The Democratic Party after 2024.
In politics, as in life, winning is better than losing. But some losses are worse than others. An especially damaging defeat creates a situation that is both hard to endure and hard to change.
This is the Democratic Party’s dilemma after the 2024 election: It suffered a bad defeat. An important cause of that defeat was that the party had embraced and become identified with a social justice ideology that offends more voters than it attracts. To become more politically competitive by becoming less politically correct is, under the circumstances, clearly advisable but also highly improbable.
A Win Is a Win
First, the election. Republicans retained a majority in the House of Representatives, with a 220- to 215-seat advantage, after a net loss of two seats. By gaining four seats, the GOP also captured control of the Senate with a workable but not dominating 53-47 majority. Finally, the party won the presidency with a 49.8% to 48.3% popular vote plurality and won 58% of the Electoral College: 312 electoral votes to the Democrats’ 226.
Politically, America remains closely divided: a “49% nation,” as Michael Barone called our polity after the 2000 election. The narrowness of the Democrats’ loss, however, does not fully reflect its severity. In addition to carrying all seven “swing states”—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—Donald Trump turned a 4.5% Democratic advantage in the nationwide 2020 popular vote into a 1.5% Republican advantage in 2024. A six-point shift over four years is unimpressive by the standards of the 20th century, when presidential politics was played between the 35-yard lines, with a large portion of the electorate in play every election cycle. For example, after winning the presidency by a 22.6% popular-vote margin in 1964—22.4 percentage points better than in 1960—the Democrats went on to lose it by 0.7% in 1968 (a swing of 23.3 percentage points), then lose again by 23.2% in 1972 (a 22.5-point swing), regain it by 2.1% in 1976 (25.3), and lose it once more by a margin of 9.7% in 1980 (11.8). In the 21st century, however, presidential politics has been played between the 45-yard lines, without any double-digit swings from one election to the next. Six points is a significant improvement by recent standards, a larger shift than any since Barack Obama turned the Republicans’ 2.4% advantage in the 2004 popular vote into a Democratic margin of 7.2% in 2008.
Moreover, Trump’s gains between 2020 and 2024 were widely distributed, in terms of both geography and demography. He improved his margin in all 50 states. (That is, he either lost the state by a smaller margin than he had in 2020, won it by a larger margin, or, in six cases, flipped a state that Joe Biden had carried.) States that were once reliably Democratic, such as the “blue wall” of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, have grown competitive. Other states that were competitive have gotten redder and redder. Obama, for example, won Florida, Iowa, and Ohio in 2008 and again in 2012. Trump has now won each state three times with, in 2024, 56.1%, 55.7%, and 55.1% of the vote, respectively.
Trump improved his margin, compared to 2020, in 2,793 counties, 89% of the total. In “majority minority” counties, where fewer than 50% of the residents are white, he did 8.7 percentage points better in 2024 than in 2020, after having improved 1.3 points in such counties between 2016 and 2020. Among the 11% of the 2024 electorate that was Hispanic, Trump received 46% of the vote, according to exit polls, an improvement on the 28% he won in 2016 and 32% in 2020. Trump won 57% of white voters in 2016 and again in 2024, which means his improvement over those eight years came entirely from non-whites, winning 21% of their votes in 2016 and 33% in 2024.
The loss of these votes is harmful to the Democrats’ electoral calculations, but also to the party’s image of itself. The activist Van Jones spoke for many Democrats on Election Night 2016 when he said on CNN that Donald Trump’s victory was a “whitelash against a changing country” and “against a black president.” Eight years later, the distribution of votes undermines this indictment of Trump and his coalition, not to mention the vision of the Democrats as avatars of multicultural inclusion and harmony. The New York Times, in a strikingly peevish news analysis published one week before the 2024 election, deplored Trump’s growing appeal to non-white voters. Titled “How Trump Exploits Divisions Among Black and Latino Voters,” it lamented Trump’s success in gaining support by recognizing something that “Black and Latino activists have privately acknowledged for years: The presumed solidarity between both groups is fragile and may be splintering again.” The most galling fact to the Times was that “polling shows that Trump supporters are far less likely than Harris supporters to say that being Hispanic or Black is important to their personal identity.” In other words, America First appeals strongly to voters who consider themselves Americans first.
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