Democrats have spent the past twenty days trying to figure out what went wrong in the 2024 election. That’s what a responsible party ought to do. Some critics have even called for a complete overhaul of the party.
Democrats need to be very careful about overcorrecting, however. As I wrote last week, while the reality of Trump’s re-election is crushing, it needs to be acknowledged that Kamala Harris barely lost the election while Democrats in down-ballot races held their own. Yes, I know, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, but if the issue here is competitiveness, it’s clear Democrats were competitive in 2024:
According to the Cook Political Report, Trump is on track to win the popular vote by 1.60% (49.86% vs. 48.26%). That will be the closest popular vote margin since 2000, when Al Gore beat George W. Bush 48.4% to 47.9% despite losing the Electoral College. Since the end of World War II, only two other presidential elections—1960 (0.17%) and 1968 (0.7%)—have been closer. Harris only would have needed to flip a little less than 1% of the overall electorate from Trump to her column to win the popular vote.
That last point also applies in the three Rust Belt battleground states, which were decided by 1.7% (Pennsylvania), 1.4% (Michigan), and 0.9% (Wisconsin). Had Harris pulled that off, she’d be the president-elect. (She also only lost Georgia by 2%.)
Democrats managed to win four Senate races in states won by Trump: Arizona (Gallego over Lake), Michigan (Slotkin over Rogers), Nevada (Rosen over Brown), and Wisconsin (Baldwin over Hovde). During the past three presidential elections, the only other time a Senate candidate won a seat in a state that was won that same year by the presidential candidate from the opposite party was in 2016 when Maine voters sent Republican Senator Susan Collins back to Washington while also backing Democrat Hillary Clinton.
With those four Senate victories (and despite Democratic Senator Bob Casey’s loss in Pennsylvania) Democrats will hold ten of the fourteen seats belonging to this election’s seven battleground states.
If we called all House races as they currently stand (there are three outstanding) there would basically be no change in the composition of the House: 221 Republicans to 214 Democrats. Yet the Republican in one of those races—California’s 13th district—is hanging on by a margin that could easily disappear, which means Democrats could actually pick up a seat in the House. Flip a mere 2,600 votes from R to D in each of the four closest House races won or favored to be won by Republicans and you would end up with the slimmest of Democratic majorities.
Even at the state level, Republicans did not overperform. As Aaron Blake of the Washington Post points out, if you exclude Vermont (where Republicans made significant gains and eliminated Democratic supermajorities in the state legislature) Republicans gained less than one seat per state legislature and flipped 0.4% of seats nationwide.
When margins are that close, the outcome of elections can swing on factors like candidate profile, candidate quality, campaign strategy, and messaging. Had Democrats made the campaign equivalent of a tweak—run a different candidate at the top of the ticket, flip the tables on Trump and put his inflation-inducing economic plan at the center of their campaign, book Harris on as many podcasts as possible—it could be Republicans who are now in the throes of an existential crisis. (And who knows: Maybe Republicans win in a landslide if they nominate a mainstream non-Trump/non-MAGA candidate. Or maybe they don’t if it turns out Trump is the only person who can hold his party/cult of personality together.)
Of course, some will argue Democrats’ inability to formulate a response to voters’ concerns about inflation reveals the party lacks a compelling economic message. That idea needs to be teased apart, however: The Democrats’ economic platform—a product of their liberal political ideology—wouldn’t have been much different if the pandemic-induced inflation hadn’t occurred. Their overall message just looked bad in light of inflation. Absent inflation (but with a booming economy) voters probably would have endorsed the Democrats’ economic agenda. If you think this election was decided by retrospective voters passing judgment on the state of the economy—something that also happened across Europe this year, where the incumbent conservative party in the UK, the incumbent centrist party in France, and the incumbent left-wing coalition in Germany all either lost or are about to lose elections—then you should also admit Harris’s loss has little to do with ideology. (Given those European outcomes, you could even conclude Harris ran surprisingly well despite the inflationary headwinds and massively improved on however Biden—who had an average 38% approval rating on Election Day—would have performed.)
Still, many are rushing to claim the Democrats lost the White House and failed to win majorities in Congress because they are ideologically at odds with too much of the American electorate. That’s an important claim to interrogate, as ideologies and party agendas are perhaps the most important factor when it comes to motivating massive blocs of voters. It could be Harris was somehow ideologically out of step with huge swaths of potential Democratic voters who chose to either stay home or vote for Trump. If that’s the case, it doesn’t really matter if this was a close election Democrats could have won by tweaking elements connected to message, messenger, and strategy. What would matter instead is the ominous possibility that, ideologically, Democrats just can’t connect with enough voters to create a durable governing majority. Even more worrisome is the possibility that this slippage in support—Harris received 7 million fewer votes than Biden did in 2020 as Trump made inroads with groups considered core parts of the Democratic base (young voters, Black voters, Latino voters, urban voters)—is only just beginning.
