Among Democrats, there is plenty of blame to go around in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election. That is why it is unsurprising that they have fallen quickly into a game of “if only.”
“If only Joe Biden had dropped out long before he did.” “If only Vice President Harris had chosen Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate.” “If only she had more forcefully and clearly distanced herself from Joe Biden.”
Looking backward is, of course, a natural response to any catastrophic event. But the problems that emerged for Democrats in the 2024 election are more than short-term or temporary events. If unaddressed, they are likely to plague the Democratic Party for years to come.
Simply put, the party has alienated significant segments of its base. Led by white progressives, the party has moved sharply to the left, while many people of color have not.
As CNN reports, “Latino voters, and men in particular, have been moving toward Donald Trump since 2016. This year, Latino men broke in his direction for the first time. Biden won their support by 23 points in 2020 and Trump won them in 2024. Latina women still favored Harris, but by smaller margins than they supported either Clinton or Biden.”
Moreover, fewer Black men supported Harris than either Biden in 2020 or Hilary Clinton in 2016. Harris outperformed Biden by 3 points among Black women but received 6 points less support than Clinton had when she ran for president.
These trends were exacerbated among non-white who do not have college degrees. The message they sent was that they want their leaders to worry less about defunding the police and more about making sure that the police respond when they call; less about hurting the feelings of minority groups and more about kitchen-table issues; less about comprehensive immigration reform and more about the current border crisis.
That is why Democrats will have to wrest power from progressives if they are to right the ship — and the sooner, the better.
But as the New York Times’s Thomas Edsall explains, this will not be easy. He quotes political scientist Sean Westwood, who observes, “It will be hard for the modern Democratic Party to shift from coddling white progressive voters.”
The 2024 election results throws cold water on the widely held expectation that as the United States moves toward becoming a majority-minority nation, it would enter a period of Democratic dominance. That expectation was captured most vividly in a widely read 2002 book by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, two leading Democratic intellectuals, titled “The Emerging Democratic Majority.”
Judis and Teixeira believed at that time that “A left-of-center coalition of minorities, young people, women, and knowledge economy professionals was going to allow the Dems to break through the political stalemate that defined the early 2000s and perhaps even create an FDR-style realignment.”
Their thesis seemed vindicated in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected president. He “put together the very coalition that Judis and Teixeira described in their book.”
Judis and Teixeira were not alone in their predictions of an enduring Democratic majority. Writing in the aftermath of Obama’s re-election, columnist Greg Sargent wrote, “The story of this election will be all about demographics. Obama made the right bet on the true nature of the American electorate.” His victory, Sargent went on, “shows that the GOP is not keeping pace with the changing face of America.” The country, he said, “continues to be defined by … minorities, young voters, and college-educated whites, particularly women.” The result, he predicted, would be continuing Democratic Party dominance.
These confident predictions of political destiny baked into changing demographics in this country came with a caution, however. The future, said Teixeira, depends on “whether the Democrats can provide this coalition with what it wants and needs.” The 2024 election results strongly signal that the post-Obama Democratic Party failed in that task.
The warning signs were there well before Trump beat Kamala Harris. As Nate Cohn wrote in 2022, predictions of a new Democratic majority failed to anticipate “decades of political division, resurgent populism, political reaction, and growing inequality.”
“Demographic change rarely offers a path to political dominance,” said Cohn. They are “easily swamped by other factors, like a shift in the economy, a different slate of candidates, a midterm, or just a few too many years in power.”
The danger of assuming that, as Cohn put it, “demographics are destiny [is thinking] that the hard work of persuading voters and building a broad and sometimes fractious coalition just isn’t necessary.”
However, the current and ongoing dilemma of the Democratic Party is not, in my view, simply a matter of hard work. It results instead from the fact that the party’s ideology is no longer where large numbers of voters of color are.
That was made clear in October in survey results highlighted by The Financial Times. Findings worthy of note include the fact that, 60 years ago, around 98 percent of ethnic minorities supported the Democratic nominee for president; this year, that number was around 30 percent lower.
And, as the Times reported, a “sharp leftward turn among educated white liberals has caused white Democrats to overshoot the minority position on a growing number of issues, including immigration, racism, patriotism, and meritocracy. … White progressive Americans now hold views on these culture questions that are completely out of line with the average Black or Hispanic voter.”
For example, while almost 80 percent of white progressives think that “racism is baked into our society,” only 60 percent of Blacks and 40 percent of Hispanics agree. Or take immigration; when asked whether the government “should increase border security and enforcement,” only 15 percent of white progressives agreed. In contrast, almost 50 percent of Blacks and Hispanics voters endorse greater border security and enforcement.
The bottom line: The Democratic Party needs to come to terms with the fact that non-white voters “are now roughly equidistant between white progressives and conservatives.” This suggests that the dominant concerns and favored policies of white progressives will continue to lead voters of color to be more open to voting for Republicans, long after Trump has left the scene.
Ultimately, no set of “what ifs” about the 2024 election can help Democrats do what needs to be done. The party must learn the hard lesson that demographics don’t predict or assure political destiny. As the 2024 election results showed, identity is loose-fitting, rather than a sure-fire predictor of political attitudes and behavior.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. His views do not necessarily reflect those of Amherst College.
