As a political history buff I became fascinated with the history of presidential state funerals, and soon realized why Jimmy Carter’s commemoration on January 9 will be unique, so I wrote about it at New York:

There have been 14 official state funerals in Washington for presidents and ex-presidents since the first, for William Henry Harrison, was held in 1841. Until the 1930 funeral of former president (and sitting chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) William Howard Taft, this particular honor was reserved for presidents who died in office. The upcoming January 9 memorial in Washington for the 39th president, Jimmy Carter, will be the fourth ex-presidential state funeral of the 21st century, but the first ever to coincide with the transition of power from one president to another.

Though President-elect Donald Trump regularly mocked Carter as a failed chief executive, his reaction to his predecessor’s death was surprisingly gracious, and he quickly indicated that he would attend the funeral. And as Joe Biden first revealed back in March 2023, Carter asked him to deliver a eulogy. So potentially, this state funeral will mark President Biden’s last big moment in the spotlight and a bit of a prequel to the second Trump inauguration. While Trump skipped Biden’s swearing-in in 2021, Biden will be present on January 20 to formally relinquish the office to his bitter rival.

It could be a moment of transition soon to be forgotten, but there are a number of symbolic implications that might be drawn from this crossing of diverging paths. This will be the first state funeral for a Democratic president since the one in 1973 for Lyndon Johnson, another Oval Office occupant who, like Biden, was pressured into withdrawing from a reelection bid. Could the 2024 election, like that of 1968, represent the beginning of an extended period of Republican domination of presidential elections? (The first was interrupted, as it happens, by Jimmy Carter’s one term in the White House.)

We can’t know that for a while, but we can likely rule out another possibility: that Trump and Biden will use the occasion of the ceremony honoring Carter to bury recent partisan grudges. They could probably both find something nice to say about Carter without offering much of an olive branch to their contemporary political foes. For Trump, Carter was an outsider who tried to shake up the federal government and his own party, while Biden (who actually supported Carter’s 1976 presidential bid as a freshman U.S. senator) can rightly view himself as a fellow centrist Democrat who was nonetheless a fierce partisan warrior. But Biden will have the unique opportunity to stand behind the pulpit of the National Cathedral and pay tribute to his predecessor in a way that adds a punctuation mark to his own one-term presidency.

One thing both Biden and Trump (and, for that matter, the other living ex-presidents, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama) can agree on is to hope that they will enjoy a post-presidency that competes with Carter’s in length, distinction, and the approbation of his fellow citizens. The 39th president certainly left this world more appreciated — and loved — than he was when he left the White House.

As a longtime Georgian and longtime observer of the 39th president, I wrote an obituary of the remarkable Jimmy Carter for New York:

Jimmy Carter was America’s oldest ex-president and had by far the longest former presidency. Indeed, his remarkable life — which ended today after 100 years — can be divided into the stretches before (38 years) and after (43 years) he held public office, with a comparatively short stretch of public service (four in the Georgia state senate, four as governor, and four as president, plus a couple of stints of campaigning) between those two eras. While his ascent to the presidency was in many respects astonishing, his record as a politician was at best mixed: He won one statewide political contest in Georgia and lost one, then won one presidential election and lost one. Assessments of his presidency never quite turned positive in hindsight, and for many years he continued to hold controversial positions on the ultimate hot-button international concern, the Middle East. Most recently, the return of inflation in the early 2020s brought back memories of one of the more painful aspects of his administration’s record.

Yet the man always known by the informal name of Jimmy became and remained a beloved figure in his postpresidency, owing in no small part to his dogged efforts to combat such basic scourges of the human condition as war, disease, political corruption, and homelessness.

Carter was born in 1924 on a large family peanut farm near the hamlet of Plains in southwestern Georgia, the son of an experienced farmer and entrepreneur, Earl, and a trained nurse, Lillian, the remarkable woman who eventually found fame by joining the Peace Corps at age 68 as her son ran for governor. He helped in his family’s agricultural and commercial ventures while growing up. (One, which he was later to revive and expand, was wine-making, unusual for rural Baptists at the time.) Though a dutiful son of the land, Carter longed for travel, and after some preliminary higher education, he gained admission to the U.S. Naval Academy in 1943, graduating in the top 10 percent of his class in 1946, shortly after World War II ended. Around the same time, he married Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister’s from Plains, and the couple soon began a family that ultimately included three sons and a daughter.

Carter was well embarked on a naval career (notably serving on the research staff of Hyman Rickover, the “father of the nuclear Navy,” whose hands-on taskmaster management style made a deep impression on the young officer) when his father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, leading Carter to secure a discharge and return to Plains to take over the family farm and businesses. By the end of the 1950s, he was both prosperous and restless, and he became involved in civic and political life. He entered politics at the larger tail end of Jim Crow, when it didn’t take much to get a reputation as a relative liberal on racial matters. Carter quietly qualified by supporting the desegregation of his own Southern Baptist congregation and refusing to join the militantly racist White Citizens’ Council movement when it reached his county. By the time he got to the state senate in 1962 (a judicial intervention aimed at a rival’s fraud forced a second election), he was known as a strong supporter of President John F. Kennedy.

But in Carter’s initial and subsequent campaigns prior to his election as governor, he was hardly a profile in courage on racial matters. In his first gubernatorial bid, in 1966, he cleverly positioned himself between the self-described liberal ex-governor Ellis Arnall and the notorious segregationist Lester Maddox. (I was a kiddie volunteer for that first statewide Carter campaign.) He narrowly missed making a Democratic runoff against Arnall mostly because of Republican crossover votes for Maddox, who was deemed the Democrat that GOP nominee Bo Callaway could most easily defeat. When write-in votes for Arnall forced the election into the legislature under Georgia’s archaic and poorly written Constitution, Carter joined most (but not all) Democrats in casting a party-line vote for the buffoonish racist Maddox. I was shocked to hear my hero’s voice clearly announcing a vote for “Lester G. Maddox” on the live radio broadcast of the balloting, and I did not support his subsequent gubernatorial effort.

Carter barely stopped running between 1966 and 1970, and he confirmed his twin reputations for cautious ambivalence on racial issues and impressive (if cynical) political skills. This time, his principal opponent was former governor Carl Sanders, who had earned the loyalty of Black voters during a relatively enlightened first term. While Carter was quietly wooing some of the same Black civil-rights leaders who would later spearhead his presidential run, his public campaign focused on a populist appeal to white rural and small-town voters who disliked “Cufflinks Carl” for his corporate ties and his racial moderation. Most notoriously, Carter supporters widely distributed photos of Sanders celebrating a victory with Black players from the Atlanta Hawks, the NBA team he partially owned. Carter also went out of his way to express solidarity with Alabama’s George Wallace, who was running an overtly racist campaign in 1970 to recapture power in Montgomery. Carter consolidated conservative white voters and nearly won a majority against Sanders in the first round of primaries, then dispatched the former governor handily in a runoff.

