As a veteran of many “struggles for the soul of the Democratic Party,” I am sympathetic to the sort of informal 2024 autopsy effort that centrist Democrats are undertaking right now (particularly from the Third Way organization, and from former colleagues Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck, and my more recent colleague Jonathan Chait). When a major political party loses a presidential election as consequential as the one Democrats just lost, despite having an opponent who was both unpopular generally and horrifying to the Democratic base, then reevaluation is in order. The possibility that a proper diagnosis of what went wrong will discomfit some important elements of the party should not be a bar to this reevaluation, unless it’s assumed the Democratic coalition is so fragile that fault can never be found.
Having said that, the “lessons of 2024” can tell Democrats only so much about how to deal with the realities of 2025. Yes, it’s good to get a sense of how heavy a millstone Joe Biden represented for his party last year. But Biden is not the president now, and unfortunately, thanks to the GOP trifecta, Democrats in Washington have been entirely relieved of the burdens of power in a country (and even a world) where people are chronically unhappy and restive.
Sure, today’s Democratic elected officials should be aware of the high price Kamala Harris (and derivatively, her party) paid for her abject and almost comical subservience to unpopular interest- and identity-group demands during her unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign. But at a moment when the most basic progressive policies that have been in place since the 1960s (e.g., anti-discrimination laws) are under intense attack, there’s not much of a risk that Democrats will excessively focus on expanding DEI efforts or picking wildly controversial fights with majoritarian sentiments.
And of course, the Democratic Party needs to begin planning on how to regain the White House in 2028. But there’s a more immediate election in 2026 with quite possibly a more congenial electorate, a very different public-opinion climate (particularly if Trump policies like tariffs backfire and make him the “inflation president”) and highly achievable objectives (i.e., flipping the U.S. House of Representatives and ending Trump’s GOP trifecta).
Even more urgently, Trump and his subordinates are in the midst of an assault on the public sector and on legal and constitutional restraints on presidential power that is unprecedented and increasingly difficult to characterize as anything other than revolutionary. There is a risk that Democrats inhibited by post-2024 fears of looking like the “party of government” may miss the opportunity to call attention to Republican intentions of demolishing unquestionably popular and essential programs and services. Suggesting, for example, that Elon Musk and his DOGE minions have the right idea but not necessarily the right targets, as some Democrats have already done, is just going to convince voters they have little to fear from Trump 2.0. Similarly, the widespread conclusion that 2024 swing voters rejected the argument that Trump represented a “threat to democracy” might lead to the bad idea that current real-life Trump policies (notably the claim that the president’s powers enable him to completely reverse congressional spending decisions) that manifestly do threaten democracy aren’t worth bringing up. More generally, Democrats too immediately obsessed with “moving to the center” may concede that the “center” is defined by Trump’s radical agenda, which he is rapidly advancing in a massive bait and switch after campaigning mostly on lowering grocery prices and stopping a border surge of migrants.
Democrats can and should be able to look back to 2024 and forward to 2028 in developing an effective party message. But right now messaging is only a small part of an emergency response to what Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has rightly called a “five-alarm fire.” The actual weapons Democrats have to stop the Trump 2.0 locomotive are leverage points in Congress over must-pass legislation like appropriations, and broad-based litigation to get the federal courts to enforce the laws and the Constitution. They need to be especially nimble in order to create and then exploit divisions in the Trump-GOP coalition (e.g., over trade policy, spending-cut radicalism, and possibly even tax policy). And that really does require a tactical focus on exposing decisions the administration and its congressional allies are making that are unpopular and endanger public support for the whole crazy enterprise in ways that might matter in 2026 (and in 2028!).
The most relevant bit of self-reflection over 2024 for the Democratic Party’s current leaders is the need to convince potentially fractious interest and identity groups that they must wake up, smell the coffee, and subordinate all of their narrow objectives to the emergency conditions they face right now. I don’t know the inside story of the noisy protests by climate-change activists at the Democratic National Committee’s January 30 forum for DNC chair candidates. But if they can’t grasp that the country is currently in the hands of people eager to increase greenhouse-gas emissions exponentially until the icecaps melt and coastal cities disappear, they need to get out of politics. There will be plenty of time to sort out both principles and long-term strategy before 2028. For now, instead of slapping each other, all hands should be on deck.
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