A lot of Democratic voters are feeling disappointed and drained with an inevitable sense of futility that accompanies an electoral defeat. Many are wondering if they should even bother with political activism going forward. It can be dispiriting, especially after losing one of the most important presidential elections in American history.

You will probably hear some political activist friends say they are quitting and getting focused on other things. But now is the wrong time for quitting Democratic politics. Now is the time to get involved in building a stronger, well-rooted Democratic Party. Now is time to admit the errors of the past, but not to dwell on them. Now is the time to open up new directions for party-building.

Sick of presidential disappointments? Check out local races. Democrats are still behind in state and local government representation. Let’s get more Democrats elected to our city councils, state legislatures and congressional districts. Let’s elect more Democratic judges and prosecutors. Let’s get involved in local leadership development. Let’s find more young people to run for office. Let’s give more money to beginners in Democratic politics. Let’s sink deeper roots in our communities.

As a red county resident, I’ve noticed that meetings of our local Democratic Party are very short on younger members. I suspect County Democratic parties all across the U.S. would say the same thing. There should be more conscious exploration of ways to attract  young people. Some creative thinking and activism is needed here. Every county and state party should have a hard-working youth recruitment committee.

Another much-neglected area of needed activism is rebuilding the labor movement. It is no accident that Republicans have worked so hard to crush unions. In addition to their wanting to keep wages low, they know that unions provide Democrats with manpower and money. Weakening unions diminishes both.

Every worker should have union representation, and that should be more of a priority for all Democrats. Democrats should educate themselves about the labor movement and its fascinating history, and then resolve to do something this year to promote union membership in his or her profession or former profession.

A third project that merits more Democratic support is fighting voter suppression, particularly in Mississippi and Louisiana. Georgia’s electorate is now about one-third Black, which was instrumental in Democrats winning two U.S. Senate seats –  and majority control of the U.S. Senate – in 2020-21. But Mississippi and Louisiana now both have an even higher percentage of eligible Black voters than Georgia. Rank and file Democrats nationwide, not just leaders, should make financial contributions to Democratic candidates and county and state parties in MS and LA.

These are just three possible new directions for Democratic party-building. There is plenty of room to explore other new paths for building local Democratic groups. Form issue-focused caucuses in local Democratic organizations for environmentalists, health care activists, anti-corruption projects, foreign policy concerns and many others.

Presidential races may be where big media is focused. But it’s not where the seeds of lasting change are sown. Democrats understandably focus much time, money and effort on presidential elections. But that’s not the most effective way to strengthen the party. Tall trees with shallow roots are the most likely to fall.

When I visited an Amish farm many years ago, I remember the tour guide saying that Amish farmers grew more produce per square foot than farmers anywhere else. One of the primary reasons was that they dug a little deeper than other farmers, which gave the roots a head start and more nutrients. The same is likely true for politics.

Lets dig a little deeper as Democrats, so that one day in the not too distant future, we will reap a bountiful harvest with a durable working majority that can move America forward.

Politico is running a round-up, “11 Democratic Thinkers on What the Party Needs Right Now,” which is worth a red. Here is one segment, “Democrats must return to being the party that a majority of voters believes to be saner” by Matt Bennett, co-founder and executive vice president of public affairs at Third Way:

Let’s start with where Democrats should NOT go. We should not blame Vice President Kamala Harris or her campaign. Given the underlying challenges with the Democratic brand, Joe Biden’s unpopularity, the compressed time frame, some hangover from the 2020 primaries, and the need to be the “change” candidate, her task in retrospect looks like it was impossible. Blaming her or her team is wrong and myopic, and it elides the reckoning we must face — Democrats have lost a staggering amount of support across almost every demographic group. We must find a way to turn that around.

To do so, we must make sure our focus is our generational challenge: defeating right-wing populism. A century of global history makes clear that right-wing populists cannot be beaten with left-wing populism. Rather, you take on the right-wing demagogues and authoritarians through the center. That means Democrats must return to being the party that a majority of voters believes to be saner, more reasonable, more patriotic and more in touch with their lives.

Democrats won’t get there without letting go of some stale and spurious conventional wisdom about our politics. Demography is not destiny — no “rising American electorate” of people of color and young voters is coming to save us. Mobilizing low-propensity voters is not a viable campaign plan. You can’t build a winning coalition with college-educated voters alone. And we must avoid what the commentator Ruy Teixeira has dubbed the “Fox News Fallacy”: Issues like immigration and crime can be both inflated by right-wing media and be real and rational concerns for a lot of voters outside the MAGA base. And despite all the cruelty and bigotry of the Trump campaign, we cannot view the whole of Trump’s support solely through the lens of racism, misogyny and ignorance. Voters are telling us something vital about what matters to them: We had better listen carefully.

Read all 11 essays right here.

