What’s Wrong with the Democratic Party?
How the Left got de-branded in 2024
This is the first in a series of four posts about the current state and possible future directions of the Democratic Party in the era of Trump 2.0.
- This post looks at the sorry state of public perceptions of the Party today.
- Next, I consider two issues that tend to be under-reported for Democrats: white status threat and implicit racial bias. I explain how these issues create serious challenges for Democratic messaging and outreach in the run-up to the 2026 and 2028 elections.
- Next, I look at the core of the Democrats’ Dilemma: should they tack to the center or should they take a more progressive route? Or is there perhaps a third option?
- Finally, in a fourth post, I conclude that the opportunity for Democrats lies in a revitalization of the Democratic brand and a rededication to the Economic Bill of Rights spelled out by Franklin Roosevelt in 1944.
As the Republican Party enthusiastically enacts the economic destruction and international isolation of the United States, it is the Democratic Party that is experiencing its lowest level of public support — 29% in March 2025 CNN poll — since the dawn of polling. According to CNN, that’s a 20 point drop since 2021. In contrast, the Republican Party was positively rated by 36% of the participants in the same poll (source). These results are replicated in several other post-election polls (source, source). Let that sink in.
The American people, on average, have a higher opinion of the Party that is trying to destroy America than they have of the Party that is trying to save it.
Not a pretty picture: How the Democratic Party is perceived today
What is America’s beef with Democrats? If we look at the polling, everybody seems to be fed up with Democrats: Among those who self-identify as Democrats , two-thirds say they are less than “somewhat optimistic” about the Party’s future (source). Within the public as a whole, while the Party enjoys majority support from Democratic-aligned women (57%), people without college degrees (60%) and people of color (57%), only 38% of men and 32% of white college graduates believe the Party is heading in the right direction (source).
If we dig a little deeper into this survey, we see a common theme underlying this dissatisfaction. Both within and outside the Party, Democrats are described as out of touch with the needs and interests of voters, especially those voters who broke for Trump in the last weeks of the campaign. For those voters, selecting Trump was largely based on a perception that Democrats under Harris, unlike Republicans under Trump, were “too focused on identity politics” (67%), “not doing enough to address crime” (68%), and were “too focused on fighting Trump rather than bringing the country together” (75%). More broadly, Democrats suffered from a wide perception gap that was fueled by a relentless Republican media campaign, basically telling voters that Harris was lying about her true beliefs:
“Over 80% of swing voters who chose Trump believed Harris held positions she didn’t campaign on in 2024, including supporting taxpayer funding for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants (83%), mandatory electric vehicles by 2035 (82%), decriminalizing border crossings (77%), and defunding the police (72%).” (source)
One example of the effectiveness of this approach can be seen in a New York Times/Ipsos poll conducted in early January (before the inauguration). When asked what the Democratic Party’s most important issues were, the top four responses were abortion, LGBT policy, climate change, and the state of democracy. For the Republican Party, the top four issues were believed to be immigration, the economy, taxes, and guns. Overwhelmingly, people believed the Republican agenda better matched their own priorities, which centered, in order, on the economy, healthcare, immigration, and taxes. (source) What voters didn’t know in early January 2025 was how the Trump 2.0 Administration would address those issues. As reported in an earlier post, the American people apparently expected something like the Trump 1.0 reality show. Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition, but that’s what they got.
First things first: What actually happened in 2024?
The 2024 Presidential election is like a Rorschach Test. People see what they want to see. The mainstream media, for example, was quick to jump on the interpretation that the election was a massive swing to the right, a pro-Trump mandate that could not be denied. Graphics like the following, showing how much Trump’s vote increased or decreased compared to his totals in 2020, were circulated widely.
A closer examination of the voting data, however, reveals a somewhat different story. As first documented by Michael Podhorzer, the election was much less a Trump win than a Harris loss. When turnout levels are combined with results from those who voted, we see that Harris’s loss was sealed by 19 million people who voted for Biden in 2020 but stayed home in 2024. They didn’t vote for Trump but they also didn’t vote for Harris. As one wag put it, Harris didn’t lose to Trump so much as she lost to the couch.
Podhorzer also looked at the extent to which the “anti-Trump” vote changed between 2020 and 2024. One pollster (AP-VoteCast) asked in both 2020 and 2024, “Did you vote for the candidate you selected, or did you vote against the other candidate?” In 2020, 41 million people who cast ballots for Biden said they were doing as a vote against Trump; in 2024 only 26 million people who cast ballots for Harris said they were doing so for the same reason. Podhorzer interprets this as 41 million–26 million = 15 million “anti-MAGA” voters who voted for Biden in 2020 but were “missing in action” for Harris in 2024. Podhorzer’s conclusion:
The results show that about 15 million fewer votes were cast “against” Trump in 2024 than in 2020. That suggests a lot of missing “anti-MAGA but not pro-Democrat” voters.
Podhorzer’s analysis goes against the grain of many mainstream media narratives that conclude Trump achieved an overwhelming mandate in 2024. In challenging that conclusion, Podhorzer offers the following data-driven facts:
- Trump’s share of eligible voters was the same in 2024 as in 2020.
- Trump’s victory in 2024 was one of the narrowest Presidential wins of the last century.
- Among “change elections” (when the incumbent party loses the Presidency), Trump’s vote “swing” was among the smallest since 1920.
- Trump is the only President other than George W. Bush in 2020 to have an immediate post-election approval rating lower than the share of votes he received in the election.
- External factors heavily favored Trump (incumbent parties were defeated around the world in 2024, often by greater margins than witnessed in the US).
- Very few 2020 Biden voters (about 4%) switched to Trump in 2024. Four percent of 2020 Trump voters also switched to Harris in 2024, so vote switching was a wash in the final tally.
- Republicans fared poorly where Trump made his greatest “gains”. Although Blue States “swung right” by 7 points, Trump increased his share of eligible voters in those states by only three-tenths of a percentage point, while Harris’s share dropped by 5 points.
In summary, Trump won in 2024 not because America became more “Trumpy”, but because it became much less friendly to Democrats. The challenge facing the Democratic Party today, as we enter the depths of Trump 2.0, is that the people it has relied on to deliver popular vote majorities in every Presidential election since 2004 now seem to be unhappy with the direction in which they perceive the Party to be heading.
If the Party’s challenge is to reconnect with a “still anti-MAGA but much less pro-Democratic” electorate, its dilemma revolves around how to carry out that task. Does the Party need to “move to the center” and abandon long-held liberal values in order to meet the public “where it’s at” today? Or can the Party motivate its wandering voters with a different strategy, one that does not sacrifice the Party’s progressive values? How can the Party rebuild a strong anti-MAGA and pro-Democratic coalition that is capable of defeating Trump and his Republican enablers, preferably at some point before they manage to end American democracy forever?
