It’s been less than two weeks since President-elect Donald Trump’s astonishing comeback election victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, becoming the second president elected to nonconsecutive terms. This victory has launched as much Monday morning quarterbacking among Democrats, political pundits, scholars and journalists as a bad Dallas Cowboys loss.
Trump became the first Republican candidate since George W. Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote. He made significant inroads with Black and Latino voters, as well as Generation Z voters. He also gained substantial support among middle- and working-class voters. Many voted for Trump because they felt he would handle the economy and international geopolitics better than Harris would have done, and because they wanted a crackdown on illegal immigration.
There have been many assertions as to how and why the Democrats were hit with a “red wave” that resulted not only in a resounding Electoral College victory for Trump, but Republican control of the U.S. Senate and House. The results of the election have left the Democrats confused and demoralized.
Some place the blame on Harris, who was often criticized for her inability to articulate a persuasive reason to vote for her other than she wasn’t Trump. Others have suggested that Harris spent too much time emphasizing the dangers of a second Trump presidency while ignoring concerns about inflation and economic anxiety. Still others blame Biden for choosing to run for reelection, thereby placing Democrats in an untenable position of defending an incumbent who was clearly not up to another campaign and, then, after he chose to step aside, being forced to quickly pivot to creating an insanely compressed national campaign timetable on the fly. And yet still others have placed the blame on an electorate that had unexpectedly turned right, on Trump’s populism, on a Harris campaign that was painted as “woke” and too liberal for the average voter, or on racism and misogyny.
The problem with these claims is that they’re not necessarily wrong but are only components of a larger problem — the Democratic Party itself. Like most elections, voters engaged in retrospective and prospective voting. It didn’t matter that Trump was defeated four years earlier. He was viewed as the change candidate. Rightly or wrongly, voters were angry and looked to blame someone for higher grocery and gas prices. As a result, the 2024 election ultimately became an expression of that anger toward the Biden-Harris administration. Invariably, when a presidential election turns on negative voter sentiment and retrospection, the incumbent party loses.
While some warning signs were evident as early as 2021, other traditional factors that account for presidential success — and therefore reelection — suggested that a
Democratic victory was not only possible but leaning toward probable by September. Although opinion polling and political science election modeling suggested a modest Harris win, the variables used in these models, as well as sampling techniques used in polling, never properly accounted or reflected the American electorate’s mood.
The immediate task for Democrats is how do they maintain their commitment to the most marginalized in American society while also appealing to those voters who just rejected Harris — voters who, until quite recently, had been a core portion the party’s base. Understanding how and why the Democratic Party stopped addressing the issues that are most important to the average voter will be critical for the 2026 midterm election and beyond. That means moving beyond the usual finger-pointing and focusing on actually talking to them on their terms.
Perhaps Democrats should listen to former President Barack Obama, who, in a series of meetings with younger House Democrats this year, urged them to think about how not to come across as “coastal elites.” The task for the Democrats is to figure out how to avoid alienating voters, which means focusing on their most pressing worries.
Ultimately, Democrats need to ask themselves some hard questions. Trump is a popular figure, but what is it that makes him that way? Figuring this out is the key to competing with Trump and the Republicans. Until they do, they will continue to both lose ground among nearly every demographic group as well as elections.
Jon Taylor is a professor of political science at The University of Texas at San Antonio.
A version of this op-ed appeared in the San Antonio Express-News.