If you want to know “Why Democratic Turnout Cratered and Why It Won’t Be Easy to Fix“,” check out Andrew Perez’s Rolling Stone article on the topic. As Perez writes, “On Monday, Rolling Stone spoke with Michael Podhorzer, former longtime political director for the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of unions, to gain more insight into what went so wrong for Democrats….Podhorzer, who chairs the Analyst Institute and is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, is an expert in data-driven politics. In a blog post Monday, he writes that the election results were not about Americans embracing Trumpism — but rather a continuation of a trend in U.S. politics: Elections are consistently “change elections,” because “Americans are simply fed up with the system not working for them.” That was the case before the Covid era — and even more so now….Further, he says, the election was no MAGA mandate: “If the exit polls are roughly accurate, about 19 million people who had voted for [Joe] Biden in 2020 just stayed home,” Podhorzer writes. “And, again, if the exits are roughly accurate, nearly all of those who stayed home had said they were voting against Trump when they cast ballots in 2020.”….Podhorzer suggests the 2024 election results were in part about media coverage that didn’t capture Trump’s threat, as well as Americans’ discontent with an economic system and job market that are more precarious than ever — with neither major political party interested in solving those issues….Rather than ask what Democrats can do to win back working-class voters, Podhozer says the better question is: “What do working people have to do to get a Democratic Party?” The other related and necessary collective project, he says, is taking on a Supreme Court that has deemed itself Washington’s only “actual functioning legislative body,” and has fundamentally rewritten the rules of our democracy. ”

In Perez’s interview,  Podhorzer says, “The big difference, what was most alarming this fall, was how much less alarmed everyone was in the media and civil society than they had been four years ago. Four years ago, we had honestly forthright coverage of how bad Trump was, and very much less this time around. And although there were excellent side pieces on that, it was as if the people doing the daily reporting about the election didn’t bother to read it, and just covered it like it was a normal election. People were just not as alarmed….In nine of the last 10 elections, they’ve thrown out either the president or the party controlling the House or the Senate. That never came close to happening with that regularity before. Americans are just fed up with a political system that’s not responsive to their actual needs, or understands the challenges in their lives, or speaks to them, and they’re caught between two bad alternatives, in their minds, and this is the politics we get. All this stuff about, after the fact, doing a head count on this demographic group and that demographic group and all of that is confusing what the effective cause is….A very disproportionate share of those 2020 noncollege Biden voters stayed home. They didn’t move right; they moved away from the political process altogether. The inevitable effect of that is that the noncollege voters in 2024 were more Republican, simply because fewer noncollege Democrats bothered to vote. To be clear — I’m not saying that there were no conversions — there were, but that’s hardly the biggest part of the story. And to be clear this is not meant to suggest that Democrats have nothing to answer for — if anything they have more to answer for, since all they had to do was get them out to vote again.”

Podhorzer observes that “both parties completely ignore the value of job security and the security about the expectations that you need to think about raising a family or having a reasonable, good life. These are all things that the people in the leadership of both parties don’t experience at all. They’re blind to that aspect of what’s going on. And instead, they just look at data like GDP growth or unemployment or all of that, and don’t understand what’s important to them in their own minds — quality of life and relationships, how your kids are doing, their schools — is increasingly cut off for many voters. Instead, it’s then: “Well, why don’t they understand they just got a 10 percent raise after inflation? And they don’t know how good it is.”….in terms of [Supreme Court justices] putting their thumb on the scales, I think that really understates what’s going on. What was going on is that you had a portion of the business community, along with the wealthy, who never wanted to accept the New Deal, and who did not want to accept government intervention in their businesses at all, combined with the Southern, theocratic approach that never accepted the challenges to the social and racial hierarchy. They understood that they were in a position where undoing any of it couldn’t happen through a democratic process. You could not pass a bill in Congress to say, let’s let billionaires spend as much money in the elections as possible, and then when they get favors back from the government, that’s not corruption. You couldn’t get a bill in Congress that says, let everybody have firearms. The Supreme Court has been the actual functioning legislative body in this country for the last 16 years, and it’s because they keep grabbing cases to use as pretexts to legislate, and we’re just sort of standing by and letting it happen….I’ve been asked like 10 billion times how do Democrats win back the working class. Probably until I say it to you, you haven’t even heard someone say: What do working people have to do to get a Democratic Party? The unexamined us and them in that sentence is the problem. [Democrats are] like, “What do we give them off the table?” The answer is a seat at the table….”

Here’s some revealing nuggets by Zachary Bass at Axios: “….Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who campaigned for Vice President Harris, was unsparing in his critique this week of a party that he believes “has abandoned working-class people.”….”While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right,” Sanders wrote, citing failures to tackle wage inequality and costly health care….

• Some critics say it doesn’t matter what Biden did: The Democratic brand is toxic because it’s associated — fairly or unfairly — with sneering elites and activists whose language alienates working-class Americans.
• “The fundamental mistake people make is condescension. A lot of elected officials get calloused to the ways that they’re disrespecting people,” Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.), who won re-election in a rural Trump district, told the Times.

….Post-election polling by the Democratic strategy group Blueprint found that swing voters’ top reason for not choosing Harris was a belief that she was “focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.”

• Harris and Democrats barely talked about trans issues during the campaign — but Republicans spent nearly $123 million on TV ads referencing trans athletes.
• “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” a narrator declared in what the Trump campaign and Harris allies both found to be one of the most effective ads of the cycle, including with Black and Latino voters.

….Some Democrats say there’s a far simpler explanation for the working-class shift: the ferocious headwinds of inflation, which have fueled incumbent losses around the world since COVID.

• Compounding the pain of high prices was the insistence that the U.S. economy is “the envy of the world” — a claim backed by data, but clearly irrelevant to personal perception.
• “People are putting their groceries on their credit card. No one is listening to anything else you say if you try to talk them out of their lived experiences with data points from some economists,” Gluesenkamp Perez said.”

Some political wisdom shared by Tara Suter in her post, “Ezra Klein says Democrats ‘need to take seriously how much scarcity harms them’” at The Hill:

Ezra Klein, a columnist with The New York Times, said that Democrats “need to take seriously how much scarcity harms them” in a Monday post on the social platform X.

