How the Democrats Lost the Election

For nearly a decade, Democrats have tried to convince voters that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the country’s future. That effort has clearly failed.

Nov 06, 2024

Four years ago, Donald Trump lost an election and began a baseless crusade to overturn it that ultimately led to a violent assault on the seat of American democracy. Spurred on by the then-president, his supporters wandered the halls of the Capitol, looking to lynch somebody—the speaker of the House and the sitting vice president, for instance—but anyone, really, who could plausibly be blamed for “stealing” the presidency. Today, Trump is facing dozens of criminal charges related to that effort.

Six months ago, Trump was found guilty of defrauding the state of New York and ordered to pay a nearly $500 million judgment. Since then, he has selected a radical, inexperienced running mate, hosted a rally featuring a speaker who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” made baseless allegations that legal immigrants were killing and eating pets, and suggested that his multiracial opponent “wasn’t Black.” He has embraced what would be the most extreme agenda since the American Civil War, promising to deport millions and promoting an economic agenda that would cripple the economy.

One could go back further. His presidency, marked by a characteristic mix of menace and incompetence, was one of the most destructive in American history. He mismanaged a pandemic. He appointed three justices to the Supreme Court who overturned Roe v. Wade. He ordered the separation of migrant children from their parents. Every single day of his presidency was marked by grinding anxiety. The best days were ones where he merely embarrassed the country. The worst were ones in which he posed an existential threat to its very future.

The Democratic Party has had nearly a decade to convince voters of something that should be obvious. Donald Trump is dangerous, radical, authoritarian—even fascistic. He is unstable, erratic, and reckless. His policy ideas are at best plutocratic, at worst xenophobic, and aimed at the outright destruction of the federal government as we know it. Voters are, moreover, familiar with this message: It has been at the center of every election Democrats have run since 2016. And yet, nearly a decade into Donald Trump’s political career, it is clear that making a cogent case against Trump’s misrule has not only failed, but it has failed catastrophically. Four years after leading a failed insurrection, Donald Trump has been decisively reelected, winning both the Electoral College and, likely, the popular vote.

In three months, he will lead the government he attempted to overthrow, and he will do so with far fewer of the guardrails that were present during his first term. There will be no adults in the room, and there are barely any anti-Trump Republicans left in Congress. He will reenter the White House at the head of a Republican Party he has spent eight years twisting into his own hideous image. The only opposition left will be the Democratic Party—a party whose decade-long effort to take down Trump has resulted in catastrophic failure.

More than a year ago the Democratic Party had concluded that its best path to retaining the White House was by making the 2024 presidential election a referendum on Donald Trump. Joe Biden had spent months telling nervous allies that once the contest became a clear two-person race, voters who had long viewed him as too old to serve a second term would come back into the fold. When they didn’t, forcing Biden to drop out of the presidential race on July 21, Vice President Kamala Harris took up the mantle, adopting “We are not going back” as a rallying call.

Sorry to say, we very much are going back. We may, in fact, find ourselves in a much darker place than anyone had hitherto imagined. It is clear that Donald Trump is as potent a political force as ever. The broad, multiparty coalition of voters disgusted with his vulgar, antidemocratic politics failed to materialize. Instead, Trump has potentially expanded his base: It appears that he has made astonishing gains with previously reliable Democratic voters—young men, Black men, Latino men—and it is already evident that he will do better than any Republican presidential candidate has in a generation in blue bastions such as New York and New Jersey.

It is already obvious, in other words, that the larger, decade-long effort to reject Donald Trump’s disgusting character and aberrant approach to politics has failed. Yes, what was—and what perhaps will be again—known as the #Resistance has won many battles. It successfully stymied much of Trump’s first term in office, won midterm elections in 2018 and 2022, and defeated Trump in 2020. But if the overall goal was to convince a clear majority of voters that Donald Trump was not only unfit for office but un-American, then it has failed, utterly.

