The Only Thing We Know Right Now Is that the Democrats Must Change

There are a lot of takes flying around right now, lord knows I’ve written a bunch in the last calamitous week, and while there are things we think and can infer in the nascent stages of processing this loss, the optimal path forward for the Democrats is still unknowable at this point. The main reason why is because the likeliest political route for the party will be carved by President Donald Trump, as responding to the crises he will inevitably create will have a big say in how elections going forward will unfold, and what issues will matter to people.

Not to mention that we still are sifting through the data of what happened. Exit polls are not a reliable source from which to make large and sweeping changes, they are a way to point you in the direction of doing more scientific study of dynamics they unearth, and there are undoubtedly countless studies underway to drill down on the roots of this broad-based rebuke of the Democrats. People who actually want to help build a better future and not provide further evidence to the notion that liberal politics is one big navel-gazing exercise must be cautious to not come to the conclusion that all of my ideas are correct, and the party would win more elections if they just listened to me, personally.

This is especially dangerous on the left as it sure looks like we won the fight for populist economics in the party, as Republicans like Bill Kristol and David Brooks are now admitting that we were on to something when Obungler won Indiana with a populist economic message while Trump’s Zoomer backlash army was still in diapers. Party flacks saying the Democrats must ditch the left and pivot to the center (as defined by Beltway, not the electorate) yet again after they ran the Cheneys as their de facto VPs are just proving that they are the fundamentally unserious people they have always been. We all need to express a little humility right now about what we may not know because no one, not even the betting markets that were bullish on Trump’s chances all year or even Trump’s own team, saw this outcome coming.

We know that Kamala Harris dramatically under-performed the youth vote now, which is not a figure we had a full grasp on last week. We can infer conclusions from new information like this, like how the Democrats endorsing Israel’s genocide of Gaza as a matter of supposed political expediency absolutely had a hand in their loss, but it also means that economic plights consistently highlighted as young people’s chief concern in poll after poll leading up to the election went unaddressed by the party in power. The degree to how much either had an impact on the outcome of the election is really anyone’s guess right now.

The electorate is a lot younger than what cable news would have you think. I detailed last week how this cloistered mainstream media diet led Democrats to believe utterly insane things “like by November…’the focus will become overwhelming on democracy. I think the biggest images in people’s minds are going to be of January 6th.’” Democrats have followed the Republicans of old in pursuing a well-off voter base flattered by amorphous appeals to America’s greatness rooted in the past, and in 2024 they finally got the narrow constituency they have been angling for since Chuck Schumer’s famous line of “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” He had the lose part right, that’s for sure.

Republicans have now built a culturally and socioeconomically diverse coalition that has the potential to rule for a decade or more if Democrats don’t figure out how to campaign and govern in the 21st century. It’s now or never for the party.

Maybe that means adopting a more assertive and masculine rhetorical posture. Maybe that means going the opposite direction and challenging the rise of this revanchist male-centric culture that swept Trump into office. All we know is what Marx has told us, that the root of so much disaffection with Democrats’ beloved American democracy and neoliberal order is the vast economic inequality and the feeling of hopelessness it induces amongst a group of people who rightly feel like their future was stolen from them by a selfish generation of gerontocrats and capitalists who betrayed the eternal human promise of leaving the world in a better place than you found it.

If Democrats do not address the root complaint that voters have been lodging since 2008–that the status quo must change–then trying to figure out the rest of this puzzle will be impossible. The fact that America has lurched around from change election to change election in four out of the last five proves that Americans are amenable to a wide range of political pitches if they are all centered around the fundamental promise to dismantle a system that everyone hates except for the elitist Democratic Party and the billionaires who benefit from it.

Democrats wax poetic about democracy, but they are one of the biggest threats to it. By advertising themselves as an opposition party but governing like a status quo one, they have allowed Donald freaking Trump to portray himself as the champion of the little man. World historic failure doesn’t even begin to describe these group of hacks who should never be let near politics again. Democrats need to do a lot of soul searching, a lot of data-driven and in person investigations into the electorate (like how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is earnestly asking her Instagram followers who voted for both her and Trump to explain why), and to spend the next year trying to figure out who they are and what values they actually fight for.

The party has told an utterly incoherent story of a country that is still great, but horribly racist, but also just needs some tweaks around the edges to be great again, and they have portrayed themselves as a group of brave opposition warriors opposing Trump’s dangerous fascism–but also as principled bipartisan actors to help him enact his commonsense agenda at the border. Saying Democrats don’t believe in anything may sound like something you’d hear from a cynical lefty like me, but I’m just repeating what former Obama speechwriter John Favreau half-joked on Pod Save America last week. Where the Democrats must turn after this election is going to be a process that plays out over time, greatly informed by Trump’s chaos, but the one thing we do know for certain is that for the Democratic Party to survive going forward, it must be a completely different one from the failure that has brought us to this point.