In his post, the left-leaning Klein shared some of his “thoughts from the conversations I’ve been having and hearing over the last week,” including a “hard question” about “how to build a Democratic Party that isn’t always 2 points away from losing to Donald Trump — or worse.”

Klein said in another part of his post-Trump election post that “Democrats need to take seriously how much scarcity harms them.”

“Housing scarcity became a core Trump-Vance argument against immigrants. Too little clean energy becomes the argument for rapidly building out more fossil fuels,” he continued. “A successful liberalism needs to believe in *and deliver* abundance of the things people need most.”

Klein also said, “The Democratic Party is supposed to represent the working class.”

“If it isn’t doing that, it is failing,” he continued.

Klein’s words somewhat mirror those of Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who said in a Sunday thread on X that a purer form of “economic populism should be” the American left’s “tentpole,” but also argued that “true economic populism is bad for our high-income base.”

Back in February 2024, Klein was an early advocate for President Biden’s exit from the presidential race, saying Democrats “should help him find his way to that, to being the thing he said he would be in 2020, the bridge to the next generation of Democrats.”

“And then I think Democrats should meet in August at the convention to do what political parties have done at conventions so many times before, organize victory,” he said at the time.

Democrats should create a consensus economic reform package that is so good that hefty majorities of voters will support it. Not an easy task, but not as hard as losing another presidential election.

From “Despite presidential headwinds, these Senate Democratic candidates won states Harris lost” by Arit John at CNN Politics: “As of Monday afternoon, Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin – who won the race to replace retiring Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow – had won 24,000 fewer votes than Harris in the state, but her Republican opponent received 123,000 fewer votes than Trump. In Wisconsin, Sen. Tammy Baldwin won roughly 500 more votes than Harris, while Republican Eric Hovde missed out on 57,000 votes Trump received. And in Nevada, Sen. Jacky Rosen trailed Harris by 3,000 votes, while Republican Sam Brown had received 70,000 fewer votes than Trump….In some races, the differences between the Senate candidates’ and Harris’ performances were more pronounced among subsections of the Democratic coalition. In Nevada, Rosen won 50% of the Latino vote, while Brown won 43%, according to exit polls. Latino voters in the state, however, were evenly split between Harris and Trump, with both candidates winning 48%. While Trump won independents by 2 points, Rosen won the group by 6….This year’s most endangered Democratic incumbents – Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio – were seeking reelection in states Trump won in 2020 by 16 and 8 points, respectively. Tester lost his bid for a fourth term to Republican Tim Sheehy, trailing by about 7 points as of Monday afternoon (Harris lost the state by 20 points). Brown, who lost to Republican Bernie Moreno, was trailing by 4 points as of Monday, while Harris trailed Trump by 11 points….“They ran respectable races and damn near pulled it off, but it’s so hard to do, even in a closely run swing state,” said Matt Bennett, the executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank. “Doing it in a red state is now probably impossible.””

“Overall,” John continues, “Democratic Senate candidates received more votes than Harris in about half of this year’s races, including in less competitive states such as Minnesota, Virginia and Missouri. Republican Senate candidates across the country ran behind Trump in about 80% of states. A notable exception was Maryland, where Republican former Gov. Larry Hogan ran nearly 9 points ahead of Trump and received more than 200,000 more votes. (Hogan lostto Democrat Angela Alsobrooks.)….In addition to Tester and Brown, Republicans are also counting Pennsylvania as a flip. CNN has not yet projected a winner in the race, where Democratic Sen. Bob Casey is trailing Republican Dave McCormick by 0.6% with 95% of the vote in….Even before Harris became the Democratic nominee, Senate candidates were running ahead of President Joe Biden. Candidates in battleground states sought to distance themselves from the president while also running on key parts of the Biden-Harris agenda, such as the provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that capped the cost of insulin at $35 for Medicare patients and new projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law….In one ad, Baldwin noted that both Biden and Trump signed bills she introduced to bolster American manufacturing. On costs, candidates from Rosen to Casey vowed to take on “price gouging” from corporations….After the change atop the ticket, Democrats were more willing to campaign with Harris, who energized the party base in the early days of her 107-day campaign. Slotkin, Casey, Baldwin and Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, the Senate nominee in Arizona, all spoke at the August Democratic National Convention. (Tester, Brown and Rosen skipped the convention altogether.)”

Geoffrey Skelley opines on the same topic in “How Democrats won Senate seats in states that Trump carried” at 538:,” and writes, “the 2024 election represents a notable uptick in split-ticket results and downturn in same-party outcomes. Based on the results as they stand right now, different parties won the presidential and Senate contests in 12 percent of the states that had both contests on the ballot, the highest share since 18 percent of 2012’s presidential-Senate races had split-ticket outcomes….Naturally, this has led to easy headlines about split-ticket voting making a comeback. And there’s some truth to that, both in split-ticket outcomes and in relatively larger differences in the vote margins between presidential and Senate races in the same state. If we look at contemporaneous presidential and Senate races in which both a Democrat and Republican were on the ballot (including independent Sens. Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont as Democrats), 2020 saw the narrowest gap in the margin of victory between the two major parties in these types of races since at least 1992 — 2.8 points in margin. Based on the present results, the median gap in 2024 will be higher, around 4 points — though still historically quite low, roughly half the almost 8-point mark in 2016….Yet only one of the four likely split-ticket outcomes appears to have come about because a big percentage of voters cast ballots simultaneously for Trump and the Democratic Senate nominee. In Arizona, which remains unprojected, Gallego has won nearly 6 percent more raw votes than Harris has, while Republican Kari Lake has won almost 10 percent fewer raw votes than Trump — a signal that a not-insignificant group of Trump voters backed Gallego….Now, a few other states did see sizable amounts of split-ticket voting between the presidential and Senate races that, potentially, stood to affect control of the Senate. In Montana, Democratic Sen. Jon Tester significantly outperformed Harris, winning 19 percent more raw votes than she did, while in Ohio, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown won about 5 percent more. In Maryland, former Gov. Larry Hogan gave Republicans an unusually strong candidate in a blue state, and he won a whopping 24 percent more raw votes than Trump did.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