The Donald Trump of 2024 is more diminished, paranoid, and extreme than the one who won a presidential campaign built on “locking up” his political opponents and demonizing immigrants eight years ago. And yet his hold on the electorate is arguably stronger than ever. Trump’s support is strongest with those who believe that the American political and economic system has failed, that its politicians are craven and corrupt, and that the only path forward is to destroy that system and reject those politicians. A message built around the threat he poses to that system without a credible alternative is clearly not enough. Continuously reminding voters of the myriad ways in which he is aberrant and dangerous may even have backfired. These appeals only bolster Trump’s core message, which is that he is both different from other politicians and stronger than them: He—and he alone—can bring about true change.

As shocking and depressing as Trump’s victory is, it is less surprising when one considers the incumbent president. Joe Biden: a wildly unpopular figure who many see as doddering and fundamentally incapable of doing the job of the presidency. Long before Biden’s disastrous performance in his late-June debate with Trump, it was obvious that most voters had concluded that his presidency was a failure. Biden’s successes—his legislative accomplishments, his management of inflation and the post-pandemic recovery, and his role in expanding NATO—didn’t register with voters, either because they were things most people don’t care about or because Biden’s increasing inability to effectively communicate hindered his ability to sell his ideas. What is clear, however, is that he was blamed for things he had little control over: rising prices, global conflict, continued political dysfunction. Voters had little faith in his ability to manage the economy (where he actually did a good job) and foreign affairs (where he markedly did not).

Much will be made in the coming days of the campaign that Kamala Harris has run since she became the Democratic Party’s nominee in mid-July. Her theory of the election, in which white, suburban voters would carry her to victory, was clearly wrong. Her decision to campaign heavily with the deeply unpopular Liz Cheney convinced no one and likely backfired, alienating progressives and bolstering her connection to a political establishment that many voters of both parties detest.

It is also already clear that Harris’s overcautious, risk-averse approach failed. Reluctant to provide policy specifics or, for much of the campaign, answer questions, she had hoped to cast herself as a candidate who could appeal to everyone: an immigration hawk but not a xenophobe, an “opportunity economy” advocate but not a socialist, a friend of Israel who fretted about Palestinian suffering.

This approach played into Trump’s hands in two ways. First, it made her seem squishy and, by extension, made Trump seem strong. More importantly, however, it failed to communicate to voters that she was different from the president that many of them had rejected—who also happened to be running the administration she was serving in. Voters wanted change. Harris didn’t give it to them. Trump did.

Harris obviously deserves blame here, but it’s Biden who deserves the greater share. It was clear two years ago that voters had concluded that he was too old to serve a second term, but he stubbornly clung on. By the time he stepped aside—by most accounts thanks to the considerable effort of Democratic powerbrokers—it was too late. Harris was the only conceivable Democratic nominee. Given only 100 days to run a presidential campaign, she was dealt an extraordinarily bad hand. We will never know what would have happened if she had broken more strongly with Biden, but her status as his vice president made doing so extraordinarily difficult. By the time she became her party’s nominee, it was too late. The race’s stakes were fixed long ago: This was a referendum on a presidency that most voters rejected more than a year ago.

Trump, his allies, and likely much of the mainstream media will likely cast his victory as evidence of his extraordinary strength and his singular place in American political history. Republicans will tout it as a mandate for the litany of horrors that they will unleash in three months time. But Biden’s weakness played a significant and perhaps decisive role. By refusing to drop out of the race until mid-July, he put his party in a difficult and perhaps impossible position. It may very well have simply been too late to convince voters that the party could change direction. This is the thinnest of silver linings, but if one sees this as a rejection of Biden as much as—or perhaps more than—an embrace of Trump, one can hope that he will quickly remind voters of why they voted him out of office four years ago.

But that may not matter. This election is a reminder of the Democratic Party’s weakness, and its decade-long effort to convince voters that Trump is a singular, existential threat to the country has failed catastrophically. Despite a disastrous presidency, a pandemic, an insurrection, and dozens of criminal charges, he is still seen as a credible and legitimate leader by more than 70 million voters. Defeating Trump and his political project will require more than centering Trump’s clear unfitness for office; Democrats have had four years to convince voters that they can offer a better alternative. They have failed in the effort. What’s more, they may be further away from success now than they were eight years ago.