The debate over what Democrats do now hinges on one question

The Democratic Party lost the presidency to an unpopular, indisciplined authoritarian with a penchant for rambling incoherently about Hannibal Lecter — again.

Despite January 6, the Dobbs decision, and the GOP ticket’s many forays into racial incitement, Americans not only elected Donald Trump on Tuesday, but — by all appearances — gave him a popular mandate: Ballots still need to be tabulated but, as of this writing, Trump is poised to win the popular vote by a hefty margin. 

Democrats also lost their Senate majority. If current results hold, Republicans will enjoy a 53-to-47 seat advantage in Congress’s upper chamber, and likely narrow the House advantage. 

All this amounts to a crisis for Democrats. The only question is the scale of their challenge. 

The optimistic read of Election Day results is that the party drew a bad hand. Democrats faced a series of contingent headwinds in this particular election cycle — voter outrage over post-pandemic inflation, a rhetorically inept president, and an electorally undistinguished nominee — none of which are likely to burden them going forward. In this read, Democrats may need to adjust their tactics. But their basic strategic orientation remains sound. 

Yet there is another, bleaker interpretation of Tuesday’s returns. From this vantage, Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss looks less like bad luck than the byproduct of deep, structural trends that will be difficult to reverse, especially once the GOP gets out from under Trump’s grip. For this reason, Democrats cannot realistically hope to wield control of the federal government without substantially revising the party’s agenda and messaging. 

Both perspectives are plausible. It is impossible to say with certainty which of these readings is closer to the truth. But I suspect that the Democrats’ problems are larger than the peculiar disadvantages they faced this election cycle. If the party does not take that possibility seriously, it risks condemning the United States to a period of reactionary rule that extends well beyond Trump’s second term — assuming it has not already done so.  

Why Democrats might be bound to bounce back

The case for chalking up Trump’s victory to contingent, ephemeral factors is fivefold. 

First, the past four years were a very bad time to be in power. The pandemic did real damage to the global economy, which governments papered over through deficit spending in 2020. But the bill for Covid-19 was always going to come due in 2021 and 2022. And virtually every party that happened to be in power at that time proceeded to suffer at the ballot box.

Since the onset of post-pandemic inflation, ruling parties either lost seats or control of government altogether in Austria, Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan, among other nations. If polls hold steady, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s governing Liberal Party is poised for a landslide defeat in next year’s Canadian election.

Given this transcontinental desire for change, Democrats keeping the election close could be seen as a credit to the party’s political health. 

Second, the Democrats’ senescent president compounded the harms of their unfortunate timing. The party spent the first leg of the general election campaign tethered to an octogenarian who lacked basic proficiency in public speaking. Biden’s conspicuous feebleness — and the Democrats’ initial compulsion to unite behind him, in defiance of the public’s wishes — made it all the more difficult to overcome the public’s discontent with elevated prices.

Third, Harris was a suboptimal standard-bearer who owed her nomination more to circumstance than demonstrable electoral success. 

Harris’s electoral track record prior to 2024 was unimpressive. In her first statewide election in 2010, she defeated a Republican in the California attorney general race by less than 1 percentage point (two years earlier, Barack Obama had bested John McCain by more than 23 points in that state). In 2020, Harris began her run for the Democratic nomination with strong fundraising and an early surge in the polls. Yet her campaign collapsed before the primary’s first ballots were cast.

Further, as a Californian whose Senate voting record put her on the left wing of her caucus, Harris was not an ideal figurehead for a party anxious to appeal to Trump-curious Midwesterners. And she compounded these liabilities by taking several unpopular stances during her 2020 primary campaign in a bid for progressive support, which the Trump campaign highlighted incessantly.

Next time around, there will be an open Democratic primary, in which no sitting vice president (nor former one) will enjoy an advantage in name-recognition or party support. And if 2020 is any guide, the Democratic electorate will be eager to nominate a maximally electable nominee.

Fourth, Democratic Senate candidates in swing states ran far ahead of Harris on Tuesday night. As of this writing, it looks like Democrats will win the Senate races in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin. This suggests that swing-state voters may have been more discounted with the Biden-Harris administration than with the Democratic Party writ large. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Trump is all but certain to do many things that the public won’t like. His team is already signaling it intends to move forward with mass deportation, a concept voters may like in the abstract, but which will yield price increases they are sure to loathe and humanitarian nightmares that many will struggle to stomach. 

Free of Biden and Harris’s personal liabilities — and from culpability for any economic discontents — Democrats will have an excellent shot of regaining the White House on a wave of anti-Trump backlash in 2028.

Why the path of least resistance could lead Democrats deeper into the wilderness

There are reasons for fearing that the Democrats’ problems are deeper and more abiding than inflation, Biden’s age, or Harris’s imperfections. 

All the data available to us right now is imperfect. But the returns and voter surveys tell a consistent story: In 2024, two long-term trends in American voting behavior — that are highly unfavorable for Democrats — accelerated. 

The first is the rightward drift of working-class voters. Americans without college degrees have been shifting rightward for decades, but Trump’s conquest of the GOP in 2016 greatly accelerated that trend. Biden fended off further erosion in his party’s working-class support four years later. But in 2024, working-class defections from blue America resumed. According to AP VoteCast, Trump won non-college-educated voters by 4 points in 2020 — and by 12 points four years later. 

To a large extent, Democrats have compensated for losses with working-class voters through gains with college graduates. But this did not happen in 2024: Harris did remarkably well with college educated, given her overall performance, but still lost about one point of support with the demographic relative to 2020, according to the AP survey. 

