The Democrats released their first major postmortem on the 2024 election Monday, following a weeklong media blitz cataloging all that went wrong. The findings may paint an even bleaker picture than the election results themselves.
Worse still, the party’s response — or lack of one — reveals a state of denial. Despite clear warning signs, Democrats have shown no serious effort to address their problems. Instead, the party’s most prominent voices continue to cling to the same failed strategies, even as their own data analysts — and a few sympathetic columnists — issue increasingly urgent warnings that doom is upon them.
The loudest voices by far remain the progressives. Rather than trying to expand their support, they keep appealing to their narrow base.
The survey, by Blue Rose Research, interviewed 8 million people over the course of 2024. Its chief data scientist, David Shor, was clear about the results: Ethnic voters turned on the party at higher levels than Democrats have seen in decades. Young voters joined them. And typically disengaged voters flocked to the Republican ticket.
Shifting support toward the GOP among black voters — and even more sharply among Hispanic voters and naturalized immigrants — has forced a long-overdue reckoning with Democratic leadership in major cities. These voting patterns highlight just how poorly many of those cities have been governed.
They’ve also upended a core belief in both parties: The more people who vote, the better Democrats do. That belief no longer holds.
Democrats have tried to explain some of the shift by suggesting that their base simply sat on the couch. But that isn’t what happened. Ethnic moderates, young voters, and many politically disengaged Americans actively broke with the party.
Shor contends that if
everyone had voted in 2024, the results would have been even worse for Democrats. According to his analysis, the party would have lost the popular vote by an even wider margin.
You may have heard the rumors before the election: Democrats quietly scaled back some outreach efforts after realizing they were registering likely Trump voters. The panic set in when internal data showed the trend working against them.
“If only people who voted in 2022 had turned out, Harris would have won both the popular vote and the Electoral College fairly easily,” David Shor told Ezra Klein in an interview with the New York Times. “But if everyone had voted, Trump would have won the popular vote by nearly five points.”
If Democrats have a strategy to counter this politically existential trend, they haven’t shared it. All we’ve seen from Team Blue is more red meat.
Consider this week’s headlines. On Sunday, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas)
said on MSNBC, “I think you punch. I think you punch. … Like, it’s Ted Cruz! I mean, this dude has to be knocked over the head, like, hard, right? Like, there is no niceties with him at all. Like, you go clean off on him, right?”
In the same interview, Crockett admitted she has no legislation currently pending and added, “I’m just not gonna lie.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I), the 84-year-old progressive from Vermont, walked off the set of an ABC interview that aired over the weekend after facing a routine question about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)
The interviewer asked whether Ocasio-Cortez might challenge Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) in a Democratic primary. Sanders refused to answer and ended the interview.
The question followed a Friday rally where Sanders and AOC appeared together. The crowd repeatedly chanted in favor of a primary challenge, and some of Ocasio-Cortez’s allies have reportedly discussed the idea behind closed doors.
On Monday’s edition of “Morning Joe,” the Nation’s Elie Mystal said the United States should “
eliminate all voter registration laws,” calling them a post-Civil War tactic designed to suppress the black vote.
These are just a few recent examples. Will any of them help the Democrats resolve their massive predicament? The short answer is no. Sure, they excite a thoroughly depressed base, but who else are Democrats and their media allies speaking to? The real problem remains unaddressed: Democrats and their media allies continue to talk to the same shrinking audience while losing ground with everyone else.
“It’s not just that the New York Times readers are more liberal than the overall population — that’s definitely true,” Shor told Klein last week. “It’s that they’re more liberal than they were four years ago — even though the country went the other way. And so there’s this great political divergence between people who consume all the news sources that we know about and read about versus the people who don’t.”
The obvious solution to the party’s dilemma is to broaden its shrinking share of the electorate. Some Democrats, such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, appear focused on doing just that. Still, Newsom’s record as a staunch progressive can’t be undone with a few moderate-sounding podcast appearances.
Others, like Schumer, are more concerned with short-term political survival than long-term strategy.
But the loudest voices by far remain the progressives. Rather than trying to expand their support, they keep appealing to their narrow base. That might offer short-term energy, but it won’t build lasting political momentum.
The New York Times: Democrats need to face why Trump won
Vox: This is why Kamala Harris really lost
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Opinion & analysis, Politics