But upon taking office (after a pro forma general-election victory over Republican TV newsman Hal Suit), Carter engineered a sharp left turn on racial issues, making this blunt statement in his 1971 inaugural address:

“I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over … No poor, rural, weak, or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice.”

Thanks to his reputation for quiet decency on racial matters and the strength of his outreach to civil-rights leaders, his campaign demagoguery, not this new departure, was widely viewed as tactical and disposable.

While racially enlightened, Carter’s governorship (limited at the time to a single term) was to a significant extent focused on the dry process issue of government reorganization. He successfully proposed to consolidate 300 state agencies into 22. He made small but politically significant gestures in areas ranging from the equalization of public-education revenues to prison reform and environmental protection.

Meanwhile, like most southern (and not a few northern) politicians in both parties, Carter opposed busing to achieve school desegregation. He nonetheless kept himself in the national political news as an exemplar of “New South” Democratic governors (whose ranks included Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, Reubin Askew of Florida, and John West of South Carolina) who were outmaneuvering the old segregationists of their own party while heading off Republican gains in the region that threatened Democrats’ national viability. They were the first truly “national” Democrats in the South since the party had fully abandoned its ancient willingness to support, or at least tolerate, Jim Crow.

Carter’s astonishing rise to the presidency just two years after a meh single term as governor of a Deep South state was a testament to both his unique positioning in a Democratic Party struggling with realignment and the political skills he and his advisers often showed even as they were being mocked as backwoods rubes. Team Carter exploited the emergence of the Iowa caucuses as a pre–New Hampshire nominating contest and out-organized the field there. He then took advantage of national Democrats’ desire for someone to end the threat of Wallace’s presidential candidacy by securing support for one-on-one contests with the Alabaman in the South, which Carter won with the regionally resonant slogan “Don’t send them a message. Send them a president.” He used crucial support from the Atlanta-based King-family network of civil-rights stalwarts to head off attacks on his dubious background on racial matters and turned criticism of his lack of experience into an asset among voters still furious at Watergate-era Washington. Even his Baptist piety became a selling point among both Evangelicals (who had not yet begun their mass exodus to the GOP) and voters inclined to believe his “I’ll never tell you a lie” pledge.

But it was in the general-election contest against Gerald Ford that Carter’s unique regional political appeal became crucial, as I explained in a meditation on the 2020 revival of the southern Democratic Party:

“[Carter] defeated Wallace in most southern primaries and then gained his endorsement, subsequently putting together a mind-bending coalition of Black and conservative white voters united by regional pride (between Andrew and Lyndon Johnson, no president was elected from a state that had been part of the Confederacy). Carter won every state of the former Confederacy (producing huge swings compared with Hubert Humphrey’s performance in 1968 and George McGovern’s in 1972) except Virginia; he won the border states of Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri as well as southern-inflected areas of Ohio and Pennsylvania that helped keep those states in the Democratic column.”

It is unlikely that any other Democrat could have won the presidency in 1976, and Carter won by an eyelash. Yet like other regional or ethnic-racial pioneers, his peak of support among the home folks was a thing of the past once he took office. Thus began a troubled four years.

Carter’s one-term presidency had its ups and downs and was rarely stable or predictable. Yes, he inherited a lot of economic trouble from the Nixon and Ford administrations, but his response to double-digit inflation (involving some austerity measures and a lot of austerity talk) divided Democrats, particularly when the Carter administration deprioritized full employment and put in place a Federal Reserve Board chairman (Paul Volcker) determined to use a tight monetary policy to tame inflation, triggering a recession.

This economic turbulence and a closely associated energy crisis (both kicked off by the Arab oil boycott of 1973–74 and a subsequent huge price spike in petroleum products) led Carter to indulge his inner Baptist deacon and sternly lecture Americans about the need for belt-tightening and self-discipline. For one famous week in 1979, he holed up at Camp David summoning advisers and elected officials in preparation for what was later known as the “malaise speech” (though he did not use that term). He struggled regularly with congressional Democrats, who joined with Republicans in sufficient numbers to kill his proposals for a stepped-up federal consumer-protection effort, standby gas-rationing powers, and canceling major water projects he deemed unnecessary. As he had in Georgia, Carter emphasized government-reorganization schemes and did succeed in creating new Cabinet-level Departments of Education and Energy.

But foreign policy was an unusually large focus for Carter as president, leading to some of his biggest triumphs and setbacks. He invested enormous amounts of capital and personal time into engineering the 1978 Camp David Accords, the landmark Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement signed by Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. (It has, extraordinarily, held for more than four decades.) Earlier that year, after a long, tense negotiation, he secured Senate ratification of a treaty to relinquish the Panama Canal to Panama. Beyond establishing any individual bilateral relationships, Carter introduced human rights as a key consideration in U.S. foreign and defense policy, modifying the strict anti-Communist priorities of his immediate predecessors.

Carter’s interactions with Iran characterized the ambiguities of his presidency, helping him beat Ted Kennedy in the 1980 Democratic primaries but putting an exclamation point on his general-election defeat.

Kennedy had been leading Carter two-to-one in primary polls in mid-1979 when the Massachusetts senator all but decided to run; Carter’s combative streak was engaged, and he went out of his way to tell journalists that if Kennedy ran, “I’ll whip his ass.” But a few days before Kennedy’s official announcement, Iranian student revolutionaries took 66 Americans hostage in Tehran in response to Carter’s decision — against the caution of his advisers — to let the deposed Shah of Iran into the U.S. for cancer treatment. The hostage-taking launched a simmering crisis that did not end until the last day of Carter’s presidency. The international emergency did bolster the incumbent’s public standing, particularly among Democrats, and Carter’s “Rose Garden strategy” of running for renomination without holding personal campaign events worked, at least initially. He won 14 of the first 15 caucuses and primaries (losing only Massachusetts), in part by rebuilding his biracial coalition of support in southern and southern-inflected states.

Kennedy made a comeback in the later primaries, and voters grew tired of the hostage crisis (particularly after a rescue attempt went bad in April) and the country’s chronic economic problems. Kennedy won New York, Pennsylvania, California, and New Jersey, but it wasn’t enough to defeat the incumbent. Still, he didn’t concede until the convention and managed to avoid the traditional arms-raised unity gesture with Carter as the proceedings ended.

