Democrats will adjust as the sound-bite age fades into history. But it will be difficult.
Democrats will adjust as the sound-bite age fades into history. But it will be difficult.
D emocrats will be back. The laws of physics in American politics will rescue them even if they cannot yet figure out how to rescue themselves.
For now, Donald Trump’s comeback victory in 2024 is especially demoralizing to Democrats in ways that previous defeats (1988, 2004, 2016) were not. The first is that Donald Trump actually came back stronger than ever. He has a greater mandate than he could have achieved in 2020. And he comes now, for the first time, with a political apparatus that is largely aligned with him, enabling him more than restraining him. He comes into office with a judiciary that he already transformed in his first term.
Second, his victory this time was at the expense of Democratic self-image. Having won the popular vote but not the presidency in 2000 and 2016, Democrats convinced themselves they were the real majority party, one that had been robbed and treated unfairly by a system set up to protect a slave-holding aristocracy from too much democracy. That’s not all. Trump’s astonishing gains among minority voters and working-class voters, while Dems continued to gain among white voters with college educations, overthrew all conventional wisdom about how the politics of immigration works.
Democrats won among voters in homes making over $100,000 a year and in homes making over $200,000 a year. Trump won in homes making $30,000–$100,000. Democrats absolutely dominated the fundraising scene and dominated among billionaire donors. By income and education level, Democrats resemble the Bob Dole coalition of 1996. They are a party with a substantial but demoralized black voter base that is utterly overwhelmed by its core of professional-class college graduates, particularly single women among them. James Carville complained that the party had “too many preachy females.” In this, he sounded like the now–vice president at his trolliest: The Democrats are a party of cat ladies.
Democrats are the party of experts at a time of massive social distrust in traditional authorities, and in which technology is splintering traditional media and other institutions that mediate expertise to the public — breaking them down into a cacophonous series of rivalrous minor duchies and principalities.
Last and relatedly, Democrats and progressives are the party of constructed narratives in an age of candor. That makes them the party that shouts “Studies say” without telling you how these studies were constructed to function like a puppet for an existing set of interests. They are the party that believes a media apparatus can simply declare Joe Biden fit and the public ought to be obliged to believe it. Or that Hunter Biden’s laptop is a piece of right-wing misinformation. The sell-by date on sound-bite politics expired in 2016, when it was obvious that people tuned in for hours-long political rallies and hours-long podcasts. The narrative truly died on the debate stage last year, when it was revealed to be part of a conspiracy to hide the condition of the president for years.
The future of politics is one of genuine intellectual engagement and candor. Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Tom Cotton are thriving in this environment. To a lesser degree, so is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The only Democrat who is truly built for this new age is John Fetterman, whose plainspokenness and authenticity are genuinely politically exciting. This has implications for media figures, too. Late-night talk show hosts and Morning Joe belong to the old sound-bite age that’s passing away. The podcasters own the present and the foreseeable future.
Republican rule will create disaffections and put Democrats back into position to win again. Populist coalitions tend to leave some mess and chaos in their wake, and this may bring traditional expertise into better repute. Democrats will adjust. But it will be difficult. They were overinvested in the old forms of mainstream-media politics. Their unlovely entry into the new world was to demand censorship. But they should be confident that once they let go of control, they can compete and even win in the new environment. Their closer proximity to the arts gives them access to charismatic personalities. And the deeper, sometimes utopian impulses that lie underneath the Left speak perennially to new generations of voters who feel that the system doesn’t benefit or serve them.