For the first time in modern history the majority of Americans now believes that the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor, and that the Democratic Party is the party of the wealthy and the elites.
Dems support in three of its crucial constituencies: minorities, the young and urban voters have weakened.
The Democratic Party is ill prepared to defend itself against a Republican Party determined to eviscerate liberalism. Not only was the outcome of the 2024 election supremely deflating, but many of the party’s institutional allies are struggling to deal with setbacks.
Democrats need to reimagine what it stands for and who is in its coalition.
Pew Research asked Democrats and Republicans whether they were optimistic or pessimistic about the future of their party after the five presidential and midterm elections from 2016 to 2024. Meanwhile, a substantial portions of the Republican electoral base are so angry with ‘liberal elites’ that they will stop at nothing to destroy them, by whatever means Trump chooses to use.”
Republicans in 2024 were more optimistic, 86-13, than after any of the previous four contests, including Donald Trump’s 2016 victory.
Among Democrats, optimism fell to 51 percent, while pessimism rose to 49 percent, well below the 61-38 for Democrats after the 2016 election.
Polling suggests that Trump is ideologically closer to the median voter than Kamala Harris.
The Democratic Party seems culturally out of touch to many Americans. Its brand is associated with championing niche interests, and the party — despite some crucial electoral victories — has ultimately failed since 2015 to defeat the MAGA movement and it’s anti-establishment themes.
The two liberal cable networks, CNN and MSNBC, have experienced sharp post-election declines in viewership. MSNBC’s prime-time audience has dipped 53 percent since the week before the election,” closely followed “by a 47 percent drop by CNN — while Fox News has largely held onto its audience since President-elect Donald Trump’s victory.”
Authoritarians tend to target the media, higher education, the bureaucracy, the legal system and the military. Trump will use government powers to engage in selective punishments and purges on a scale we really have not seen before.
So where do we go from all of this?
First Dems must regain majority power in at least one national institution.
The second hurdle is avoiding past strategic errors:
Even when Democrats do enjoy majorities, they have proved unwilling to give priority to defending constitutional democracy. In the most recent Congress, for example, they failed to join bipartisan efforts to reform the dangerously broad Insurrection Act. Advocacy groups should stop pressuring elected officials to take positions that they cannot defend during elections.”
Democrats must agree on an approach to immigration that can command majority support, even if left-leaning immigration lawyers denounce it.
We just lost the presidential election and normally we would lick our wounds, take an audit of our failings, and wait patiently for the eventual rebound.
However, Trump’s return presents a more urgent situation for the Democrats. He seeks to overturn the narrative about Jan. 6 and even jail some opponents.
So the Democrats need to show that they will stand in his way and make him pause. For instance, Senate Democrats should challenge confirmation of political appointees who are Jan. 6 sympathizers or who would willingly facilitate retribution. Of course they would need at least a few Republican allies for any successful resistance. And build alliances with the few Republicans in Congress who have at least partially distanced themselves from Trump, including Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine.
We need a flexible Democratic Party platform that is willing to compromise on various social and economic issues (immigration, trans rights, tax policies) in the short run to protect democracy in the long run. It requires an ideological pivot toward more moderate voters who may not always agree with socially and culturally liberal whites.
The Democratic Party and its candidates must regain the center and avoid the adoption of more extreme cultural and social policies that alienate the middle and working classes.
The Republican Party’s excesses could make it more likely for Democrats to coordinate and converge around political positions that promise electoral success with moderate voters while also preventing a retreat of more radical supporters into abstention, given how high the stakes are of the political game.
The prospect of sustained defeat will be the mother of moderation
Progressives policies seem, to a majority of Americans, to produce new forms of authoritarianism. So, Democratic politics, as interpreted by this or that party wing, have to be put on the back burner, and probably permanently.
Don’t let America turn into an authoritarian one-party state. We need to demonstrate the resilience and creativity that carried America through crises in the past as it did during the American Revolution, the Civil War and two World Wars.
Source: Pew Research and the NYT.