Carter had his moments in the general-election contest with Republican Ronald Reagan (and his low points, as when he briefly slipped behind independent candidate John Anderson in the polls), managing to keep the race competitive until late in the campaign despite an assortment of ongoing crises in domestic and foreign policy. There were persistent rumors then and later (and recently, spurred by Carter’s transition to end-of-life care, a confession from an associate of Republican power broker John Connally) of Republican efforts to talk the Iranian regime out of a hostage release prior to the election, but the outcome was probably sealed in any event.

In their one debate, Reagan famously called for voters to make the election a referendum on “the last four years,” and right at the end of the race, Carter’s numbers collapsed. Reagan won by nearly ten points, carrying 44 states.

Although he left office at only 55, Carter never gave a thought to running again. His vice-president, Walter Mondale, won the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination but lost 49 states in the general election, which proved the country was undergoing a partisan realignment. Carter’s strength in the South had masked it earlier, keeping Democratic losses from being much worse. But Carter didn’t brood about his difficulties as president and embraced a simple if robust postpresidential agenda that kept him in good stead for over four decades.

His principal vehicle was the Carter Center, a nonprofit organization created in 1982 in partnership with Atlanta’s Emory University; he and Rosalynn Carter served as co-founders. Its three main international programs have centered on conflict resolution (in areas ranging from North Korea–U.S. nuclear cooperation, to the restoration of democracy in Haiti, to disputes between Sudan and Uganda and between Colombia and Ecuador), election monitoring (in 39 countries), and health initiatives. The center has led efforts to eradicate deadly diseases like Guinea worm and to help diagnose and treat others like river blindness and trachoma. It has also fought to reduce the stigma of mental illness in the U.S. and beyond. In 2002, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the Carter Center’s efforts to “find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” He also continued his work for Middle East peace, leading to the one big controversy surrounding his postpresidential years: allegations that he was hostile to Zionism and to Israel itself, which grew stronger with the publication of his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

Another postpresidential commitment of Carter’s (and Rosalynn’s) involved Habitat for Humanity, a Georgia-based NGO that had long been doing modest work to build housing for the homeless. The Carters began working with Habitat in 1984 and over the years helped it expand its programs to all 50 states and to 70 countries. We’ve all seen those celebrated photographs of Carter framing up walls. During the 1992 presidential campaign, I was having dinner at the Atlanta political hangout Manuel’s Tavern, and I asked a waiter about all the security loitering around a back room. “Jimmy’s back there showing Clinton and Gore how to drive a nail,” the waiter replied; sure enough, the next day, the three men held a Habitat event nearby and nary a nail was missed.

Yet the nongovernmental entity to which Carter devoted the most years was probably the Baptist Church. He taught Sunday school off and on at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains from its founding in 1977 as a church that welcomed Black worshippers. As the Southern Baptist Convention became militantly conservative in the 1980s and ’90s, Carter eventually broke any identification with the SBC (especially objecting to its refusal to ordain women as ministers) and became a leader of the moderate spinoff group the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

Carter’s legacy as a president and a politician is substantial but not entirely settled. He was prescient in a number of policy areas, notably the search for a comprehensive energy strategy and his strong stance on human rights as a touchstone of U.S. foreign policy. He was also a personal diplomat of great courage and skill. From a political perspective, he was the key bridge figure between the Jim Crow era of southern politics and the biracial Democratic coalitions that followed; the Democratic victories in Georgia in 2020 — including the election of a Black U.S. senator — must have gratified him immensely. But Carter also exemplified centrist and even conservative strains in the Democratic Party that persisted while white Democratic racist politics largely vanished.

What made Carter’s postpresidential career so popular, however, was the simple sense, shared far beyond his own region or party, that he was a fundamentally good man who eschewed riches and power for a more humble path to righteousness.

After looking at various Democratic utterances about dealing with Trump 2.0, I wrote up a brief typology for New York:

The reaction among Democrats to Donald Trump’s return to power has been significantly more subdued than what we saw in 2016 after the mogul’s first shocking electoral win. The old-school “resistance” is dead, and it’s not clear what will replace it. But Democratic elected officials are developing new strategies for dealing with the new realities in Washington. Here are five distinct approaches that have emerged, even before Trump’s second administration has begun.

If you can’t beat ’em, (partially) join ’em

Some Democrats are so thoroughly impressed by the current power of the MAGA movement they are choosing to surrender to it in significant respects. The prime example is Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, the onetime fiery populist politician who is now becoming conspicuous in his desire to admit his party’s weaknesses and snuggle up to the new regime. The freshman and one-time ally of Bernie Sanders has been drifting away from the left wing of his party for a good while, particularly via his vocally unconditional backing for Israel during its war in Gaza. But now he’s making news regularly for taking steps in Trump’s direction.

Quite a few Democrats publicly expressed dismay over Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter, but Fetterman distinguished himself by calling for a corresponding pardon for Trump over his hush-money conviction in New York. Similarly, many Democrats have discussed ways to reach out to the voters they have lost to Trump. Fetterman’s approach was to join Trump’s Truth Social platform, which is a fever swamp for the president-elect’s most passionate supporters. Various Democrats are cautiously circling Elon Musk, Trump’s new best friend and potential slayer of the civil-service system and the New Deal–Great Society legacy of federal programs. But Fetterman seems to want to become Musk’s buddy, too, exchanging compliments with him in a sort of weird courtship. Fetterman has also gone out of his way to exhibit openness to support for Trump’s controversial Cabinet nominees even as nearly every other Senate Democrat takes the tack of forcing Republicans to take a stand on people like Pete Hegseth before weighing in themselves.

It’s probably germane to Fetterman’s conduct that he will be up for reelection in 2028, a presidential-election year in a state Trump carried on November 5. Or maybe he’s just burnishing his credentials as the maverick who blew up the Senate dress code.

Join ’em (very selectively) to beat ’em

Other Democrats are being much more selectively friendly to Trump, searching for “common ground” on issues where they believe he will be cross-pressured by his wealthy backers and more conventional Republicans. Like Fetterman, these Democrats — including Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — tend to come from the progressive wing of the party and have longed chafed at the centrist economic policies advanced by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and, to some extent, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. They’ve talked about strategically encouraging Trump’s “populist” impulses on such issues as credit-card interest and big-tech regulation, partly as a matter of forcing the new president and his congressional allies to put up or shut up.

So the idea is to push off a discredited Democratic Establishment, at least on economic issues, and either accomplish things for working-class voters in alliance with Trump or prove the hollowness of his “populism.”

Colorado governor Jared Solis has offered a similar strategy of selective cooperation by praising the potential agenda of Trump HHS secretary nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as helpfully “shaking up” the medical and scientific Establishment.