The Republican Party, according to Democrats, has given rein to some of the darker impulses in the national psyche, has shown flagrant disregard for democratic norms and offers little to the American people in terms of effective policy. There is considerable truth to this indictment and Democrats have not been shy about making their case in uninhibited language, including the obligatory comparison of their opponents to “fascists” and “Nazis.”

Yet Democrats cannot decisively beat their opponents as this election has shown once again. The party is uncompetitive among white working-class voters and among voters in exurban, small town, and rural America. This puts them at a massive structural disadvantage given an American electoral system that gives disproportionate weight to these voters, especially in Senate and presidential elections. To add to the problem, Democrats are now hemorrhaging nonwhite working-class voters across the country.

The facts must be faced. The Democratic coalition today is not fit for purpose. It cannot beat Republicans consistently in enough areas of the country to achieve dominance and implement its agenda at scale. The Democratic Party may be the party of blue America, especially deep blue metro America, but its bid to be the party of the ordinary American, the common man and woman, is falling short.

There is a simple—and painful—reason for this. The Democrats really are no longer the party of the common man and woman. The priorities and values that dominate the party today are instead those of educated, liberal America which only partially overlap—and sometimes not at all—with those of ordinary Americans.

This election has made this problem manifest in the starkest possible terms, as the Democratic coalition shattered into pieces. Trump not only won, he won fairly easily, carrying all seven swing states and, much to Democrats’ shock, the national popular vote. Below I review the demographic trends driving this shattering.

Recall that before the election, there was much debate, bordering on denialism, about whether and to what extent demographic trends revealed by most polling data would actually undercut the Democratic coalition in the election. Now we have results and it is clear those trends were real and that they did massively weaken the Democratic coalition.

Here are some demographic comparisons using the AP VoteCast data—which I consider to be far superior to the exits. These are national comparisons using 2024 and 2020 VoteCast data. Comparisons of state level demographic patterns between the two elections generally follow the national pattern.

The gender gap: Contrary to much pre-election discussion, Harris’s margin among women was actually less than Biden’s in 2020, 7 points for Harris vs. 12 points for Biden. And the Trump margin was better among men, 10 points vs. 5 points in 2020. The overall gender gap went from 17 points in 2020 to….17 points in 2024. How about that. The Democrats invested so much hope in the women’s vote, especially the idea that the abortion issue would spike their margin among women, and it just did not pan out.

Even more startling, Democrats believed with an almost religious fervor that young women would move sharply in their direction given liberal trends among this demographic and, again, the salience of the abortion issue. And, again, it did not happen. Women under 30 supported Biden by 32 points in 2020 but supported Harris by just 18 points in this election, a 14-point shift toward Trump. Among young men, the swing was even harder: these voters supported Biden by 15 points in 2020 but supported Trump by 14 points in 2024. That’s a 29-point pro-Republican swing. As a result, the gender gap did widen among young voters, but it was because young men moved more sharply toward Trump than young women did. That’s not exactly what Democrats had in mind.

The working-class (non-college) vote: Among all working-class voters, Trump dramatically widened his advantage, tripling his margin from 4 points in 2020 to 12 points in this election. That included moving from 25 to 29 points among white working-class voters and radically compressing his deficit among nonwhite working-class voters from 48 points in 2020 to 33 points this election. Compare that margin to what Obama had in 2012: according to Catalist, he carried the nonwhite working class by 67 points in that election. That indicates that Democrats have had their margin among this core constituency more than cut in half over the last 12 years. Ouch. So much for the “rising American electorate.”

And it’s time to face the fact that the GOP has become the party of America’s working class. Democrats hate to admit that and mutter that they represent the “interests” of the working class. But the numerical pattern is now too powerful to be denied. Instead of denying the obvious—or, worse, blaming the dumb workers for not knowing their own interests—Democrats would be well-advised to accept this new reality and seek to change it.

Unless they’re content to be primarily the party of America’s well-off. Harris lost voters under $50,000 in household income as well as voters from $50,000 to $100,000 in income. But she did carry voters with over $100,000 in household by 8 points, one place where Harris did improve over Biden in 2020. This is not, as they say, your father’s Democratic Party. Not even close.

The youth vote: The idea that the youth vote might bail out on the Democrats this election was strenuously resisted in Democratic-friendly quarters but happen it did. Democrat support among voters under 30 collapsed from a 25-point advantage in 2020 to a mere 6 points in this election.

This should be especially disturbing for Democrats since this is the first presidential election where this age group is overwhelmingly composed on Gen Z voters. This does not augur well for the future. Nor does their performance among voters 30-44, now dominated by the Millennials, where Harris’s advantage over Trump was only 4 points. The great generational replacement theory of future Democratic dominance is another theory Democrats would be well-advised to discard.

There is much more to be said about shifting voting patterns in this election (and it will be said!) But for now, these data do indicate that a lot of the trends the polls were picking up on the compression of Democratic margins among key groups was real. And that should be food for thought for Democrats as they sift through the wreckage of their shattered coalition.