Meanwhile, in a distinct — but likely related — development, Democrats lost ground with nonwhite voters. Harris actually won the same share of the white vote as Biden did in 2020 (43 percent), according to the AP’s figures. But her margin over Trump with Black voters was 14 points lower than Biden’s, while her advantage with Hispanic voters was 13 points smaller than the last Democratic nominees. 

The AP VoteCast’s data is highly imperfect. But its basic story is consistent with the geographic pattern of Tuesday’s results. Florida, where only 52 percent of the population is non-Hispanic white, went for Trump by 13 points. In Hazleton, Pennsylvania — where 62 percent of residents are Hispanic — Democrats went from winning the presidential vote by 5 points in 2016 to losing it by 25 on Tuesday night. In Queens, one of the most diverse counties in the United States, the Democratic nominee’s margin over Trump was roughly 20 points lower than it had been in 2020. 

Democrats lost ground almost everywhere. But they maintained support — or grew it — in some overwhelmingly white and affluent enclaves, such as Cumberland County, Maine, and the Northwest Hills Planning Region of Connecticut. 

These trends are concerning for at least two reasons. 

First, there is a theoretical basis for believing that the trends derive from deep-seated, structural changes in American life and will therefore be difficult to fully reverse. 

Working-class voters have not only been drifting right in the United States for decades — they’ve also been doing so in virtually every Western nation. The reasons for this are complex, but they relate to the weakening of trade unions amid deindustrialization, and the tendency of highly educated people to hold unusually cosmopolitan values — an inclination that spurs social conflict when college graduates become numerous enough to dominate cultural production and center-left politics. And trade unions are not going to become drastically more powerful — nor educated professionals, less multitudinous — anytime soon.

Meanwhile, there’s long been reason to suspect that Hispanic and Black voters would grow less Democratic over time. For decades, Democrats have been relying on the votes of conservative nonwhites, whose support for the party derived less from ideological affinity than inherited allegiances. 

As many Hispanic American families enter their third and fourth generations, however, they tend to grow more assimilated. And if the political trajectory of previous immigrant groups was any guide, Latinos were liable to become more Republican (and white identifying) as they gained more distance from the immigrant experience. And this would be especially true of the subset that was already temperamentally disposed to conservative politics.

Similarly, Democrats’ capacity to win roughly 90 percent of the Black vote, year in and year out, was arguably rooted in historical conditions that are gradually fading. As the political scientists Ismail K. White and Cheryl N. Laird argued in their 2020 book, Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior, the Black voting bloc is a product of African American communities internally policing norms of political behavior through social rewards and penalties. And such norm enforcement has historically been exceptionally effective due to the extraordinary degree of social cohesion that slavery and segregation fostered.

As American society grows more integrated, and attendance declines at community institutions like the Black church, Laird and White predicted that there would be a “slow but steady diversification of Black partisanship,” as the norm of supporting Democrats grew harder to enforce.

Tuesday’s result is consistent with that hypothesis.

The second cause for concern about these trends is that Trump’s retirement from politics could plausibly exacerbate them. 

Democrats weren’t the only party facing unusual liabilities in 2024. The GOP was once again saddled with an unpopular, exceptionally undisciplined, and explicitly racist nominee. 

To be sure, Trump likely helped Republicans gain ground with non-college-educated voters in 2016 by forcing the party to embrace stances on immigration and entitlement spending that are popular with that demographic. And it is possible that his personal celebrity and charisma rendered him uniquely capable of reaching politically disaffected or disengaged constituencies. 

Nevertheless, given that the rightward drift of working-class voters is a transnational phenomenon, a future Republican standard-bearer would have a good chance of building on Trump’s gains, particularly if they retained his positioning and populist rhetoric.

At the same time, were such a Republican to dispense with, say, allowing surrogates to liken nonwhite ethnic groups to garbage, they might do even better with Black and Hispanic voters than Trump did. 

All this wouldn’t be so damaging for Democrats, if the rightward drift of nonwhite and working-class voters ensured the leftward movement of college-educated whites. But there is no such guarantee. In fact, it is hard to imagine a GOP nominee more offensive to the sensibilities of the highly educated than Trump, a vulgar, anti-intellectual, misogynist who evinces contempt for democracy. If the GOP nominates a more ordinary Republican in 2028 — a near certainty, given Trump’s ineligibility for a third term — then Democrats could see their share of the college-educated vote fall, even as structural forces prevent a rebound in their Black and Hispanic support.

Finally and least ambiguously, both the Biden and Harris coalitions are poorly equipped to compete for Senate control. As of this writing, it looks like Republicans will have a 53-seat Senate majority in the new Congress — even with Democratic Senate candidates winning a majority of races in swing states. Looking ahead to the 2026 and 2028 Senate maps, it is not easy to chart a path back to Democratic control. To win back the chamber, Democrats would need to beat Republicans in states that both Biden and Harris lost, while reelecting Democratic incumbents in purple states like Georgia.

The Democrats’ weak position in the Senate is not coincidental; the body heavily overrepresents non-college-educated voters. 

Thus, unless the party can broaden its support, it will be incapable of appointing Supreme Court justices or passing major legislation without Republicans’ help. 

Democrats should plan for the worst

It is entirely possible that Trump’s misgovernance will solve the Democratic Party’s problems for it. If he follows through on his immigration and trade plans, he will engineer an economic disaster. But Democrats should not bank on that (not least because it’s their responsibility to do whatever they can to prevent such a calamity from happening).

Prudence demands that Democrats take the grimmest interpretation of Tuesday’s results seriously. The party’s eroding support from both working-class and nonwhite voters could render it uncompetitive in future presidential elections, and has already put it at a large disadvantage in the fight for Senate control. 

Democrats do not control their fate. A second Trump presidency threatens to pervert the democratic process in ways that entrench Republican power. But the party can try to make itself appealing to a broader share of Americans. And it must.