A. Total. Unmitigated. Disaster. These were my first thoughts upon waking from my dream (nightmare?) that Donald Trump had been re-elected for four more years in office and Democrats were defeated in the House and Senate in the 2024 election. Except this was not a dream; this played out in real-time on an election night that for Democrats quickly turned into a nightmare.
What happened?
How could it all go so wrong?
Where were Rachel Maddow and Joy Behar promising us an election night triumph? Was I sold a false bill of goods and did I fall for it?
The Republican victory was complete and total domination. As night turned into morning and Wednesday, November 6th came, I was clearer and more level-headed and could begin to think about what went wrong and how so many “experts” failed to see this coming.
2024 Election: Issues that speak to people
Minorities, Union workers, Women, and young people. Trump and Republicans gained in nearly every category of voter. On CNN they went to the map to show the counties where Kamala Harris was outperforming Joe Biden’s performance in 2020 and nearly the whole country went grey. This was an astonishing embarrassment.
Unlike in 2016 when Trump won by dominating mainly the White vote, the 2024 election was a multi-cultural, multi-demographic drubbing. Obviously, the issues that the Democrats are standing on are not speaking to the country at large. As much as we may want to fight for the rights of transgenders and migrants these are not the issues that are winning elections at this current time. It is evident to those of us who are progressive that it is not the right time to push these policies. When Americans are struggling to put food on the table they are not worried about a fight over which bathroom a transgender individual can use.
This is a sad but true reality.
If we ever want to get back into positions of power, we need to accept these facts. The Republicans did a better job of speaking to the issues that the public wants to hear. This is a shame because as a Democrat I think that we have many policies that do resonate with the American people.
Abortion, has time and time again been shown that even in Conservative states people want access to this inherent right. Gun control, the vast majority of the public supports more restrictions on gun ownership when we are faced with deadly mass shootings year after year. Climate change and the Environment, most people want a clean environment and support common sense steps to halt climate change.
Instead, the Democrats decided that their best election strategy was to focus on groups comprising a minuscule amount of the electorate. Democrats over the past four years tried too hard to appeal to the far left in the party with support for unfettered illegal immigration or gender changes for minors/inmates. These are not topics that will win you elections and they provide easy talking points for Republicans.
Defund the Police and Policing Gender Speech
For the past four years, Democrats have been too quick to jump on the new trendy social justice movement in politics and forget about the consequences. Defunding the police was a disaster from the beginning as the actual people who this supposedly helped, black and brown people, actually wanted more police services when questioned. What part of the electorate are you catering to with buying into these movements? This diversification of the Republican party did not just happen overnight, this has been years in the making by a Democrat party that has not focused on the issues of concern to most voters.
What truly should have been a warning sign to me that Democrats were losing the culture war was when Democratic party members and the media could not define what a woman is. Race may be a social construct but biological sex certainly is not. As African Americans, we still suffer from lots of ignorance regarding the LGBTQ community.
Members of my own family may vote Democrat but they are extremely socially conservative and not the most accepting of alternative lifestyles. They look the other way and still vote Democratic when you push gay marriage and certain other policies but you start alienating socially conservative Democratic voters when you cannot define a man vs a woman. Or make a claim that there are dozens of genders in existence.
This denial of basic biology is why Trump improved in particular with the Black male vote. Pre-2016 Democrats were plus 87 on the Black vote but in 2024 they were only plus 72. Biden only won the election by a few thousand swing voters in 2020 so any shift to Trump will tilt the election as this did. This demographic is socially conservative, they don’t want men using women’s restrooms or be forced into using pronouns. Even if I don’t necessarily agree with that, that is the truth. If we want to start winning elections we need to accept this fact.
While I’m not as intimately connected with Latino voters, I know most of them abhor the term Latinx. Julie Roginsky who is a Democratic strategist on CNN pointed this out effectively as she said the following of the Democratic party.
“It failed to communicate effectively to voters. We are not the party of common sense, which is the message that voters sent to us.”
“We don’t know how to speak to voters. When we address Latino voters as Latinx, because that is the politically correct thing to do, it makes them think that we don’t even live on the same planet they do… We need to get back to being the party of common sense.”
Stop policing people’s language and start focusing on the democratic policies that can be of great value to these different communities. That is the only way we can start to win back these voters.
Anti-Social Behavior
People want a functional government and society. All too often in the past few years, Democrats have coddled anti-social behavior. This anti-social behavior though, is once again supported by a small minority of Americans with many of them likely being low-propensity voters anyway. So why are we catering to them?
Are the members of the autonomous CHAZ zone really coming out to vote or door-knock for Democratic politicians?
NO FUCKING WAY, so why does the Democrat party insist on catering to this fringe minority who the rest of America sees as petulant children.
The same can be said for supporting recent protests of the Middle East shutting down bridges, streets, and college campuses in New York City. Purposely disrupting the lives and commutes of regular working Americans. The Republican party comes out against this but the Democrats constantly equivocate.
The union carpenter who has always voted Democratic who is now trying to cross the Williamsburgh bridge that is blocked by protestors sees Republicans as the only ones responding to lawlessness and a breakdown of social order.
So how do you expect him to vote?
The only way to win these voters back is to get back to the issues that matter to the majority of Americans and to stop catering to fringe groups.
Takeaways
I do believe that the Democratic party can rise from this 2024 election as a better more inclusive party. When I use the word inclusive I don’t mean it as part of the virtue-signaling orthodoxy of the last four years but as a party that gets back to the inclusion of the American working Man and Woman. Politics is like a pendulum, what swings one way in a few short years can easily swing back the other way. In order for the swing though we need to make sure that the party gets back to its roots as a pro-worker, pro-union, pro-immigrant(legal), pro-capitalist(restrained) party.
Why can we not have great economic growth coupled with a strong social safety net? That is a more sellable message than the Republican survival of the fittest message of unbridled, unrestrained capitalism.
Yes, there are costs to everything, but it’s not like Republican presidents have done such a great job with the national debt. The Democratic Party needs to re-evaluate itself from the party of virtue signaling and pronouns and focus on winning economic and common sense reforms. Some in the media refuse to accept reality and are pushing ideas that this election was lost by a group of white nationalist Trump-loving white supremacists.
The data tells a different story though as a rainbow coalition pushed Trump back into office. The longer it takes us to reflect and look in the mirror about what went wrong means the less time we have to fix our flaws before it’s time to run again.
Do you agree this is why Democrats lost the 2024 Election? Will they able to retake some power in the mid-terms? Let us know your thoughts below and if you liked this work by our author you may also like The Rise of Youth Activism in 2024: What Their Strength Means for Future Elections