As they do so, here’s an idea to start with: have every Democrat ostentatiously say they subscribe to the following principles. These principles would signal to normie voters, particularly working-class voters of all races, that Democrats’ values and priorities are not so different from theirs. That’s a prerequisite for getting these voters to listen to Democrats’ pitch and take it seriously.

• Equality of opportunity is a fundamental American principle; equality of outcome is not.
• America is not perfect but it is good to be patriotic and proud of the country.
• Discrimination and racism are bad but they are not the cause of all disparities in American society.
• Racial achievement gaps are bad and we should seek to close them. However, they are not due just to racism and standards of high achievement should be maintained for people of all races.
• No one is completely without bias but calling all white people racists who benefit from white privilege and American society a white supremacist society is not right or fair.
• America benefits from the presence of immigrants and no immigrant, even if illegal, should be mistreated. But border security is hugely important, as is an enforceable system that fairly decides who can enter the country.
• Police misconduct and brutality against people of any race is wrong and we need to reform police conduct and recruitment. However, more and better policing is needed to get criminals off the streets and secure public safety. That cannot be provided by “defunding the police”.
• There are underlying differences between men and women that should not all be attributed to sexism. However, discrimination on the basis of gender is wrong and should always be opposed.
• People who want to live as a gender different from their biological sex should have that right. However, biological sex is real and spaces limited to biological women in areas like sports and prisons should be preserved. Medical treatments like drugs and surgery are serious interventions that should not be available on demand, especially for children.
• Language policing has gone too far; by and large, people should be able to express their views without fear of sanction by employer, school, institution or government. Free speech is a fundamental American value that should be safeguarded everywhere.
• Climate change is a serious problem but it won’t be solved overnight. As we move toward a clean energy economy with an “all of the above” strategy, energy must continue to be cheap, reliable and abundant. That means fossil fuels, especially natural gas, will continue to be an important part of the mix.
• We must make America more equal, but we also must make it richer. There is no contradiction between the two. A richer country will make it easier to promote equality.
• Degrowth is the worst idea on the left since Communism. Ordinary voters want abundance: more stuff, more opportunity, cheaper prices, nicer, more comfortable lives. The only way to provide this is with more growth, not less.
• We need to make it much easier to build things, from housing to transmission lines to nuclear reactors. That cannot happen without serious regulatory and permitting reform.
• America needs a robust industrial policy that goes far beyond climate policy. We are in direct competition with nations like China, a competition we cannot win without building on cutting edge scientific research in all fields.
• National economic development should prioritize the “left-behind” areas of the country. The New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt did this and we can do it today. “Trickle-down” economics from rich metropolitan areas is not working.

A Democratic Party united around these principles would be a far more appealing party to those millions of voters who are leaving the Democratic Party behind. It’s time to start calling them back.

“Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?” by TNR editor Michael Tomasky is cross-posted from The New Republic:

I’ve had a lot of conversations since Tuesday revolving around the question of why Donald Trump won. The economy and inflation. Kamala Harris didn’t do this or that. Sexism and racism. The border. That trans-inmate ad that ran a jillion times. And so on.

These conversations have usually proceeded along lines where people ask incredulously how a majority of voters could have believed this or that. Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president?

The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”

But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.

The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.

If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.

I’ve been in the media for three decades, and I’ve watched this happen from the front row. Fox News came on the air in 1996. Then, it was an annoyance, a little bug the mainstream media could brush off its shoulder. There was also Rush Limbaugh; still, no comparison between the two medias. Rush was talented, after a fashion anyway, but couldn’t survive in a mainstream lane (recall how quickly the experiment of having him be an ESPN color commentator went off the rails.) But in the late 1990s, and after the Internet exploded and George W. Bush took office, the right-wing media grew and grew. At first, the liberal media grew as well along with the Internet, in the form of a robust blogosphere that eventually spawned influential, agenda-setting web sites like HuffPost. But billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left—whose ad-supported, VC-funded operations started to fizzle out once social media and Google started eating up the revenue pie.

And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beachball, and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball, and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.

This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.

And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times.

That atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at all. In that world, ruled by a traditional mainstream media, Trump would have been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they failed to do in real life—banded together to marginalize him.

But the existence of Fox changed everything. Fox hosted the early debates, which Trump won not with intelligence, but outrageousness. He tapped into the grievance culture Fox had nursed among conservatives for years. He had (most of the time) Rupert Murdoch’s personal blessing. In 2015-16, Fox made Trump possible.

And this year, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media elected him. I discussed all this Thursday with Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America, who watches lots of Fox News so the rest of us don’t have to. He made the crucial point—and you must understand this—that nearly all the crazy memes that percolated into the news-stream during this election came not from Trump or JD Vance originally, but from somewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem.

The fake story about Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio eating cats and dogs, for example, started with a Facebook post citing second- and third-hand sources, Gertz told me; it then “circulated on X and was picked up by all the major right-wing influencers.” Only then did Vance, a very online dude, notice it and decide to run with it. And then Trump said it himself at the debate. But it started in the right-wing media.

Likewise with the post-debate ABC “whistleblower” claims, which Gertz wrote about at the time. This was the story that ABC, which hosted the only presidential debate this election, fed Team Harris the questions in advance. This started, Gertz wrote, as a “wildly flimsy internet rumor launched by a random pro-Trump X poster.” Soon enough, the right-wing media was all over it.