But once again, when it comes to ideology, Democrats should tread carefully. To begin with, the signals Democrats are receiving are pretty mixed. Some argue Harris and the Democrats couldn’t connect with moderates and independents due to the party’s preoccupation with left-wing causes. Others insist Harris failed to embrace a robust progressive economic agenda and alienated the party’s liberal base. Did Harris lose because she was a woke Bay Area liberal who supported gender-affirming care for transgender inmates back in 2019? Or did she come up short because she refused to break with Biden on Israel’s war in Gaza, cozied up with business interests, and hung around with Liz Cheney? Was she too far to the Left or too far to the Right? Maybe it was even a little bit of both.
It’s not unusual for major political parties in western democracies to wrestle with this dilemma. What makes it so vexing for Democrats is the breadth of their coalition, which stretches from Joe Manchin-style centrists to Bernie Sanders-style socialists. While both of those aforementioned senators caucus with the Democrats, neither actually are Democrats, revealing just how weak their attachments are to the party. If the party moves too far to the left, it sheds moderate independents like Manchin; move too far to the center, and the party disillusions progressives like Sanders.
Democrats are used to having this debate. It broke out into the open in 2016 during the primary campaign between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Sanders crisscrossed the country criticizing Clinton for not being liberal enough and, like other New Democrats before her, far too amenable to corporate interests. Sanders’ campaign was essentially a broadside against the centrist turn the Democratic Party had taken over the past thirty years, when it had not only embraced small-government, business-friendly policies and free trade agreements, but had also staked out conservative positions on social issues like same-sex marriage, supported “tough on crime” policies that glossed over racial disparities in the nation’s criminal justice system, and backed George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. After Clinton’s general election campaign failed to inspire the Democratic faithful, many Democrats concluded the party needed to start acting more like Democrats and move to the left to tap into the progressive, populist energy stirred up by Sanders.
Yet four years later, even after the party had moved to the left, Democratic voters concluded the best person to put forward for president in 2020 was Joe Biden, the most establishment-friendly, middle-of-the-road candidate among that year’s main contenders. Biden, of course, won that election. As president, he compiled an impressive legislative record. He won the praise of progressives for passing a green energy bill and prescription drug reform. His bipartisan infrastructure bill pleased moderates. Yet while Biden was not a culture warrior, many analysts blame Democrats’ lackluster performance in 2024 on his party’s woke impulses. Others claimed he and Harris failed to rally left-wing voters.
And so Democrats are once again engaged in a tug of war between its centrist and progressive wings. Unlike in 2016, this time it appears the centrists have the momentum. I’m unconvinced, however, that this ideological debate serves the party well. The issue again is the breadth of the party. If the party moves too far in either direction, it will lose voters on its wings. While it may make sense to err toward the center of the electorate (when you win a voter there, you deprive Republicans of a potential voter) Democrats also can’t disillusion the liberal voters who expect the nation’s liberal party to pursue liberal policy goals. The Democratic Party is a broad coalition, and it seems to suffer more than the Republican Party when it swings too hard toward its poles. It’s still haunted by the countercultural ghosts of 1968 and 1972 as well as Bill Clinton’s Middle Way politics of the 1990s.
I’d argue what Democrats need instead isn’t an ideological recalibration but a corps of party leaders who have credibility with all the factions within (and in the proximity of) its coalition. That’s what made Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden such productive Democratic leaders. They were able to go as mediators to the different groups in the party and assure them that they were being heard and that their concerns were being attended to. They could communicate to progressives that they were going to try to get as much of their wish list passed as possible but that they would ultimately need to give something up in negotiations. They could also communicate to moderates that they understood the electoral pressure they were under but that their success also depended on the party’s success, meaning they ought to help the rest of the party realize its policy ambitions. I feel this is how Biden conducted his presidency; unfortunately, he aged out of the role and couldn’t vigorously defend his work. As for Harris, she was largely untested and therefore lacked the credibility Biden had with his electoral coalition, which left her saddled with the unpopular aspects of his administration.
So in a highly-polarized nation where only one presidential election (2008, Obama vs. McCain) has been decided by more than five points in the past twenty-five years and where both parties have high floors of support, Democrats need to be very careful when making adjustments. I’m not saying Democrats should rest easy and wait for the political pendulum to swing back their way. Instead, they need to make sure they do not overreact to an electoral loss that could be attributed to election-year-specific circumstances by overhauling their party in ways that could potentially make them less competitive going forward. Furthermore, I’d argue Democrats need to worry less about adjusting the ideological focus of their party and instead tend to the ideological breadth of their party. When Democrats do that, they have strength in numbers, and those numbers win them elections.
I have a lot more to say about the current state of the Democratic Party, particularly when it comes to solving the puzzle of the “working class” voter. This article is already long enough, however, so I’ll pick up that thread in December. In the meantime, have a happy Thanksgiving.