Democrats Now Must Rebuild Their Obliterated Party
Democrats Now Must Rebuild Their Obliterated Party
The same cast won’t be returning next season.
THREE MONTHS AGO, the Democratic party looked robust. It was willing to push a sitting president off the ticket because of his advanced age, then it quickly united around another candidate. The Republican party, by contrast, was sticking with its (also old) convicted criminal. Parties exist to win elections, not launder money to their nominee’s lawyers or tend to the egos of elderly men—and the Democrats showed they understood that.
But that party was demolished on Tuesday.
Democrats are now reeling, and not only because of the breadth of Donald Trump’s rout, which points to a historic realignment in the electorate that will force them to adapt their policies and messaging—but also because their entire apparatus just fell apart. Their team is busted. All the big players have just participated in, and influenced, their last election. They will have their opinions, and they will render declarations, but they are done.
President Joe Biden crawls, humiliated, into retirement in January after being expelled. He will be blamed forever by many of his fellow Democrats for Trump’s return to power. Kamala Harris, a vice president and former senator who never had deep roots in the party, has suffered a devastating defeat. And while Harris sources said her concession speech Wednesday was designed to position her to remain a party leader, that appears naïve.
Trump has defeated not one but two women, the nation’s first and only females to become major party presidential nominees. As a consequence, popular Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and progressive star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are now unlikely to lead their party.
Indeed, given the country’s populist turn, the Democratic party may shy away from elite lawyers in the future—bad news for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. Someone like Sen. John Fetterman or Rep. Ruben Gallego—a former Marine who grew up poor, had his own bed for the first time when he arrived at Harvard University, and seems poised to soon be Arizona’s senator-elect—may be smarter choices. Gavin Newsom need not apply.
As for who will champion the party’s ideas and reinvigorate the demoralized grassroots behind new candidates—those jobs are open too.
The Clintons and the Obamas, of the free-trade establishment and of the past, won’t be wanted in a party that must reposition itself to win over working-class voters it has hemorrhaged since 2016.
Rep. James Clyburn, age 84, helped Biden win the party’s nomination in 2020 but he is not playing kingmaker anymore.
Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer, age 73, has never been influential in the party and is now headed into the wilderness as Senate Democrats are unlikely to regain a majority in the chamber for the foreseeable future.
Jaime Harrison who runs the Democratic National Committee, will pass the baton in humility and bewilderment . . . but to whom?
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who has served just one term as leader of the House Democrats, is the only current leader who will be part of the future Democratic party.
Nancy Pelosi remains the only senior leader in the party with any moral authority. Had she not succeeded in pushing Biden out in July, Trump’s victory would have been far larger. She passed power successfully to Jeffries and is a shrewd strategist connected at all levels who will be clear eyed about the party’s path forward. But she is also 84 and was just elected to her twentieth term in the House.
It’s hard to know where to start.
Trump’s smashing win shows he has built a durable and diverse working-class coalition. He held strong with every voting bloc, and made gains with most. In 2020, he lost Latino men to Biden by 36 to 59 percent; this year, he won them 55 to 43. Many women voted for abortion rights ballot initiatives while supporting Trump, whose Supreme Court justices helped overturn Roe. Young men under age 30, whom Biden won by 15 points four years ago, now voted for Trump by 14 points. The entire country, including blue states, moved rightward.
This affirmed the GOP argument that Democrats are considered elitist and out of touch, speaking only to the 43 percent of the electorate with college degrees. They are seen as soft on crime, wrong on energy production, and as radical culture warriors who expect us all to welcome boys on to girls sports teams and say “birthing persons;” people who, in a quest for social justice, label everyone who disagrees with them bigots and racists.
Trump’s advertisements during football games about Harris supporting prisoners having taxpayer-funded sex-change operations in prison didn’t just resonate because it turned off Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. At a deeper level, it raised doubts that no matter how centrist she sounded in her campaign she might give in to pressure from the left.
SINCE DEMOCRATS’ DEFEAT ON TUESDAY, two camps have already formed and are leaking to the media. One believes that if only Biden had left sooner and there had been a primary, Harris (or someone else) could have become a stronger candidate and prevailed. The other accepts that Harris never had a chance and argues that no Democrat could have stopped a Trump victory.
Not all of the recriminations are productive. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who should also take a bow, excoriated Democrats the day after the election for abandoning working-class people. He criticized sending billions to the Israeli government for its “all out war against the Palestinian people” and questioned whether Democrats “have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.”
Since all those working-class Americans just voted for Trump’s corrosive plan to give Elon Musk unfettered power in his administration, yes, it’s true: Democrats probably don’t have any idea how to do that.
Jaime Harrison slapped back at Sanders on Thursday, calling his criticism “straight up BS” and crediting Biden with being the most pro-worker president of his lifetime.
Rep. Ro Khanna, a progressive considered a future presidential candidate, called for the party to start over. “There needs to be new thinking, new ideas and a new direction. And, you know, the establishment produced a disaster.”
Others, however, are blaming progressives. Rep. Ritchie Torres argued that the left has “managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like ‘Defund the Police’ or ‘From the River to the Sea’ or ‘Latinx.’” He added that “the working class is not buying the ivory-towered nonsense that the far left is selling.”
Given this rift, finding consensus on a new policy agenda will be confounding. Democrats support expanding health care, lowering the cost of prescription drugs, taxing the wealthy, raising the minimum wage, expanding Medicaid and Medicare, paid family leave, and childcare support. All of which are popular, and most of which Republicans oppose. They will argue over how this is messaged—and will presumably struggle to argue that if the economy stays strong in the next few years, it should be attributed to Biden’s legislative accomplishments—like the CHIPS Act, the infrastructure bill, and new clean energy manufacturing in the Inflation Reduction Act—and not to Trump policies.
DEMOCRATS WILL UNITE against Trump and his policies, too. But they must overcome intraparty division on immigration. The party needs to back new restrictions while opposing Trump’s promised plans for massive deportations of immigrants. They can’t deny that Biden’s failure to control the border was a huge gift to Trump. It grew during his term to become a top concern across the political spectrum and added to a sense of chaos. As David Frum warned, so aptly, in 2019: “If Liberals Won’t Enforce Borders, Fascists Will.”
Trump will not convince other nations to absorb 15 million people but he will round up thousands and likely hold them in internment camps, which could become a spectacle as vivid and troubling as the family-separation policy of Trump’s first term and will damage the economy as well. Democrats should again push for passage of the strict border-security bill written by Sen. James Lankford that Trump spiked.
Finally, as Democrats attempt to appeal to those who have stopped hearing them, they should recognize that voters no longer want to hear about Trump.
He will use the power of his second term in dangerous, and likely unconstitutional, ways. The results could be calamitous. But a majority of voters—even after his coup attempt—have given him permission to do as he pleases. And so has the Supreme Court. If Democrats want to secure an electoral majority again, they will have to choose their battles.
They will also have to get much better at talking with people, and listening to them. Trump will work hard to make sure fewer and fewer voters listen to Democrats, and that he’s doing all the talking.