Maybe that one didn’t make a huge difference (although who knows?), but this one, I believe, absolutely did: the idea that Harris and Joe Biden swiped emergency aid away from the victims of Hurricane Helene (in mostly Southern, red states) and gave it all to undocumented migrants. It did not start with Trump or his campaign or Vance or the Republican National Committee or Lindsey Graham. It started on Fox. Only then did the others pick it up. And it was key, since this was a moment when Harris’s momentum in the polling averages began to flag.

I think a lot of people who don’t watch Fox or listen to Sinclair radio don’t understand this crucial chicken-and-egg point. They assume that Trump says something, and the right-wing media amplify it. That happens sometimes. But more often, it’s the other way around. These memes start in the media sphere, then they become part of the Trump agenda.

I haven’t even gotten to the economy, about which there is so much to say. Yes—inflation is real. But the Biden economy has been great in many ways. The U.S. economy, wrote The Economist in mid-October, is “the envy of the world.” But in the right-wing media, the horror stories were relentless. And mainstream economic reporting too often followed that lead. Allow me to make the world’s easiest prediction: After 12:00 noon next January 20, it won’t take Fox News and Fox Business even a full hour to start locating every positive economic indicator they can find and start touting those. Within weeks, the “roaring Trump economy” will be conventional wisdom. (Eventually, as some of the fruits from the long tail of Bidenomics start growing on the vine, Trump may become the beneficiary of some real-world facts as well, taking credit for that which he opposed and regularly denounced.)

Back to the campaign. I asked Gertz what I call my “Ulan Bator question.” If someone moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia in the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris? “You would know that she is a very stupid person,” Gertz said. “You’d know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden. That she’s a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care about you.”

Same Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he’s been “the target of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years,” that he is under constant assault; and most importantly, that he is “doing it all for you.”

To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side’s view of things. It’s simply “the news.” This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by Sinclair, and it, too, has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the oped page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro.

Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff. I would beg them to see it. Watch some Fox. Listen to some Christian radio. Experience the news that millions of Americans are getting on a daily basis. You’ll pretty quickly come to understand what I’m saying here.

And then contemplate this fact: If you think they’re done, you’re in fantasy land. They’re not happy with the rough parity, the slight advantage they have now. They want media domination. Sinclair bought the once glorious Baltimore Sun. Don’t think they’ll stop there. I predict Sinclair or the News Corp. will own The Washington Post one day. Maybe sooner than we think.

I implore you. Contemplate this. If you’re of a certain age, you have a living memory of revolutions in what we used to call the Third World. Question: What’s the first thing every guerilla army, whether of the left or the right, did once they seized the palace? They took over the radio or television station. First. There’s a reason for that.

It’s the same reason Viktor Orban told CPAC in 2022: “Have your own media.”

This is a crisis. The Democratic brand is garbage in wide swaths of the country, and this is the reason. Consider this point. In Missouri on Tuesday, voters passed a pro-abortion rights initiative, and another that raised the minimum wage and mandated paid leave. These are all Democratic positions. But as far as electing someone to high office, the Man-Boy Love Party could probably come closer than the Democrats. Trump beat Harris there by 18 points, and Senator Josh Hawley beat Lucas Kunce, who ran a good race and pasted Hawley in their debate, by 14 points.

The reason? The right-wing media. And it’s only growing and growing. And I haven’t even gotten to social media and Tik Tok and the other platforms from which far more people are getting their news these days. The right is way ahead on those fronts too. Liberals must wake up and understand this and do something about it before it’s too late, which it almost is.

I wrote this insta-reaction to Trump’s victory at New York in the wee hours of the morning, after many hours of staring at numbers and trying to understand them. It’s probably as good an analysis as I can manage days later:

We will be debating the contours of Donald Trump’s comeback presidential victory over Kamala Harris for a good while. Certainly among Democrats, this close but conclusive defeat will be interpreted as flowing from a host of party weaknesses and candidate and campaign mistakes. And Republicans, as winners do, will likely over-interpret their success as representing a watershed victory that will turn into governing coalition that will last for decades.

The simplest explanation, though, may be the most compelling: This was a classic “change” election in which the “out” party had an advantage that the governing party could not overcome. Yes, the outcome was in doubt because Democrats managed to replace a very unpopular incumbent with an interesting if untested successor, and also because the GOP chose a nominee whose constant demonstration of his own unpopular traits threatened to take over the whole contest. In the end Trump normalized his crude and erratic character by endless repetition; reduced scrutiny of his lawless misconduct by denouncing critics and prosecutors alike as politically motivated; and convinced an awful lot of unhappy voters that he hated the same people and institutions they did.

Nobody for a moment doubted that Trump would bring change. And indeed, his signature Make America Great Again slogan and message came to have a double meaning. Yes, for some it meant (as it did in 2016) a return to the allegedly all-American culture of the 20th century, with its traditional hierarchies; moral certainties and (for some) white male leadership. But for others MAGA meant very specifically referred to the perceived peace and prosperity of the pre-pandemic economy and society presided over, however turbulently, Trump. When Republicans gleefully asked swing voters if they were better off before Joe Biden became president, a veritable coalition of voters with recent and long-standing grievances over conditions in the country had as simple an answer as they did when Ronald Reagan used it to depose Jimmy Carter more than a half-century ago.