Aim at the dead center

At the other end of the spectrum, some centrist Democrats are pushing off what they perceive as a discredited progressive ascendancy in the party, especially on culture-war issues and immigration. The most outspoken of them showed up at last week’s annual meeting of the avowedly nonpartisan No Labels organization, which was otherwise dominated by Republicans seeking to demonstrate a bit of independence from the next administration. These include vocal critics of the 2024 Democratic message like House members Jared Golden, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Ritchie Torres, and Seth Moulton, along with wannabe 2025 New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Josh Gottheimer (his Virginia counterpart, Abigail Spanberger, wasn’t at the No Labels confab but is similarly positioned ideologically).

From a strategic point of view, these militant centrists appear to envision a 2028 presidential campaign that will take back the voters Biden won in 2020 and Harris lost this year.

Cut a few deals to mitigate the damage

We’re beginning to see the emergence of a faction of Democrats that is willing to cut policy or legislative deals with Team Trump in order to protect some vulnerable constituencies from MAGA wrath. This is particularly visible on the immigration front; some congressional Democrats are talking about cutting a deal to support some of Trump’s agenda in exchange for continued protection from deportation of DREAMers. Politico reports:

“The prize that many Democrats would like to secure is protecting Dreamers — Americans who came with their families to the U.S. at a young age and have since been protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program created by President Barack Obama in 2012.

“Trump himself expressed an openness to ‘do something about the Dreamers’ in a recent ‘Meet the Press’ interview. But he would almost certainly want significant policy concessions in return, including border security measures and changes to asylum law that Democrats have historically resisted.”

On a broader front, the New York Times has found significant support among Democratic governors to selectively cooperate with the new administration’s “mass deportation” plans in exchange for concessions:

“In interviews, 11 Democratic governors, governors-elect and candidates for the office often expressed defiance toward Mr. Trump’s expected immigration crackdown — but were also strikingly willing to highlight areas of potential cooperation.

“Several balanced messages of compassion for struggling migrants with a tough-on-crime tone. They said that they were willing to work with the Trump administration to deport people who had been convicted of serious crimes and that they wanted stricter border control, even as they vowed to defend migrant families and those fleeing violence in their home countries, as well as businesses that rely on immigrant labor.”

Hang tough and aim for a Democratic comeback

While the Democrats planning strategic cooperation with Trump are getting a lot of attention, it’s clear the bulk of elected officials and activists are more quietly waiting for the initial fallout from the new regime to develop while planning ahead for a Democratic comeback. This is particularly true among the House Democratic leadership, which hopes to exploit the extremely narrow Republican majority in the chamber (which will be exacerbated by vacancies for several months until Trump appointees can be replaced in special elections) on must-pass House votes going forward, while looking ahead with a plan to aggressively contest marginal Republican-held seats in the 2026 midterms. Historical precedents indicate very high odds that Democrats can flip the House in 2026, bringing a relatively quick end to any Republican legislative steamrolling on Trump’s behalf and signaling good vibes for 2028.

It probably won’t matter to Donald Trump how many Democrats show up at his inauguration, but I think it’s important to distinguish between honoring the wishes of voters and fighting like hell once the 47th president is in office, and I wrote about that at New York.

Democrats and others who fear or despise what Donald Trump has in store for us over the next four years have many decisions to make about how to cope with the new regime. There are plenty of legitimate reasons (especially given the plans and appointments he has already revealed) for a posture of total opposition. Something approaching an actual “resistance” may arise once the 47th president takes office and it all becomes very real.

But prior to January 20, it’s all potential rather than actual, which is one reason the talk of Democratic elected officials boycotting the inauguration, as USA Today reports some are considering, seems like a bad idea, one that signals the opposition’s weakness, not its resolution:

“Should Democrats skip the inauguration, as more than 60 members of Congress did in 2017, or would it be wiser for them to attend and show that after a divisive contest, America’s democratic norms remain secure? After all, Trump didn’t attend Biden’s inauguration after the now-president defeated him in 2020.”

Amid all the conflicting takes on how Donald Trump won the presidency after losing it in 2020, there’s a strong consensus that gains among Latino voters mattered a great deal. I examined this CW at New York:

Definite judgements about how the 2024 presidential election turned out should await voter-file based data that won’t be available for some time. But it’s pretty clear one of the biggest and most counter-intuitive shifts from 2020 was Donald Trump’s gains among Latino voters. Yes, there’s a lot of controversy over the exact size of that shift. Edison Research’s exit polls (which have drawn considerable criticism in the past for allegedly poor Latino voter samples) showed Kamala Harris winning Latinos by a spare 51 to 46 percent margin, while Edison’s major competitor, the Associated Press VoteCast, showed Harris’s margin at a somewhat more robust 55 to 43 percent. Other estimates range up to the 62 to 37 percent win claimed for Harris in the American Electorate Voter Poll.

But most takes showed sizable Republican gains from 2020, and for that matter, Trump did measurably better among Latinos in 2020 than in 2016 (Pew’s validated voter studies showed Trump winning 28 percent in 2016 and 38 percent in 2020). As Equis Research puts it, “this looks and sounds like a realignment.” And while close elections lend themselves to exaggerated focus on specific voter groups, the size and potential future magnitude of the Latino vote make it a natural source of deep concern for Democrats and optimism for Republicans. A New York Times analysis of the startling losses in vote share by Democrats in urban core areas in 2024 concluded that the most consistent pattern was significant Latino populations, which also showed major Republican gains in non-urban areas as well.

To state the obvious, it’s surprising that a politician so associated with nativist rhetoric and policies as Donald Trump is setting records for support in what has traditionally been a Democratic “base” constituency. Is this a trend that would have occurred without Trump leading the GOP, and if so, could it actually intensify once he’s left office for good?

It’s important to understand that this isn’t the first time a pro-GOP Latino “wave” seemed to be developing. While there was immense controversy over the exact numbers (in part because of uniquely flawed exit polls in that particular year), George W. Bush appears to have won about 40 percent of this vote, beating Ronald Reagan’s earlier record of 37 percent in his 1984 reelection landslide. According to the more reliable exit polls in subsequent elections, the GOP share of the Latino vote dropped to 31 percent in 2008 and then to 27 percent in 2012. Some reasons for this reversal of the trend that appeared in 2004 weren’t that hard to discern: the Great Recession that appeared late in Bush’s second term hit Latino households really hard, even as Republicans retreated rapidly from Bush’s support for comprehensive immigration reform (by 2012, Republican nominee Mitt Romney was promoting policies to make life so unpleasant for undocumented immigrants that they would “self-deport”).

