The Democrats lost to someone who is unfit to lead the nation. Can they learn from it?
Republican
President-elect Donald Trump gestures alongside his wife, Melania,
during his rally at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm
Beach, Fla., Nov. 6, 2024, after being elected the 47th president of
the United States. (OSV News photo/Brian Snyder, Reuters)From the perspective of “horse race” political analysis, nothing much changed this week. It was another inconclusive national election. Six of the seven U.S. presidential elections in the 21st century have ended in popular-vote margins of less than five points, historically considered “close,” and the seventh, in 2008, was marked by uncertainty about whether the first Black nominee of a major party, Barack Obama, would really do as well as the polls predicted. (By comparison, only five of the 25 presidential elections in the 20th century were close.) It appears that Donald J. Trump will end up with a popular-vote edge of one or two percentage points, not enough to claim a sweeping mandate.
The reality, though, is that the Democratic Party lost to someone manifestly unfit to lead the nation—a possible fascist, a definite kleptocrat and a man whom political scientists already have ranked as the worst president in U.S. history. Especially in the bluest parts of the United States, some voters were amazed that the election was so close. But after hitting a 21st-century high point with Mr. Obama’s victory in 2008, the Democrats have repeatedly failed to hold together the coalition that elected the country’s first Black president. The Pew Research Center reported this spring that the Democrats have even lost their longtime advantage in party identification, as white voters without college degrees increasingly express affinity with the Republican Party.
There are many ways to explain Mr. Trump’s comeback victory. Remembering his poor debate performance against Vice President Kamala Harris, it is tempting to think that the verdict of Nov. 5 was a kind of jury nullification, in which voters went with their preconceived notions and simply ignored the evidence before them. Or maybe the voters saw the U.S. political system in a checks-and-balances context—not among the major branches of government, but with politics as a check on major socioeconomic and cultural changes such as the greater visibility of L.G.B.T.Q. people and more economic independence for women. The liberals and the Democrats are winning in the marketplace and at awards shows, this reasoning may go, so it is only fair for them to get some pushback at the ballot box.
Perhaps the most compelling argument is that in a democracy, voters have the right to simply vote out the incumbents when they are dissatisfied with the state of things (in their own lives or in the country as a whole), and Mr. Trump’s win fits into a global pattern of post-Covid defeats for governing parties. Only once in the 20th century did a party lose the White House after only four years (in 1980, when Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, was ousted). Now it has happened in two consecutive elections. Is the growth of perennially dissatisfied voters one reason for the persistent closeness of national elections?
Democrats fade among ‘Democratic’ groups
None of these explanations fully explain the anemia of the Democratic Party. Nate Cohn, a political analyst for The New York Times, points out that not only did the Democrats lose support from 2020 to 2024, but “the most striking evidence of the rebuke came from blue America,” with Ms. Harris considerably weaker than Mr. Biden in states like California, New Jersey and New York. Mr. Trump drew almost even with Ms. Harris among Latino voters, a serious blow to the Democrats’ identity-based, “everyone but white men” political strategy. And Ms. Harris failed to duplicate Mr. Biden’s big lead among young voters, dropping from a 24-point lead to an 11-point lead among voters under 30, according to exit polls. This fizzling out among younger voters seriously damages the Democrats’ claim to be the party of the (less white, better educated) future, and this year’s red shift suggests that calling political opponents “weird” may not be the best strategy for a party already seen as elitist and condescending.
There is some evidence that “wokeness,” or what used to be called political correctness, has hurt the Democrats. The non-gendered term Latinx has not been popular among Americans of Hispanic descent, and one recent study suggested that its use may turn voters against Democrats. Black Americans also seem more culturally conservative than the leadership of the Democratic Party. In the Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper notes that one study showed “Black Biden voters were also much less likely than any other group of Biden voters to say they were comfortable with they/them pronouns.” He concluded, “people of color are people, not saints or saintly monoliths, and the cost of this idealization has been a certain blindness in Democratic circles to the actual, rather than imagined, political landscape within minority communities.”
But the cringiness of “white dudes for Harris” events, or irritation with people announcing their pronouns at every opportunity, does not fully explain why voters would turn to the most explicitly authoritarian nominee for president in modern U.S. history, and at least an early-stage-cancer kind of fascist. Moving slightly to the right on cultural issues, and even making room for pro-life candidates, probably would not move many votes in a country where nearly half the electorate simply does not trust the Democratic Party. A Democratic nominee who makes an attempt to be less polarizing may achieve a narrow win in 2028, but this wouldn’t break the cycle of back-and-forth close elections at the presidential and congressional levels that both sides now routinely call “the most important of our lifetimes.”
The problem for the Democrats is that Mr. Trump and the Republicans have developed several advantages in our two-party system. Maybe they can be copied, and maybe they can be neutralized, but they can’t be ignored.
Republicans set the rules of engagement
Over the past half-century, the Republican Party and the conservative movement have reshaped the U.S. political system in ways that usually benefit them. I will describe three of those ways.
First, in 1980, Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory for the G.O.P. with what he might have called optimism and positive thinking but critics described as brazen incoherence and magical thinking. While the incumbent Democrat, Jimmy Carter, warned Americans that they’d have to lower their thermostats in response to the energy crisis, Reagan promised to reduce inflation, cut taxes, increase defense spending and balance the budget—all at the same time and without shredding safety-net programs. One of his Republican primary opponents, John Anderson, sarcastically quipped in response, “It’s very simple. You do it with mirrors.”
