Last year’s election was close, despite President Trump’s hyperbolic claims about his margin of victory. Still, the Democratic Party clearly lost — and not only the presidential race. It also lost control of the Senate and failed to recapture the House of Representatives. Of the 11 governor’s races held last year, Democrats won three. In state legislature races, they won fewer than 45 percent of the seats.
In the aftermath of this comprehensive defeat, many party leaders have decided that they do not need to make significant changes to their policies or their message. They have instead settled on a convenient explanation for their plight.
That explanation starts with the notion that Democrats were merely the unlucky victims of postpandemic inflation and that their party is more popular than it seems: If Democrats could only communicate better, particularly on social media and podcasts, the party would be fine. “We’ve got the right message,” Ken Martin, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said while campaigning for the job. “What we need to do is connect it back with the voters.”
A key part of this argument involves voter turnout. Party leaders claim that most Americans still prefer Democrats but that voter apathy allowed Mr. Trump to win. According to this logic, Democrats do not need to worry about winning back Trump voters and should instead try to animate the country’s natural liberal majority. “I don’t think we’re going to win over those 77 million that voted for Donald Trump,” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the party’s 2024 vice-presidential nominee, said this month. “I’m concerned with the 90 million who stayed home.” It was an unfortunate echo of Hillary Clinton saying that millions of Trump voters were “deplorables” and “irredeemable.”
As comforting as these explanations may feel to Democrats, they are a form of denial that will make it harder for the Democratic Party to win future elections.
Even many conservatives and Republicans should be concerned about the Democratic denial. The country needs two healthy political parties. It especially needs a healthy Democratic Party, given Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party and his draconian behavior. Restraining him — and any successors who continue his policies — depends on Democrats taking an honest look at their problems.
The part of the Democratic story that contains the most truth is inflation. Prices surged during Covid’s supply-chain disruptions, and incumbent parties around the world have suffered. Whether on the political right or left, ruling parties lost power in the United States, Brazil, Britain, Germany and Italy.
But some incumbent parties managed to win re-election, including in Denmark, France, India, Japan, Mexico and Spain. A healthier Democratic Party could have joined them last year. The Democrats, after all, were running against a Republican whose favorability rating rarely exceeded 45 percent. Most voters did not like Mr. Trump. They did prefer him to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Polls make clear that inflation was not the only reason. Voters also trusted Republicans more than Democrats on immigration, crime, government spending, global trade and foreign policy. Among the few exceptions were abortion and health care. As the headline of a recent Times news article summarized, “Support for Trump’s Policies Exceeds Support for Trump.” Only 27 percent of Americans now have a favorable view of the Democratic Party. It is the party’s lowest approval rating in decades.
The part of that Democratic story that contains the least truth is voter turnout. Nonvoters appear to have favored Mr. Trump by an even wider margin than voters, as Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, has reported. David Shor, the bracingly honest Democratic data scientist, put it well: “We’re now at a point where the more people vote, the better Republicans do.”
The good news for Democrats is that winning over nonvoters and Trump voters is not in conflict. People who do not vote have many of the same concerns as voters who flipped to Mr. Trump. Nonvoters are disproportionately working class, young, Asian, Black, Latino or foreign-born, and each of these groups shifted away from Democrats. When Democrats call for ignoring the country’s 77 million Trump voters, they are writing off a diverse group of Americans, many of whom voted Democratic before.
We recognize that the Democratic Party is in a difficult position. It must compete with a Republican Party that shows an alarming hostility to American democracy. And we urge Democrats to continue speaking out against Mr. Trump’s authoritarian behavior — his bullying of military leaders, judges, law firms, universities and the media; his disdain for Congress; his attempts to chill speech through deportation; his tolerance for incompetent cabinet secretaries who endanger American troops. Whatever polls say about the political wisdom of such criticism, Democratic silence on these issues would only encourage timidity from other parts of society.
It is the rest of the Democratic strategy that requires more rigorous and less wishful reflection. To regain voters’ trust, Democrats should take at least three steps.
First, they should admit that their party mishandled Mr. Biden’s age. Leading Democrats insisted that he had mental acuity for a second term when most Americans believed otherwise. Party leaders even attempted to shout down anybody who raised concerns, before reversing course and pushing Mr. Biden out of the race. Already, many voters believe that Democrats refuse to admit uncomfortable truths on some subjects, including crime, illegal immigration, inflation and Covid lockdowns. Mr. Biden’s age became a glaring example. Acknowledging as much may be backward looking, but it would send an important signal.
Second, Democrats should recognize that the party moved too far left on social issues after Barack Obama left office in 2017. The old video clips of Ms. Harris that the Trump campaign gleefully replayed last year — on decriminalizing the border and government-funded gender-transition surgery for prisoners — highlighted the problem. Yes, she tried to abandon these stances before the election, but she never spoke forthrightly to voters and acknowledged she had changed her position.
Even today, the party remains too focused on personal identity and on Americans’ differences — by race, gender, sexuality and religion — rather than our shared values. On these issues, progressives sometimes adopt a scolding, censorious posture. It is worth emphasizing that this posture has alienated growing numbers of Asian, Black and Latino voters. Democrats who won last year in places where Mr. Trump also won, such as Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, adopted a more moderate tone. They were hawkish about border security and law enforcement, criticizing their own party. They did not make the common Democratic mistake of trying to talk about only economic policy and refusing to engage with Americans’ concerns on difficult social issues.
Third, the party has to offer new ideas. When Democrats emerged from the wilderness in the past, they often did so with fresh ideas. They updated the proud Democratic tradition of improving life for all Americans. Bill Clinton remade the party in the early 1990s and spoke of “putting people first.” In 2008, Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton and John Edwards offered exciting plans to improve health care, reduce inequality and slow climate change. These candidates provided intellectual leadership.
Ms. Harris failed to do so in last year’s campaign, and few Democrats are doing so today. Where is the Democrat with bold plans to cut living costs? Or fight the ills of social media? Or help aimless boys who are struggling in school? Where is the governor who does more than talk about an abundance agenda and actually cuts regulations to help America build? New ideas should come from both the party’s progressives and its centrists. The most successful American politicians, like Mr. Obama and Ronald Reagan, deftly mix boldness and moderation. One benefit of being out of power is that it offers time to develop ideas and see which resonate. It is not a time to say, “We’ve got the right message.”
Even without reforming themselves, Democrats may fare well in elections over the next two years. Opposition parties usually thrive in midterms. The longer-term picture is less sanguine. The next Republican leader may be more disciplined than Mr. Trump. And both the Senate and the Electoral College look challenging for Democrats. Of the seven states whose population has grown the most since 2020, the Democratic Party won none in last year’s presidential election.
Defeat has a long history of inspiring honest reflection in politics. In this time of frustration and anxiety for Democrats, they should give it a try.
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