But it’s possible that what we are seeing now is the resumption of a slow drift towards the GOP among Latinos that was temporarily interrupted by the Great Recession and a nativist uprising among white Republicans. Whatever unhappiness Latinos felt towards Trump’s immigration views was pretty clearly offset by economic concerns, especially among younger Latino men, who broke towards Trump most sharply. As happened during the Great Recession, the economy mattered most, and the combination of inflation (especially in housing costs) with tight credit eroded already-thin Democratic loyalties. As the above-mentioned Times analysis showed, defections to Trump happened all across the landscape of the Latino electorate, not just among more traditionally Republican-prone groups as Cuban Americans or South Americans. The question as to whether this is a party accomplishment rather than a personal accomplishment by Trump is an open one; Democrats did significantly better among Latinos in down-ballot races in 2024.

A general trend towards a more politically diverse Latino voting population makes some intuitive sense. As former immigrants slowly give way to native-born citizens, particularly those who are entering the middle-class en masse, it’s logical that identification with “the party of immigrants” will decline. Latinos who embrace conservative evangelical–and especially hyper-conservative pentecostal–religious practices also has helped intensify right-leaning cultural attitudes. We may never return to the days of reliable two-to-one Democratic advantages in this community, particularly as young voters who are especially alienated from traditional party loyalties move into the electorate.

While Democrats should be worried about the future of Latino voting behavior, Republicans have no reason for complacency. It’s now Trump and the GOP who are fully responsible for economic conditions which could turn out to be much worse than vague positive memories of the first Trump administration might suggest. And while (as some polling indicates) Latino citizens may have a negative attitude towards the recent surge of migrants that has become so central to Trump’s grip on his MAGA base, it’s less clear the mass deportation regime Trump has pledged to undertake immediately is going to go over well among Latinos, even those who voted for him. A recent Pew survey showed that Latinos were significantly less supportive of a major deportation program than other voters. And if the Trump administration pursues deportation round-ups in a cruel and ham-handed way (which elements of Trump’s base would welcome as a virtue rather than as a vice), or by methods that affect Latino legal immigrants and native citizens (most likely via ethnic profiling by law enforcement officials), we could see a pretty significant Latino backlash.

In other words, while some Latino trend towards the GOP may be inevitable all things being equal, it’s hardly guaranteed and could be sharply reversed. For their part Democrats need to get more serious about Latino voter outreach (particularly among young men) and identify (and learn to explain!) an economic agenda that prioritizes the practical needs of middle-class folk from every background.

 

With Senate confirmation hearings of Trump’s motley crew of Cabinet-level nominees, one issue Democrats will need to confront right away is when and whether the appointees’ often-exotic religious views are an appropriate subject for discussion. I offered some simple guidelines at New York:

Amid all the hotly disputed allegations that he has a history of excessive drinking and inappropriate (or even abusive) behavior toward women, Donald Trump’s defense-secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth, has another potential problem that’s just now coming into view: His religious beliefs are a tad scary.

Early reports on Hegseth’s belligerent brand of Christianity focused on a tattoo he acquired that sported a Latin slogan associated with the medieval Crusaders (which led to him being flagged as a potential security problem by the National Guard, in which he served with distinction for over a decade). But as the New York Times reports, the tattoo is the tip of an iceberg that appears to descend into the depths of Christian nationalism:

“’Voting is a weapon, but it’s not enough,’ [Hegseth] wrote in a book, American Crusade, published in May 2020. ‘We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must …’

“In his book, Mr. Hegseth also offered a nod to the prospect of future violence: ‘Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.’”

His words aside, Hegseth has chosen to associate himself closely with Doug Wilson, an Idaho-based Christian-nationalist minister with a growing educational mission, notes the Times:

“[After moving to Tennessee two years ago] the Hegseth family joined Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a small church opened in 2021 as part of the growing Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. The denomination was co-founded by Doug Wilson, a pastor based in Moscow, Idaho; his religious empire now includes a college, a classical school network, a publishing house, a podcast network, and multiple churches, among other entities …

“In his writings, Mr. Wilson has argued that slavery ‘produced in the South a genuine affection between the races,’ that homosexuality should be a crime, and that the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote was a mistake. He has written that women should not ordinarily hold political office because ‘the Bible does say that when feminine leadership is common, it should be reckoned not as a blessing but as a curse …’

“Mr. Hegseth told [a] Christian magazine in Nashville that he was studying a book by Mr. Wilson; on a podcast Mr. Hegseth said that he would not send his children to Harvard but would send them to Mr. Wilson’s college in Idaho.”

All this Christian-nationalist smoke leads to the fiery question of whether Hegseth’s religious views are fair game for potential confirmation hearings. Would exploration of his connections with a wildly reactionary religious figure like Doug Wilson constitute the sort of “religious test … as a qualification to any office or public trust” that is explicitly banned by Article VI of the U.S. Constitution? It’s a good and important question that could come up with respect to other Trump nominees, given the MAGA movement’s cozy relationship with theocratic tendencies in both conservative-evangelical and traditionalist-Catholic communities.

Actually, the question of the boundary between a “religious test” and maintenance of church-state separation came up conspicuously during the first year of Trump’s earlier presidency in confirmation hearings for the then-obscure Russell Vought, whom Trump nominated to serve as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (he later became director of OMB, the position to which Trump has again nominated him for the second term). Bernie Sanders seized upon a Vought comment defending his alma mater, Wheaton College, for sanctions against a professor who said that Christians and Muslims “worship the same God.” Sanders suggested that showed Vought was an Islamophobic bigot, while Vought and his defenders (included yours truly) argued that the man’s opinion of the credentials of Muslims for eternal life had nothing to do with his duties as a prospective public servant.

This does not, to be clear, mean that religious expressions when they actually do have a bearing on secular governance should be off-limits in confirmation hearings or Senate votes. If, for example, it becomes clear that Hegseth believes his Christian faith means echoing his mentor Doug Wilson’s hostility to women serving in leadership positions anywhere or anytime, that’s a real problem and raising it does not represent a “religious test.” If this misogyny was limited to restrictions on women serving in positions of religious leadership, that would be another matter entirely.

More generally, if nominees for high executive office follow their faith in adjudging homosexuality or abortion as wicked, it’s only germane to their fitness for government offices if they insist upon imposing those views as a matter of public policy. Yes, there is a conservative point of view that considers any limitation on faith-based political activism in any arena as a violation of First Amendment religious-liberty rights. But those who think this way also tend to disregard the very idea of church-state separation as a First Amendment guarantee.

