The Democrats are looking at why they lost an election they should have won, and a big part has to be how they handle presidential nominations. Parties tend to be able to keep the White House for at least two terms. In the last 120 years, there have only been two Presidents so toxic that they lost their bids for reelection when their party was in the White House for one term.
One of those guys just won a comeback, this time with the popular vote and a new state for the electoral college, so Democrats really need to consider what they did wrong in order to run more effective campaigns in the future. They hate Trump, but they need to reckon with why they lost to him two out of three times.
Democrats Nomination Process and Primaries
I think one of the biggest problems for the Democrats nomination process is how they treat primaries, essentially going for coronations over the last three cycles. Hillary Clinton kept out serious primary opponents in 2016; Bernie Sanders did better than expected, but he was initially under the radar as a first-time candidate in his mid-70s, who has been elected as a Socialist and isn’t officially a Democrat. The establishment consolidated for Biden to help stop Sanders in 2020, although this was the closest to a normal primary Democrats won, and he ended up winning the general election.
Harris became the nominee immediately when Biden dropped out after winning primaries, where the party made it clear serious challengers are not welcome. There’s a subtext that the nominee doesn’t matter in the way the party just replaced Biden, and Harris’s inability to say how she should would differ from him. She had to do something big and bold to persuade swing voters, and she wasn’t able or willing to do that.
In the next few years, we’ll see tell-all books about what was going on behind the scenes of the Harris campaign and the Biden administration. I suspect that Democrats in positions of power are not going to be seen as exemplars of transparency and integrity. So the next candidate will likely need to be somebody outside of that group.
Successful Democratic candidates tend to be people who can be presented as outsiders. JFK was a young Senator who overcame religious bigotry to win a competitive primary. Jimmy Carter was a Governor with no Washington experience, which was a plus post-Watergate. Bill Clinton was a young centrist Governor. Barack Obama was a young senator who defeated the frontrunner. When the Democrats nomination process is serious this could lead to candidates like the above being elected.
There are plenty of candidates in the future who could run with a vision that appeals to primary voters. JB Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, Jared Polis, Andy Beshear and Josh Shapiro are Governors. Andy Kim is a young Senator who called on Menendez to resign, and defeated the establishment favorite in a primary. Rafael Warnock was senior pastor at Martin Luther King’s old church. AOC will probably run in the Sanders lane, although I don’t know how well that will go since no one with that record has been elected in a competitive state.
Say what you will about the Republican primary process, but the establishment did not put their fingers on the scale to stop Trump. The people who registered to vote were able to get the candidate of their choice.
Democrats and Voting Accessibility
The Democrats tend to talk about the need to make voting easier, but this is usually about the first Tuesday in November and not the primary elections that are more likely to matter. An example would be the push to make Election Day a national holiday, since the primary is when the race is more likely to determine the individual who will represent a district or a state than the general election. To hint otherwise is to either be dishonest, or ignorant about American politics.
Here’s a thought experiment. There are 34 Senate seats in play in 2026. Someone offers you a choice: you can get either $18,000 two years from now, or $1,000 for every seat where you can guess the political party who holds the seat correctly. A reasonably informed person can probably come out ahead if they take the second offer. That is because the primary is when it’s going to be determined who holds the seat. We can repeat this experiment with the US House. A reasonably informed person will be able to guess with more than fifty percent accuracy what party will hold each district come January 2027.
I can understand the concern that some people will vote in primaries acting in bad faith (IE- Republicans entering a competitive Democratic primary in order to get a weaker opponent for the general election) so there should be more barriers at that stage. This would probably be less of a problem with increased turnout in primaries, as the people so politically involved that they’ll change their registration to vote against a candidate are always going to be a small percentage of the population. By making it easier for people who aren’t that political to participate in primaries, you are diluting the power of political activists.
I’ll note that I don’t know what the effects of greater involvement in primaries will be. Perhaps ordinary people will be more likely to vote against their elected representatives for dumb and ignorant reasons. Perhaps they’ll be more ignorant about politics than activists, and more likely to vote for the incumbents that they recognize. Perhaps it’ll lead to a greater appreciation for how government works, and a populace better able to keep elected officials accountable.
It is defensible to want to make it easier to vote in the general election, but not in the primaries. Organizations like political parties can come up with different methods for selecting nominees. If someone is doing that, they should admit that this is what they’re trying to do. However, if you want more people choosing their next members of Congress, we should make it easier to vote in primaries. If your policy preference only involves getting the highest possible turnout in the final stage of the process, something else is in play, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise.
The 2024 Election In Depth
There was a point some commentators made about the 2024 Republican strategy that instead of taking the base for granted and trying to go to the center, Republicans took normies for granted and did more to appeal to the edge. There are some complications. Trump did take some moderate positions. He disavowed Project 2025. He was against outlawing abortion in the first trimester, which some conservatives suggest is not seriously pro life. The whole strategy of taking normies for granted also works more effectively if the other party doesn’t try to appeal to them.
An important thing to keep in mind is that the election wasn’t a blowout win. Trump won the popular vote by around 2 points. He won the tipping point state of Pennsylvania by roughly the same amount (mainly because his numbers improved in blue districts where Democrats have complete control of the local political machine.) I don’t think Harris was such a great candidate with such a good campaign that no one else could have won.
There are still some caveats about how she got the nomination. Harris would likely have been the favorite in a primary as the first black woman elected to national office, although there seems to be a subtext for the “open convention” folks that she’s such a mediocrity that someone else would have connected with voters. There was also a point that an advantage for Harris was that she didn’t have to pander to the base in the 2024 election, although she had harmed herself enough in the 2020 primary.
We’re going to learn more about what was going on behind the scenes of the Biden administration. Some scuttlebutt is that he declined significantly in less than a year, so he was in better shape during December 2022 when he decided to run for another term than in June 2024 when he had the debate.
But when he was in front of cameras for 90 minutes in the disastrous debate, and was unable to do an interview longer than 20 minutes for weeks after it, his administration lost a lot of credibility. I wonder if it would have been better for Harris’ chances if he resigned at that moment, making her President, avoiding all the arguments about who’s running the country and giving her complete freedom to distinguish herself from his unpopular administration.
I get that these are narrow elections so when there are comments about whether America is ready for a woman of color as President, it can come down to whether two percent of Americans are ready, because that can make a massive difference. It would have been difficult to bypass Harris, although part of it is the reliance on bad politics for decades. Democrats put themselves in the position where swapping her out could have caused a base revolt.
A big reason she was the wrong choice was Biden’s unpopularity and the perception that his decline has been covered up and that she was part of the cover-up. I don’t know if there was any possible way for her to announce that she won’t run because the administration is so unpopular that doesn’t torpedo the whole party. If there was a way to do the switcheroo so that the party nominated Whitmer and Warnock or Klobuchar and Wes Moore, it feels like those tickets would have had a better chance, but the switcheroo would be very hard to pull off.
Someone bigger than Dean Phillips should have run against Biden in the primary. Obviously there was internal pressure to keep the likes of Gavin Newsom or Amy Klobuchar from pulling it off, but that would have been their one shot at the White House.
The primary situation may reverse in 2028. JD Vance is the obvious Republican frontrunner (jokes about Trump seeking a third term aside.) The Democrats don’t really have anyone to consolidate behind, which should make for a healthier primary. They could announce that it’s better to have a smoke-filled room decide if Harris deserves another shot, if a groundbreaking Governor should get it, or if this is the time for someone like AOC. Whatever they do, they should be transparent about it, rather than pushing for a coronation, while pretending that it’s actually small-d democratic.
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