As Democrats sort through the wreckage of their 2024 catastrophe, they would do well to take some time to reflect on the path forward rather than jumping to knee-jerk conclusions, especially since higher-quality election data about the scale of losses with groups like Black and Latino voters will soon be coming from researchers, including gold-standard studies from Pew and Catalist that typically have some numbers that differ from exit polls. Democrats should execute course corrections where necessary, but they must also be careful not to overcorrect and in doing so further divide their own coalition against itself. And to properly evaluate what did and didn’t work, both in government and in the campaign, they should keep three facts in mind.
First, where Democrats invested the most resources in the campaign—across the seven consensus battleground states—their losses were roughly half the uniform national swing of six points to the right from 2020. While votes are still being counted, the shellacking was the most acute in comparison to national shifts in deep blue and deep red states like New Jersey and Florida where Kamala Harris’ campaign invested zero resources. That suggests that the campaign was able to successfully keep losses down by taking its message directly to voters. The message, logically, could not have been all bad.
Second, the party’s brand is not in tatters. After a stinging defeat like this one, there are inevitably going to be overwrought declarations that the party needs a complete overhaul. “This is a realignment. Our country has moved to the right. It’s not center left,” Rep. Nikki Budzinski (D-IL) told NBC News. But the outcome of Budzinksi’s own race—which she won by double digits in a Democratic-leaning swing district—suggest that this might not be the case. Yes, Democrats lost ground in partisan identification since 2020, but this is almost always what happens when your party is in power and taking the heat, rightly or wrongly, for everything that goes awry.
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When all the votes are counted for the House of Representatives, Democrats are likely to have done just as well as they did in 2022 and may even gain a seat or two. And Senate candidates across the country with that same (D) next to their names significantly outperformed Harris, including in Arizona, where up-and-coming Ruben Gallego ran about six points in front of the top of the ticket. All of this suggests that the Democrats’ “brand” problem is more about President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, their key mistakes and their misfortune in ascending to power just as an inflation crisis was about to hit the entire world than it is about a wholesale rejection of the party.
Critics are predictably blaming “wokism” for the outcome of this election, but this is a difficult critique to seriously sustain. For example, where Republicans spent the most money on wall-to-wall attacks on trans Americans, they largely performed worse. If this was a revolt against “DEI” and language policing, it certainly never showed up in any survey research, which consistently showed that the economy and immigration have topped voters’ lists of concerns for more than two years. Americans are not, according to polls, teeming with resentment against their employers’ DEI policies or their friends’ pronoun choices.
Democrats didn’t experience what look like substantial losses with Latino voters because some activists insisted on using the phrase “Latinx.” They lost them because inflation hit households making less than $100,000 particularly hard, and because Democrats have long erred in assuming that liberal immigration policies are a core Latino voting interest. The outcome of this election should put that mythology to rest.
Some of my friends on the left also need to understand that there really was intense blowback in working class Black and Latino communities against the perception that the Biden administration was rolling out the red carpet for new arrivals from Venezuela while failing to address kitchen table issues in their own communities. You had Republican governors like Texas’ Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis deliberately exploiting this wedge issue by busing and flying migrants to big cities and their suburbs, and neither the Biden administration nor beleaguered governors and mayors on the receiving end were able to do much of anything about it except shrug and say “what can you do?”
To the extent that these policies are indelibly associated with Biden and Harris, the damage is unlikely to be lasting and the fix is pretty easy: Don’t do that again. Public opinion is likely to swing sharply against cruelty to immigrants as the scale of the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans set in with the electorate. Voters wanted someone to address a crisis of unsheltered homelessness, not to uproot and cavalierly deport a huge share of the country’s agricultural, childcare, and construction workforces, a process that will be extraordinarily ugly and, if pursued at anything like the scale that President-Elect Donald Trump promised during the campaign, both wildly expensive and economically ruinous.
Please don’t think that I am absolving Democrats of their sins and chalking up this whole outcome to the international post-pandemic backlash against incumbent governments. The Harris campaign’s decision to mute its economic messaging in favor of the existential democracy rhetoric that voters are clearly tired of hearing didn’t help. Americans in 2024 wanted the presidential candidates to explain how they would improve their lives. Harris was unable to do that, and Trump was. If there’s any structural lesson that can be gleaned today, it’s that it is extremely important to be responsive to how voters are reacting to your policies and governance and to adjust accordingly. That’s something our next president will need to internalize quickly if he and his party want to avoid the same fate.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