Critics of Christian nationalism in the Trump administration need to keep essential distinctions straight and avoid exploring the religious views of nominees if they are truly private articles of faith directed to matters of the spirit, not secular laws. It’s likely there will be plenty of examples of theocratic excesses among Trump nominees as Senate confirmation hearings unfold. But where potential holders of high offices respect the lines between church and state, their self-restraint commands respect as well.

In the swirling collection of suggestions for what Democrats ought to do to stage a comeback, one in particular caught my eye for obvious reasons, and I wrote a reaction at New York.

As is the case after every disappointing election cycle, we see multiple attempts underway to steer Democrats in a better direction. Most often, they involve timeworn Democratic factional advice, ranging from the hearty perennial progressive recipe of a sharpened economic “populist” message designed to freeze or reverse the decades-long working-class drift toward the GOP, to the equally well-known centrist prescription aimed at seizing a majority of persuadable swing voters, including some Republicans.

How, exactly, Democrats are supposed to incorporate and carry out such advice is usually left a little unclear. Presumably 2028 presidential candidates will test various strategies in the primaries, which is how ideological battles in the major political parties tend to get resolved.

But at least one group of centrist Democrats are planning to organize a more gradual and less top-down party makeover, or at least a force to push back against the strategies they deem futile or counterproductive. The New York Times reported:

“Seth London, an adviser to some of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, wrote a private memo addressed to ‘Discouraged Democrats’ arguing that the party should ‘begin with a complete rejection of race- and group-based identity politics.

“The sweeping four-page memo, obtained by The New York Times and earlier reported by Politico, was both widely forwarded and a source of controversy in Democratic circles.

“’Democrats have increasingly focused on the priorities of core party activists over the common voters we claim to represent,’ wrote Mr. London, who has spent the last three weeks working with other Democratic strategists to build what he envisions as a ‘a party within the party’ of media companies, donors and advocacy groups that support charismatic, moderate officeholders.”

When you look at the “party within the party” London proposes to build, there is a very specific model he has in mind, and it’s focused more on elected officials than the Times take on it might suggests. The model is the Democratic Leadership Council, and the structure is a “leadership committee of federal and state elected officials” determined to act as a party faction in opposing identity-politics litmus tests and advancing “common sense” policies that are attractive both to swing voters and to the entrepreneurs who are essential partners in carrying them out.

The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), where I worked as policy director for over a decade in the late 1990s and early aughts, functioned from 1985 until 2011 as the kind of centrist pressure group London seems to envision recreating. Its initial goal (other than serving as a sort of clubhouse for Democratic politicians unhappy with the national party) was to create the conditions for a Democratic return to the White House at a time when pundits spoke of a Republican “Electoral College Lock.” But once that goal was accomplished under DLC co-founder and all-around star Bill Clinton, the group focused more on state-leadership development, and on burnishing its think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute (which still exists), as an idea lab for Democrats, particularly on issues that more orthodox progressive Democrats tended to ignore (including crime, education reform, and national security). The DLC had a large if diffuse influence on all sorts of Democrats, but the group faded after a period when it was mainly known for divisive lefty-bashing, and for pro-market views on the global economy that didn’t look so good after the Great Recession and the subsequent voter backlash against globalization.

So is something like a “new DLC” a good idea right now? It’s a question worth asking, but on balance I’d say no. We are in a very different political moment than the founders of the DLC confronted. In 1985, Democrats were reeling from a presidential election in which its nominee had lost 49 states and was beaten by over 18 percentage points in the national popular vote. It was the second straight landslide loss to Ronald Reagan, viewed by Democrats at the time as a conservative extremist. But at the very same time, Democrats did relatively well down ballot. They picked up two U.S. Senate seats despite the Reagan landslide and won a House majority of 35 seats. They controlled 34 of 49 partisan governorships after this terrible election, and also controlled 66 of 98 state legislative chambers. The problem, DLC founders agreed, was that a failed national party had become detached from a still-successful state and local party, and the first step toward recovery was to rebuild the national party on the shoulders of its more successful politicians, who were far more in touch with voters than the party-committee identity-group and ideological litmus-test commissars who wielded power nationally.

While there were isolated situations (particularly in a few Senate races) where down-ballot Democrats did significantly better than Kamala Harris in 2024, there just wasn’t the sort of wholesale return to ticket-splitting that suggests the only problem is in Washington, D.C. In all the elections of the Trump era, the top of the Democratic ticket was stronger than it was in the 1980s while the bottom was weaker. There is no obvious cadre of better-connected or more successful elected officials who can lead the donkey back to victory.

The prescriptions the DLC offered Democrats back in the day are also a bit obsolete. In the most prominent DLC-published diagnosis of the party’s problems, Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck’s The Politics of Evasion, the culprit identified was the refusal of Democratic elites to come up with credible policies on the economy and national security, leaving these urgent concerns to be dominated by the GOP. While you can argue that today’s Democrats have identified with the wrong economic policies and made some missteps in the White House regarding global threats to national security, there’s really no “evasion” going on. And for all the ancient talk of progressives only being interested in the party “base” while centrists care about “swing voters,” it’s pretty clear all Democrats hunger and thirst for all votes, but have different definitions of “swing” and “base” voters and different understandings of what makes them tick.

But the single biggest reason the time isn’t ripe for a “new DLC” goes to the heart of what Seth London seems to envision, as progressive critic David Dayen argues at The American Prospect:

“While much of the vision is laid out in vague platitudes — ‘a future-focused narrative,’ ‘rooted in hard work’ and ‘the pursuit of the American Dream’ — where he is most clear, London aligns his movement with the ‘abundance agenda,’ pushed by a series of groups favoring supply-side liberalism through removing regulatory barriers to a host of common needs, while rejecting the concept of ‘socializing’ the provision of health care and housing and education. (London has consulted for Arnold Ventures, a key funder of the abundance agenda, led by former Enron trader and hedge fund manager John Arnold.) The memo commits to ‘social insurance for those who need it,’ an unconcealed reference to means testing.”

I strongly object to the frequently heard lefty smear of the DLC as a brothel of “corporate whores,” but there’s no question its corporate funding base created a lot of perception problems for the group and for Democrats who aligned with it (even though the DLC went out of its way to defy donors on issues ranging from cap-and-trade to health care to tax cuts to “corporate welfare”). And there’s also no question their (our!) irrational exuberance about the New Economy and financial deregulation discredited key parts of what was otherwise a sensible policy portfolio. Similar problems, it must be admitted, afflicted other center-left “reform” efforts like Britain’s New Labour movement under Tony Blair, which was heavily influenced by Clinton’s New Democrats (the final and best brand for DLC Democrats, which alas, is probably not reusable).

