2024 Changed Everything? Nonsense.
Turns out the Democratic Party wasn’t dead.
As someone who helped create the modern Republican Party – God help me – I am baffled by the conventional wisdom that has emerged about the 2024 presidential election.
NBC: Trump just realigned the entire political map. Democrats have 'no easy path' to fix it.
New York Times: Trump’s Re-election Defines a New Era of American Politics
The Washington Post: Trump coalition marks a transformed Republican Party
The Nation: Democrats Need to Fundamentally Rethink Everything
It’s all nonsense. This is how societies end up worshipping volcanoes. There’s a drought, the volcano belches, and it rains. Next thing you know, you’re sacrificing virgins to honor the Volcano God.
Donald Trump won an election by one of the smallest margins in modern history. Had Harris won Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, she’d be president. Trump’s winning margin in those states was a cumulative 230,000 votes. That’s 0.15% of the total votes.
But the tiny margin of victory isn’t really the story.
On election day 2024, President Biden’s approval rating was 40%. In modern political history, no incumbent party has received more than 2% higher than the president’s approval. When asked the question, “Do you think America is heading in the right or wrong direction?” only 27% chose the “right direction.” No incumbent party has won a presidential race when the right track was below 45%.
What do those numbers tell us? 2024 was a great year for a challenger to run against an incumbent president. It is completely wrong-headed to interpret Trump’s narrow victory as an endorsement of Trumpism. Any credible challenger most likely would have done considerably better than Trump. Polls showed that Nikki Haley overperformed Trump by five to seven points.
Yesterday was a reality check for those who argue that 2024 changed the political world. In Florida Congressional races, Republican margins dropped by 50%. In Wisconsin, there was a 12-point shift toward the Democrats.
None of this should be surprising. Unless you think we live in a pre-2024 and post-2024 divided political world. (Hot tip: we don’t.) In the presidential campaign, Trump world did everything possible to disavow any connection to Project2025 because they knew it was poison. Now that people are being forced to drink the poison, it’s only grown worse.
For the millions of words written and spoken about the crisis of the Democratic Party, on every front, they are far better positioned than the MAGA Republican Party. An old friend and former client, Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi, had a favorite saying, “Sooner or later in politics, it’s good to be for what people like.”
On that score, Democrats are way ahead of Republicans. Turns out, Americans actually like the constellation of basic social net programs that ketamine-fueled weirdo Elon Musk is trying to slash. Nearly four in five Americans (79%) oppose any reductions to Social Security benefits. For all the hate MAGA piles on the Americans who depend on SNAP, Medicaid, and housing assistance, 41% say that the government should do more to help those in need; 27% say the government does too much.
How about those tax cuts? Guess what, cut taxes for billionaires sort of sucks as a political rallying cry. This isn’t some Bernie Sanders niche “eat the rich” issue. In 2017, only a quarter of voters thought the Trump tax cuts were positive. A recent Navigator survey found, “By a 10-point margin, Americans believe that Trump’s tax plan will “hurt people like me.”
The 2024 Trump campaign became the first in history to run only negative advertising. Their Harris attack on supporting transgender surgery for prisons helped define Democrats as out-of-touch woke activists. But its effectiveness was largely due to the lack of response by Democrats. It’s easy to win a fight if one side isn’t punching. The Lincoln Project produced a highly effective response to the Trump attack, pointing out that the policy was adopted in 2018 by Trump’s appointed head of prisons. The Harris campaign never responded, while the Democratic Senate candidates who went on camera to rebut – Rosen in Nevada, Gallego in Arizona, Baldwin in Wisconsin, and Slotkin in Michigan – all won. Bob Casey in Pennsylvania didn’t respond. He lost.
But Trump’s success using trans as a wedge issue doesn’t obscure the broad sentiment that most Americans support LGBTQ rights. Most of the Republican party never really accepted marriage equality but shut up about it when it became a loser politically. Now they are using the trans issue as a vehicle to vent their anger. Their typical overreach limits their effectiveness in future elections. The simple truth is that the Democratic party represents the consensus view of Americans on the role of government policing sexual activity between consenting adults.
Then there’s the issue of public health. Does anybody other than the MAGA faithful believe that gutting the Center for Disease Control makes their lives better? Or a former heroin addict nutcase in charge of America’s public health?
Make Canada the 51st state? Invade Greenland? Pull out of NATO? Loving on Vladimir Putin?
Crazy.
Yes, Donald Trump won an election. But American politics has not fundamentally changed. Are there problems with the Democratic party? Absolutely. But it’s like a very valuable company under terrible management. The fundamentals still greatly favor the broader Democratic coalition.
In 2020, Trump’s coalition was 85% white. Sure, he did better with the non-white vote in 2024. This time, only 84% of his vote was white. In a country that is 59% white. Republicans are celebrating that only 86% of African Americans voted against them; that only 63% of Asians and 54% of Hispanics voted Democratic. The base of Trump’s support is still non-college-educated whites. In 2000, that was 60% of the electorate. Now, it’s 38% and is the fastest-declining large demographic in America.
In political campaigns, you wake up every day asking yourself, “Would I rather be my guy or the other guy.” The odds are far greater that Trump will be the last Republican elected president until 2036 than for this Republican Party, which has won the popular vote only twice since 1988, is now destined for a long run.
It’s not going to happen. November 2024 was the Pickett’s Charge of MAGA. They were given the keys to the kingdom controlling three branches of government and squandered the opportunity with a train wreck of nutty policies implemented by a Star Wars bar of unlikeable freaks.
Sooner or later, in politics, you have to be for something that people like. My bet is on the Democratic Party.
Thank you Stewart. I appreciate your analysis and work with the Lincoln Project, now L. square.
Thank you for this well-reasoned article. It is a refreshing read given all the gloom and doom around us. two points: 1. I firmly believe that it was statistically inconceivable that Harris lost all the battleground states. More likely scenario to me is that emporer musk and his doge bros were able to effectively manipulate some voting machine counts. Afterall, they have managed to reach access to all of the government systems, in most cases, without the assistance of the experts guarding those systems; 2. The breakage to the government bureaucracy is so severe that a repair will take decades. Firing experts across the board effectively kills the programs being administered while the lack of funding works similarly. All in all, I am hopeful that there will an awaking among a few current members of the republican electorate in congress to stop the hemorrhaging and take corrective action soon. Reaction?