Three Big Lessons for the Democrats in 2025
Looked at one way, the election gave Democrats little reason to panic. It was an inflation election, and the voters decided to punish the incumbent party. From January 2021 to November 2024, food prices rose 22 percent. That changes the price of a $150 cart of groceries to $183. You have to be pretty rich not to feel that. More than half of all Americans living today were born after 1980, meaning they’d never experienced inflation on anything like that scale; for the other 45 percent, it was an awfully distant memory. That’s really what happened here, period and end of story.
In addition, it always bears remembering how close the election was. If just 173,000 or so voters in four states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia—had switched their vote, Kamala Harris would be president today. That’s more than the difference in 2020 and 2016; but still, out of nearly 155 million votes, it ain’t much.
Third, their candidate was their candidate for only 107 days. Books will be published in due course giving us the inside dope on who’s really to blame for Joe Biden’s stubborn insistence that he should run again. Whatever the answer there, the decision was potentially very costly. Could a normal primary process have resulted in a Democratic victory? No one can know for sure. Harris adviser David Plouffe, in a postelection interview on Pod Save America, argued that if Harris had won the nomination in March or April through a normal process, “You spend a month, six weeks on your biography, you keep coming back to it, you define the Trump first term, you raise the stakes of what a Trump second term would be like, you have like a month just to run paid advertising on things like housing and your tax cut.” Even an abbreviated-normal process might have been better. If Biden had dropped out earlier—immediately after the disastrous June 27 debate, say—there would have been time for a mini-primary of some sort; at the very least a quick series of candidate forums, which would either have made Harris a better candidate or have produced someone else who seemed, to party activists, stronger.
Those rationalizations all carry some weight. And yet, they don’t provide much comfort. Panic may not be called for, but losing is losing, and it isn’t winning, and it’s supposed to make you think and reflect. There are, to my mind, three major things the Democrats need to be worrying about.
The first, of course, is economics, and the slippage among working-class voters of all colors. The second centers around certain aspects of cultural politics, and the role played in the nominating process by the now-much-maligned single-issue interest groups—groups defending LGBTQ rights or immigrants’ rights, for example—said to wield such iron control over Democratic candidates. The third has to do with the bleak fact that, as I wrote right after the election in a column that has now been read by upwards of half a million people, the Democratic brand is simply garbage in vast swaths of the country. This problem has many fathers, but at bottom, it is largely a media problem, and it’s one the Democrats and their donors simply have to take seriously, especially now when everyone (I hope) knows and agrees that Joe Rogan moves a thousand times more votes (and this is probably downplaying it) than the New York Times editorial page.