To be very blunt about it, Democrats will not regain the White House or Congress under the conspicuous leadership of folks from Wall Street or Silicon Valley, however well-meaning they may be. You don’t have to be attracted to what passes for progressive economic “populism” these days (and generally speaking, I’m not) to recognize this is a moment in the history of the Party of the People when a focus on those very people should be paramount. Indeed, one of the DLC’s early slogans was that Democrats should represent “the values and economic aspirations of the middle class”; that’s not a bad starting point for revival.

Beyond the specific strategy chosen for that revival, it’s important to recognize that Democrats overall are in much better shape than they were in 1985. It’s as close to a scientific certainty as you can get that Republicans will lose their slippery hold on the U.S. House in 2026 and with it the governing trifecta that makes them so terrifying at present. Trump is more likely than any president in living memory to overreach and make mistakes that erode his base of support and (quite possibly) damage the living standards that were such a huge part of the problem facing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris this year. While it’s always healthy to discuss what went wrong in an electoral defeat and debate policies and political strategies, a descent into formal factional combat that London seems to contemplate is both unnecessary and counterproductive. For now, the best way to oppose Trump is to maintain a united opposition party prepared to exploit the mistakes that are sure to come.

There are no actual Democrats in Trump’s Cabinet so far, but he’s hoping to appoint an ex-Democrat to run HHS. As I noted at New York, RFK Jr. is in trouble for not abandoning abortion rights far or fast enough.

Donald Trump’s shocking nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head up the vast Department of Health and Human Services led to a lot of concerns about his suitability and ideological compatibility with the MAGA folk that would surround him at the Cabinet table. Kennedy’s reflexive hostility to vaccines puts him at odds with many Republicans. His complaints about Big Pharma, agribusiness giants, and use of pesticides by farmers have earned him some enemies who are very influential in the Republican Party. And his denunciation of processed foods as child-killing evils has to personally annoy the Big Mac aficionado of Mar-a-Lago.

But even if none of those longtime controversies surrounding the former Democrat make him radioactive among the Senate Republicans who would have to confirm him for HHS, he’s also in considerable trouble with one of the GOP’s oldest and most important allies: the anti-abortion movement. Suspicion of him in that quarter is natural, since Kennedy for many years maintained a standard Democratic position favoring abortion rights, though it was never an issue that preoccupied him. Then, as a presidential candidate who drifted out of the Democratic primaries into an independent bid, he was all over the place on abortion. He made remarks that ranged from unconditional support for the right to choose even after fetal viability to support for a three-month national ban to various points in between.

At a minimum, anti-abortion activists would like to pin him to an acceptable position, but they also seem inclined to secure concessions from him in exchange for declining to go medieval on his confirmation, as Politico explains:

“Abortion opponents — concerned about Kennedy’s past comments supporting abortion access — have two major asks: that he appoint an anti-abortion stalwart to a senior position in HHS and that he promise privately to them and publicly during his confirmation hearing to restore anti-abortion policies from the first Trump administration, according to four anti-abortion advocates granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. And Kennedy, according to a fifth person close to the Trump transition, is open to their entreaties.”

He’d better be. Despite Trump’s abandonment of the maximum anti-abortion stance during his 2024 campaign, the forced-birth lobby remained firmly in his camp and has maintained even more influence among Republican officeholders who haven’t “pivoted” from the 45th president’s hard-core position to the 47th president’s current contention that abortion policy is up to the states. Indeed, you could make the argument that it’s even more important than ever to anti-abortion activists that Trump be surrounded by zealots in order to squeeze as many congenial actions as possible out of his administration and the Republicans who will control Congress come January. And there’s plenty HHS can do to make life miserable for those needing abortion services, Politico notes:

“At a minimum, anti-abortion groups want to see the Trump administration rescind the policies Biden implemented that expanded abortion access, such as the update to HIPAA privacy rules to cover abortions, as well as FDA rules making abortion pills available by mail and at retail pharmacies. … The advocates are also demanding the return of several Trump-era abortion rules, including the so-called Mexico City policy that blocked federal funding for international non-governmental organizations that provide or offer counseling on abortions, anti-abortion restrictions on federal family-planning clinics and a federal ban on discriminating against health care entities that refuse to cover abortion services or refer patients for the procedure when taxpayer dollars are involved.”

Anti-abortion folk could overplay their bullying of Kennedy and annoy the new administration: The Trump transition team has already vetoed one of the Cause’s all-time favorites, Roger Severino, for HHS deputy secretary, though it may have been as much about his identification with the toxic Project 2025 as his extremist background on abortion policy. It probably doesn’t help that objections to Kennedy for being squishy on abortion were first aired by former vice-president Mike Pence, who has about as much influence with Trump 2.0 as the former president’s former fixer Michael Cohen.

As for Kennedy, odds are he will say and do whatever it takes to get confirmed; he’s already had to repudiate past comments about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, including a comparison of his new master to Adolf Hitler (a surprisingly common problem in MAGA land). Having come a very long way from his quixotic challenge to Joe Biden in 2023, Kennedy really wants to take his various crusades into the new administration, at least until Trump inevitably gets tired of hearing complaints from donors about him and sends him back to the fever swamps.

In a continuing effort to outline what the 2024 election returns did and did not mean, I offered some objections at New York to some of the triumphalist talk from MAGA-land.

While claiming victory on Election Night (this time credibly), Donald Trump was unrestrained in his interpretation of what it all means: “We had everybody, and it was beautiful. It was a historic realignment, uniting citizens of all backgrounds around a common core of common sense.”

As Lee Corso likes to say on College GameDay when one of his colleagues makes a confident prediction about how a football game will turn out, “Not so fast.”

The more you look at the election returns — which are still evolving as millions of votes are counted in California — Trump’s accomplishment remains impressive considering his chronic unpopularity and the long comeback he pursued after his 2020 defeat. But historic realignment isn’t the right term for a victory that could have been undone had Kamala Harris won a relatively small number of additional votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump’s steadily declining national popular-vote margin will wind up, according to Nate Silver’s estimate, at around 1.4 percent (lower than Hillary Clinton’s 2.1 percent in 2016), with his total votes at less than a majority and 3 percent more than he won in 2020. Again, that’s good for someone with Trump’s spotty record but pretty clearly attributable to his being the “change” candidate when the electorate was in an especially sour mood and angry about short-term trends in the economy and immigration.

Trump’s much-ballyhooed gains among Democratic “base” groups are significant but no better than those posted by George W. Bush 20 years ago before his party lost control of Congress and four years before Democrats reclaimed the White House in a near landslide. So perhaps the best way to characterize the situation is that Trump will have the opportunity to build a durable GOP advantage in a country that has been closely divided between the two parties for much of this century. But there are serious questions as to whether he has a plan for pulling it off or the self-restraint to avoid blowing up his coalition altogether.

