What, If Anything, Will Democrats Learn From This Election?
Votes are still left to be counted, but it is clear by now that former President Donald Trump is once again the president-elect, prevailing over Vice President Kamala Harris in not only the Electoral College but also the popular vote. This marks not only the first time he has ever come close to majority support, but also only the second time since the end of the Cold War that a Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote.
“Of the counties with nearly complete results, more than 90 percent shifted in favor of former President Donald J. Trump in the 2024 presidential election,” The New York Times found on the morning after the election. “Early results showed that even a number of states where Vice President Kamala Harris was ahead had shifted right.”
“Trump picked up more votes in every state apart from Utah and Washington,” added the Financial Times. “Across the US, the data suggests women, urban voters and the Latino vote did not come through for Harris, while rural areas came out strong for Trump.”
With the U.S. Senate also lost and the House very much in peril, Democrats may find themselves in the wilderness yet again. But what lessons will they take from this experience in electoral repudiation? For that matter, will they learn anything?
It’s not a foregone conclusion that they will: In the three elections in which Trump has competed, Democrats largely treated him as an existential threat, making a case for his inherent unfitness for office but often forgetting to mount a positive campaign for themselves. And then, after losing to him in 2016—even after beating him in 2020—the party did no apparent soul-searching to determine why voters would pick such an unfit candidate.
Ironically, it’s a lesson they could learn from Republicans. In 2012, after losing two presidential elections in a row, Republicans conducted a “full autopsy” on the moribund party and its electoral failures, hoping to determine how to appeal to voters going forward. To compile the report, which was released the following year, the panel conducted conference calls, online surveys, focus groups, and more than 3,000 “group listening sessions.”
Democrats, on the other hand, did no such self-inquiry when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. “Democrats didn’t even attempt to do an autopsy in the wake of 2016, relegating debates about the party’s future to places like Twitter and cable news,” wrote Jon Favreau, a progressive commentator and former speechwriter for President Barack Obama.
That may not be entirely true. In fact, Democrats tasked then-Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D–N.Y.) with compiling an autopsy of the 2016 election, only to then effectively bury it: Maloney presented the report to lawmakers “during a members-only gathering at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee headquarters” in 2017, Politico reported, but “members were not allowed to have copies of the report and may view it only under the watchful eyes of DCCC staff.”
Clinton herself conceded defeat but apparently never quite accepted it. In the months after the electi
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