Just as Democrats will wonder whether a candidate different from Harris would have won this election, Republicans ought to wonder whether anyone other than Trump would have won more easily without the collateral damage to their principles, their sensibilities, and their long-term prospects. It’s true that their craven surrender to Trump made it possible for his campaign to present a unified front that took him far along to road to victory in a polarized electorate, despite all sorts of private grumbling over his countless conspiracy theories and insults to opponents. But it’s not clear at all Trump can bring the kind of change he came to represent to his voters. Indeed, the millions of people for whom inflation became not only an economic handicap but a symbol of government fecklessness could easily and quickly become disillusioned with Trump’s strange mix of protectionism and tax cuts if, as economists warn, it will rekindle inflation and spark global economic warfare. It’s a particularly troubling sign for the GOP that so many potential Trump hirelings and allies have wildly conflicting expectations of what he will actually do.

But for now, Trump’s unlikely comeback coincided almost entirely with an election in which voters wanted change enough to ignore or embrace the dark side of his legacy and agenda. It’s his luck and probably this country’s misfortune, but there’s nothing for it but to move ahead with fear and trembling.

Consider “Latino Men Were the Big Defectors—but They Weren’t the Only Story: Here’s how Harris failed to replicate Biden’s 2020 victory over Trump” by TNR editor Michael Tomasky, cross-posted here from The New Republic:

How in God’s name did the Democrats lose yet another election to Donald Trump, after defeating him somewhat comfortably four years ago?

If you go carefully through the exit polls and compare them to 2020, you actually see a fair amount of stability. Even a little modest improvement in some places. In 2020, Trump won the white vote 58–41 percent. On Tuesday, he won it by less, 55–43. Among white women, Kamala Harris did a bit better than Joe Biden: Trump won white women 55–44 over Biden and 52–47 over Harris. The result among white men wasn’t statistically different: Trump won them 61–38 over Biden and 59–39 over Harris. For all the talk of defections among Black men, the exit polls say otherwise. Biden won them 79–19, and Harris carried them 78–20. She also won among independents, although by a few points less than Biden did.

Only one group of voters really stands out. Biden had won Latinos 65–32. Harris won them by only 53–45. And the biggest change of all is among Latino men: Biden won them 59–36, and this time, Trump beat Harris outright, 54–44.

At the same time, the breadth of the Trump—and Republican—win doesn’t seem like it can be pinned solely on that. He won the popular voteby five million. He won every swing state that’s been called so far—not by huge margins, but also not by the razor-thin margins that characterized 2016 and 2020. He came closer in blue states—New Jersey, Illinois—than anyone in many years, going back probably to the previous century. And so far, all those MAGA senators have swept their Democratic opponents.

This is probably explained by the fact that the Trump vote, again, was underestimated by the polls—by around 3 percent, John Heilemann said Wednesday on Morning Joe. This was a huge debate during this campaign. I was among those who thought the pollsters, who had made that mistake in 2016 and 2020, were overcompensating this time around and undercounting Harris voters. I thought Harris would narrowly win white women, and win women overall by more than 15 points. I was wrong. (Her margin among women was just 10 points.)

So it wasn’t all Latino men, by any means, but in the exit polls, their vote is the only eye-popping shift. The “floating island of garbage” didn’t matter. May have helped, who knows. There’s no breakdown yet that I’ve seen of different Latino groups, but Trump’s Puerto Rican support apparently did not crater. He outright won heavily Latino counties in New Jersey, for example, that Democrats usually win on autopilot.

So the question is why. Cataclysmic as this result is, and what it’s going to lead to in this country over the next four years, I think people may have a tendency to get too hysterical in answering this question.

For example, Harris didn’t suck as a candidate. In fact, she ran a good campaign overall. I thought “We’re not going back” was powerful, and her optimistic tone made a good contrast to Trump’s darkness. She was overly cautious on some things. Israel apparently hurt her in Dearborn, but there was no widespread left-wing revolt against her. Jill Stein got a paltry 611,760 votes, versus 1,449,370 in 2016. Cornel West didn’t even register in the Associated Press tally I checked Wednesday morning. Likewise, few centrists ran away from her. Except for Latino men, and to a lesser extent Latina women, she held the Democratic Party together. Polls kept telling us that Democratic enthusiasm was through the roof.

I think she made two specific late mistakes—one was something she did, and the other was something she didn’t do.

The mistake she made was saying on The View on October 8 that she couldn’t think of anything she’d have done differently than Biden. Various exit poll results tell us that in a sense, she was seen as the incumbent, and she paid an obviously steep price for Biden’s 40 percent approval rating. That became a Trump commercial.

And maybe this was all that simple. As numerous people have now pointed out, every incumbent party in a developed country that had to deal with Covid and inflation, whether a party of the left or the right, has now been voted out.

But it also isn’t that simple. The thing Harris didn’t do: I kept wishing that I would see an ad by one of the prominent Black or Latino men who endorsed her that didn’t focus on praising Harris or even denouncing Trump in the normal, he’s-a-threat-to-democracy way. I wanted to see, say, LeBron James talking directly to young men of color about why Trump was not a tough guy at all; why he was a weakling and a bully, and explaining that a real man doesn’t lie or make excuses or disrespect women. Who knows, that kind of thing could have made a difference.

But millions of men bought Trump’s idea of masculinity. How much outright sexism and racism drove the vote? We’ll never know. But enough. This is another mistake I and probably a lot of people on the broad left made. Sexism and racism (the former undoubtedly more of a factor here than the latter) will never disappear, but there seemed reason to think that by 2024, they’d be minor factors. They may well have barred the door.

I might add a third mistake: not going on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Another exit poll result that surprised me was that late deciders were evenly split—completely not what preelection polls were suggesting. I wonder if the pro-Trump late deciders were influenced by Rogan’s endorsement of him.