As John Judis and Ruy Teixeira (who know a lot about premature realignment claims, having made their own in a famous 2002 book called The Emerging Democratic Majority) point out in a New York Times op-ed, Trump’s announced agenda isn’t particularly well designed to keep his 2024 coalition together, much less expand it:

“[T]here are plenty of issues that could fracture this coalition. Even immigration cuts both ways. He might try to carry out his promise of deporting millions of illegal immigrants, a project that could not just wreak havoc among families and in communities but also cause economic chaos.

“Or take tariffs. Mr. Trump’s working-class voters who lament the loss of jobs to China have supported his trade initiatives, including his plan to slap as high as a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods. But Mr. Trump’s first-term tariffs provoked retaliation from China and angered Republican farmers and Senate Republicans. Much higher tariffs could meet with opposition from Mr. Trump’s high-tech backers, who depend on the Chinese market, and from his financial donors, who still have investments in China. Unlike most Republican initiatives, tariffs, if successful, work by imposing short-term costs in prices in order to achieve long-term gains in jobs from otherwise endangered industries. It’s the short-term costs — another round of inflation, this time imposed by Mr. Trump — that might endanger the Republican coalition.”

Trump faces other obvious pitfalls, such as his “concept of a plan” to replace Obamacare with some health-care system that will likely shrink coverage and impose vast new costs on vulnerable people. As Judis and Teixeira note, Trump’s allies want to do a host of unpopular things — from RFK Jr.’s desire to ban vaccines to the anti-abortion movement’s hopes for banning abortion pills. Trump’s own promises to demolish federal aid to education and gut civil-service protections for millions of federal employees may please his MAGA “base” but not so much the new voters he temporarily attracted this year. And above all, there’s the question of whether the 45th and 47th president, who has run his last campaign, really cares enough about the long-term strength of the Republican Party to rein in his and his closest supporters’ more politically reckless tendencies. Judis and Teixeira discuss that factor as well:

“The final obstacle to a strong realignment is Mr. Trump himself, who is consumed with the quest for power and self-aggrandizement and appears eager to seek revenge against his detractors. Many of his difficulties during his first term stemmed from his own misbehavior, and he continues to revel in division and divisiveness.”

The challenge is hardly unique to Trump. Any electoral winner has to decide whether to expend the political capital victory brings on achieving goals regardless of the potential backlash or instead move cautiously to consolidate power. Nothing about Trump and his early steps (a Fox News gabber to run the Pentagon? Elon Musk acting as de facto vice-president?) suggests caution or a willingness to delay gratification; they in fact look strongly like overreach or, to use the classical term, hubris. Twenty years ago a triumphantly reelected Bush announced he would use some of his evident political capital to launch legislation to partially privatize Social Security. It backfired spectacularly and began the process whereby Bush squandered his election victory and blew up the many predictions of a permanent political realignment in his party’s favor. Trump and the GOP could avoid the same fate, but not if they think the incredibly hard work of breaking America’s partisan gridlock has already been done in a single election.

It really doesn’t help Democrats recover from the 2024 election defeat to exaggerate its dimensions. So I issued a few cautionary notes at New York.

As is inevitable in any losing presidential effort, a lot of the fingers being pointed at Democratic culprits are aimed at the Harris-Walz campaign, with a big negative assist from the former Biden-Harris campaign that was terminated in July. Some critics think Kamala Harris failed sufficiently to “pivot to the center” when the Trump campaign was pounding her as “radical communist”; others believe she erred by failing to go hard-core lefty populist. Still others seem to be certain she should have junked her billion-dollar ad blitz and instead appeared on a few dozen podcasts.

The reality is that while the Harris-Walz campaign was national in scope, its efforts (as were those of the Trump-Vance campaign) were concentrated to an extraordinary degree on the seven universally recognized battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that decided the election. So if her campaign had any positive net impact, you should be able to see it there. And as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump calculated a couple of days after Trump was declared the winner, you actually can see it if you compare these states to the country as a whole:

“The Post’s model estimates that, when all of the votes are counted, only one state, Colorado, will have seen its vote margin shift to the left. Every other state and D.C. will have shifted to the right.

“The last time an election saw that uniform a shift was in 1992, when all but one state shifted to the left as Bill Clinton was elected president…..

“On average, states are likely to end up having shifted about 4.6 points to the right since 2020….

“[T]he states where the shift toward Trump was the smallest included many of those that were the closest in 2020 — that is, the swing states. States that had a margin of 3 points or less in 2020 moved to the right by 3.4 points on average. States where the margin in 2020 was larger than that moved to the right by an average of 4.8 points.”

There are three significant implications of these patterns. First, the shift to Trump was indeed a national wave, albeit a limited one in most states (big exceptions being Florida, Texas, and New York, where Trump’s gains were supersize); his national popular vote margin has already fallen to 1.9 percent with votes still out. Second, the Harris campaign appears to have mitigated the swing to Trump precisely where it (and she) had the most intense activity. To the extent the campaign mattered, it was a net positive.

The third implication, which is more implicit than explicit in the numbers, is that the Democratic ticket was battling a national political climate that was fundamentally adverse, making the campaign a painful uphill slog that was disguised by slightly askew polling and the famous Harris “vibes.” As Cook Political Report editor-in-chief Amy Walter told my colleague Benjamin Hart in a post-election interview, for all the initial excitement, Harris began her late-starting campaign at a significant disadvantage:

“Fundamentally, it does come back to Biden and the administration. He’s an unpopular president, and an unpopular president doesn’t win reelection. The only thing possibly preventing the unpopular president from losing is that he’s challenged by a more unpopular candidate. Where Trump fits into this is that, yes, he’s still unpopular. But — and we noted this before Biden dropped out and then it started happening again in October — in retrospect, people think of Trump’s presidency more favorably than they did even when he was president. They may have not liked Trump and what he stands for or what he does, but as they put it in context now, thinking, Well, compared to what we have now, was it better or worse? — they say, ‘Well, at least stuff was less expensive.’

“And the only way you counter that is if you have a candidate on the Democratic side who’s not part of the incumbent party.”

Harris worked hard to depict herself as a “change” candidate, but that was always going to be a tough sell. With a little luck, she might have been able to squeak by in the Electoral College (she lost the three “Blue Wall” states by less than 2 percentage points) even while losing the national popular vote, just as Trump did in 2016. But nobody should blame her for failing to overcome the dead weight of an administration too many voters considered a disappointment if not a failure.