Where Do The Democrats Go From Here?

By: Luca Simián, Class II

Picture Credit: Pexels

In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump won office with 312 electoral votes and a slim popular vote majority, becoming the first Republican candidate to win more votes than their democratic opponent since George W. Bush in 2004. Republicans held on to the House 220-215 and flipped 4 seats in the Senate, winning what amounts in today’s political climate to a decisive trifecta. Combined with their control over the Supreme Court, this leaves the American right in firm control of the federal government, and Democrats firmly rejected by the American people.

So what should Democratic politicians, messengers, and voters do now?  They have to figure out why they lost in 2024. Besides the issue of Joe Biden’s age, which has now done its damage and will not be a factor in the midterms and the 2028 election, I believe there is one big issue: the economy. Consistently rated as the most important issue to voters, losing on the economy usually equates to losing the election. Polling showed that Americans blamed Joe Biden and his party for rising costs and inflation, and both Biden and Kamala Harris’ messaging on the issue proved to fall flat, failing to move polls and eventually failing to win the election. When it came down to it, voters didn’t feel confident that Democrats understood them or had a competent plan to lower the cost of living. 

This rebuke was especially pronounced in the working class. While it may be unfair to lay blame on Joe Biden for the crisis of living — and it's a fact (which even Donald Trump once acknowledged) that in the modern era, Democrats are better stewards of the economy — Democrats are certainly not blameless for the public’s negative perception of their handling of the economy. Joe Biden initially refused to acknowledge that the economy wasn’t in a great place, and while the data says that GDP surpassed expectations, productivity was high, inflation was brought down, and job stability was high, none of those statistics have a direct correlation with the cost of living. While inflation may have been brought down, that only slowed the growth of prices, rather than reducing them to levels Americans find tolerable. GDP growth is only that - the growth of the nation’s gross domestic product. GDP can be increasing, and inflation can be decreasing, while at the same time, people struggle to afford groceries, which clearly occurred during the Biden administration. Job stability of  course, is a positive indicator for people’s daily lives, but if the job a person is holding on to doesn’t pay someone enough to afford eggs, it’s unreasonable to expect them to have a positive view of the economy. Biden refused to meet voters where they were, and by the time Kamala Harris did, it was too late. While Donald Trump’s claims about why the economy wasn’t great were often racist and almost always incorrect, the fact that he acknowledged the economy wasn’t doing well and said that he would “fix” it from the start of his campaign put him miles ahead of Democrats. Democrats must acknowledge what voters feel, instead of trying to convince them otherwise using economic indicators that have no real correlation with the economic situation of the average American family. 

While the issue of messaging is an important one, it’s merely a symptom of a bigger issue in the Democratic party: becoming the party of the elites. Though the Republican party has a long history of being the party of big business, with Democrats having benefited from strong union and working class support since the New Deal era, recent elections have seen Republicans dominate the less-educated and make serious gains with the less-wealthy. Even people of color, who have historically supported Democrats reliably and in high numbers, are moving towards Republicans recently, especially Black and Latino men. These two trends combine to threaten Democrats with the loss of their most important and reliable voting blocks, and while messaging is part of it, economic policy is crucial in maintaining these groups as reliable Democratic voters. Democrats must learn from this cycle that voters do not feel like they understand their economic situations, and back a different messaging strategy with populist economic policies that appeal to working class voters. 

Finally, if the past two decades of American politics has had one consistent theme, it’s that voters prefer outsider populists to party establishment types, even if party elites do everything to stop them. Donald Trump won his party’s nomination 3 times and the presidency twice despite initial resistance from party elites in 2016, and it took a sustained and coordinated effort to stop Bernie Sanders in 2016. In the 2020 primary, of course, Biden was chosen by Democrats because of his electability, but Bernie Sanders still received a substantial amount of votes, and there’s reason to doubt that Biden would have been voters' first choice had electability not been front of mind. And Obama, though we think of him now as a two term president, was an outsider as well, running against the party establishment who wanted Hillary Clinton. 

What is the throughline that connects all of these issues? Populism. Democrats not speaking the language of the average American, catering more and more to elites, and allowing the party elites too much sway over primaries is what got them here. What will get them out is returning to the economic populism that made Democrats from FDR to Obama so successful. The fact of the matter is, most of the country would benefit from and do support progressive policies, and if Democrats are serious about taking back the White House and Congress, they must lean into populist progressive policies and messages in a way that embodies change, rather than more of the same. In 2024, they failed to message effectively, weren’t populist enough, and in voters’ minds, represented “more of the same” overwhelmingly.