Something similar happened this year when Mr. Trump promised to end inflation while imposing steep tariffs on imported goods and deporting millions of undocumented migrants, many of whom work in agriculture or food processing—two policies that almost all economists say will drive up prices. Fact-checkers pointed out the incoherence, but as The Atlantic’s David Graham points out, “in a country where roughly three-quarters of Americans feel that things are on the wrong track, a pledge to fix things was potent.”
Democratic presidential nominees often promise “change,” but many voters see them as predictable defenders of the status quo. (Ms. Harris’s “We’re not going back” appealed to cultural liberals but not to voters who might have replied, “Why can’t we go back lower grocery prices?”) The Democrats can’t simply copy Mr. Trump’s magical thinking, especially with the most highly educated voters making up a bigger share of their shrunken base, but they somehow must convey a more optimistic message, one that shows at least a sincere attempt to solve multiple problems at the same time.
Second, in 1996 Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News, the cable channel that has served as the unofficial voice of the Republican Party for the past three decades. Fox News has since been joined by many other, ever more explicitly conservative, media outlets like Newsmax, as well as social media sites (including Elon Musk’s X) and podcasts skeptical of the liberal consensus. A Pew Research Center survey taken last month showed Fox News to be the most popular source of political news for U.S. voters, and it found that only 48 percent of Republican voters relied primarily on “mainstream” sources for election news (and most of them did not consider Fox News “mainstream”), compared with 72 percent of Democratic voters.
As a result of the differences in news consumption, Democrats and Republicans often seem to be “living in two different worlds,” as one sociologist put it after researching Trump voters, with many Republicans drawn to “a toxic information ecosystem,” as Wired’s David Gilbert wrote in a story about the election fraud conspiracy theories that spread online before the election.
The siloing of voters, and lack of nearly universally trusted journalists like TV news anchor Walter Cronkite, means that there are limits to how much the Democratic Party can achieve with more effective messaging (since that messaging will be filtered or blocked from reaching many voters) and that the mainstream media cannot entirely squelch baseless accusations (such as migrants eating pets) through fact-checking. Unfortunately for the Democrats, this also means that Mr. Trump may not face accountability among his own voters for any failures in his administration, as the conservative media will undoubtedly feature stories about the Democratic Party and the “deep state” obstructing his policies.
The Democrats have their own media outlets that favor their views, but none has attained the popularity of Fox News (or X since the Musk takeover). After this week’s loss, some see the Democrats at a crossroads, with one option working with mainstream outlets like The New York Times to better reach voters and the other option helping to tear down “legacy media” (one instance being the massive number of canceled subscriptions after The Washington Post decided not to make an endorsement in the presidential race) and instead build their own progressive media infrastructure.
The left will clearly have to do both. Partisan news outlets could certainly encourage political activism and help to develop winning arguments on, say, immigration reform, and nonpartisan investigative outlets like ProPublica will be essential as a watchdog during a presidential administration that promises to be especially hostile toward oversight and transparency. But, again, a left-wing version of Fox News is going to have limited appeal to a party increasingly reliant on highly educated voters. Plus, any effort to demonize rural America in the same way that Mr. Trump and Fox News have caricatured major American cities as “cesspools of blood” is not a promising way for an electoral mandate to get past our current divisions.
Finally, when Mr. Trump began running for president almost 10 years ago, he began the process of normalizing language that has long been associated with fascist and other extremist political parties. He has specialized in dehumanizing language, calling his political opponents “vermin” (his running mate, JD Vance, picked up the habit, saying at a rally, “We’re going to take out the trash, and the trash’s name is Kamala Harris”) and implying that military leaders who criticize him should be executed. In a frank appropriation of neo-Nazi language, he has said that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Here I should note that I have long been hesitant to ascribe Mr. Trump’s political success to prejudices that are deep-rooted in America and perhaps even irradicable, whether racism, xenophobia or misogyny. Even after this week, I do not believe that these sentiments are so powerful in the United States that Mr. Trump merely had to pull some switches and activate them on his behalf. Instead, it has taken years for him (and all his allies in the Republican Party) to amplify grievances, to encourage people to look for scapegoats for their economic and family woes, and to keep upping the ante to the point where the people who object to dehumanizing language are attacked as intolerant.
This last change to American politics is obviously a problem for all of us, not only to the Democratic Party. But the Democrats are now tasked with confronting it and trying to return civility and basic decency to American politics before it is too late. One thing they could do better is partnering with religious groups that champion human dignity for all—and not make the mistake of assuming that all people of faith are on the other side of a culture war.
So there is no one lesson for the Democrats this week (or, to put it another way, there is plenty of blame to go around for Ms. Harris’s loss). Well, perhaps one lesson: The four years before the next election, assuming there is another fair election in 2028, are going to seem like minutes if they don’t figure out how to respond to Mr. Trump’s promise to radically reshape American government..
[Also read: “Why is the presidential election so close? Here are five reasons.”]
Robert David Sullivan is the production editor at America. From 2013 to 2016 he wrote a political column called (Un)Conventional Wisdom.
No comments:
Post a Comment