And nothing Trump did mattered. None of the lies, the hate, the microphone oral sex, the musing about Liz Cheney facing bullets. Nothing. As Alex Shephard argued here, Democrats have spent nearly a decade trying to convince swing voters that Trump was a unique threat to the republic, and they’ve failed.

Now, we will live with that failure, and with a fully unleashed Trump, and his idea of masculinity, for the next four years. I fear for the people he’s going to round up (and we should definitely take him at his word on that); for transgender people; for Palestinians, for whom it can get worse; for Ukrainians, for whom it can get far worse; for a lot of people who’ll be on the receiving end of his brutish policies. And we’ll see, in a year or two, how different a country the United States is going to be.

Some more Wednesday morning quarterbacking, this one from “Eight takeaways from the 2024 election” by Eric Bradner, Gregory Krieg and Daniel Strauss, at CNN Politics: “Trump made gains with nearly every demographic group compared with his 2020 loss, CNN’s exit polls showed. And his apparent near-mirroring of the 2016 map would indicate that he paid no political price for his lies about fraud in that election, his efforts to overturn it, or the criminal charges he has faced since then….Though several states are still tallying their results, Trump’s road to victory in 2024 appears to have been nearly identical to his 2016 win….Both campaigns had long been focused on seven swing states: the “blue wall” of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and the Sun Belt battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada….The final count could take weeks, but Trump also holds the popular vote lead. If that edge holds, he’d be the first Republican since George W. Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote….The only segment of the electorate with which Harris made notable gains over Biden’s 2020 performance was with college-educated women — the voters who had propelled the party’s strong suburban performance in the 2022 midterms….Harris performed much worse than Biden among voters who said they thought abortion should be legal in most cases — even though the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in between the two elections….

Bradner, Krieg and Strauss continue, “With Harris’ loss of the presidency and with the Senate coming under GOP control, the House could become the party’s last line of defense in Washington….What that would mean is, simply, that Trump would be unable to pass much, if any, legislation and perhaps more importantly would find himself hamstrung as he tries to wind back Biden’s policies….Trump’s margins in rural America appear to have been simply too large to overtake….Trump’s campaign pushed hard to court men, and particularly men of color. CNN’s exit polls showed it paid off….Chief among Trump’s gains compared with his performance against Biden in 2020: Latino men. Trump won that cohort by 8 points, four years after losing them by 23 points. It’s a result that showed his campaign’s efforts to court those voters paid off — and that the late focus on a comedian mocking Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally didn’t cause the damage Harris’ campaign hoped it would. The gains were concentrated most heavily among Latinos under age 65….Trump also made gains in key places among Black men, more than doubling his 2020 performance in North Carolina….Nearly three-fourths of voters said they were dissatisfied or angry with the way things are going in the United States, CNN’s exit polls found. Trump won about three-fifths of those voters….Harris slipped compared with Biden’s performance four years ago among young voters, independents, moderates and union households….”

From “Democrats Botched the Election—Six Mistakes That Led to Trump Victory” by Kahleda Rahman at Newsweek: “If Biden had exited sooner, Democrats might have held a very brief primary contest to choose a candidate that represented a clear break with the current administration and appealed to enough voters to defeat Trump….Instead, Democrats coalesced around Harris, and she won the nomination without Democratic voters having a say, in a process that some criticized as undemocratic….The choice of Walz had also disappointed supporters of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who they thought could have helped Democrats win the election’s largest battleground state. Trump won Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes this year….Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told Newsweek in statement: “It is important for Democratic and other elected officials to recognize that Vice President Harris’ steep drop in support in key states compared to President Biden’s 2020 victory resulted, in part, from the deep frustration and disillusionment that many young, Muslim, Arab, Black and other voters feel with the Biden-Harris administration due to its steadfast financial and military support for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.”….Exit polling indicates Harris did worse with Latino voters than Biden did in 2020, with Latino men in particular shifting to Trump, who has pledged a mass deportation of immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally….Social media may have also contributed to Trump’s victory….While the vice president embraced a digital-first strategy and limited interviews with traditional media, her campaign’s social media reach was likely dwarfed by the Trump campaign’s on X (formerly Twitter)….X owner Elon Musk spent months using the platform to amplify the Trump campaign’s message. He also hosted a $1-million-a-day voter sweepstakes in swing states….”It’s about time the Democratic Party come to terms with the fact that a vast majority of the American public lives in a media environment — from Fox to Twitter to podcasts — that functions as a Republicanpropaganda machine,” Matt McDermott, a Democratic strategist, wrote on X. “Ignoring this reality is no longer a tenable solution.”

In “Democrats keep forgetting the working class: As right-wing politicians scoop up the blue-collar vote, the left has its head in the sand,” Jamie Dettmer writes at Politico: “The former and now future U.S. president’s demagogue genius got him so far, but the Democrats offered him yet again the opening because they’ve increasingly lost touch with their traditional constituents: working class and lower-middle-income voters, who have very different preoccupations than those of most of the party’s leadership and activists. The Democrats have consistently failed to understand the reasons for working-class disaffection — let alone find remedies to offer them….The cleavage between Democrats and the working class has long been in the making, stretching back to the late 1960s when Richard Nixon assembled a resentful populist coalition of working- and middle-class voters with a blue-collar strategy based, in his words, on “character and guts.” In 1980, 47 percent of all blue-collar voters supported Ronald Reagan (44 percent of those from labor union households back­ed him)….Last year, when asked which president in recent decades had done the most for average working families, 44 percent named Trump compared to just 12 percent for Biden.” The article sees the same basic problem afflicting Social Democratic parties  in Europe.