points; the Democratic margin crashed to 58 points in 2024. Democratic decline: 33 points.

Latino male voters. Latino men have also shifted harder right than their female counterparts. Obama enjoyed a 25-point advantage among Hispanic men in 2012. In the 2024 election, Harris actually lost these voters by 6 points. Democratic decline: 32 points.

The “rising American electorate” strategy has failed. So much for Plan A. We’ll see if the Democrats have a Plan B. On current evidence, I’m not optimistic.

Read this article at The Liberal Patriot.