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THESE ARE NOTAAPIPOCBIPOCMAGAUS Your browser does not support the element. the reports Democrats were hoping to prepare. Instead of transition plans for the incoming Kamala Harris administration, draft executive orders and legislative outlines, Democrats are producing post-mortem analyses of how their campaign came apart in 2024. Those Democrats who are honest with themselves are recognising an uncomfortable truth: as awful, immoral and weird as they consider the Republican Party, the American people considered it to be the better option for governing America.Dissect the emerging election data and the diagnosis looks even worse than it first seemed. The Democratic Party’s idea of itself as a party of the young, ethnic minorities and the working class has been punctured. The best available data suggest that, compared with Barack Obama’s performance in 2012, Ms Harris did 16 percentage points worse among voters without a college degree, 19 points worse with young voters, 26 points worse with African-Americans and 27 points worse with Hispanics. “We have only begun to internalise the ways in which all the basic tenets of the emerging Democratic majority have now been completely reversed. There is not a leg standing of it any more,” says Patrick Ruffini, who wrote a prescient book on growing Republican strength among the multiracial working class.Among Democrats brave enough to believe in their own agency, a much knottier debate has emerged over identity politics. Throughout the first Trump presidency, elite institutions embraced previously radical ideas of equity over equality, the tyranny of objectivity and the violence of speech. Democratic politics were downstream of this cultural shift, leading to an embrace of ideas (including by Ms Harris) such as defunding the police, paying for gender-affirming care for illegal immigrants and banning fracking. Whole ethnic groups were rebranded by those who knew better: Hispanics were now Latinxs; Asian-Americans were now ; the collective lumping of non-whites as (“people of colour”) was upgraded to “”. By 2022, Democrats realised that such talk, voguish in 2020, was a political liability and began to edge away from it.By 2024 Ms Harris spoke like a different woman from her previous presidential campaign iteration, revoking her former positions without explanation. It didn’t work. According to a survey of swing voters released by Blueprint, a Democrat-aligned firm, majorities of persuadable voters believed that the earlier, progressive Harris was the real one. Among those who chose to vote for Mr Trump, 83% believed that she would use taxpayer dollars to pay for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants in prison, 77% believed she would decriminalise border-crossing, and 74% believed that she would ban fracking. The political advertisement that even Democrats concede was the ad of the century was one that Mr Trump’s campaign released that ended with the line: “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Ms Harris’s campaign did not rebut it, and tried instead to focus on economic messaging. But the two “are not completely separate or mutually exclusive…it creates a portrait of a party that’s out of touch with ordinary voters, particularly ordinary working-class voters”, says Ruy Teixeira of the American Enterprise Institute.The attempt to jettison that unappealing brand is already underway. “I personally think that identity politics needs to go the way of the dodo,” Elissa Slotkin, the newly elected Democratic senator from Michigan, told reporters. Seth Moulton, a Democratic representative from Massachusetts, caused a furore by saying that he did not want his daughters to get hurt playing sports with trans girls. That attracted 200 protesters at his district office in Salem, condemnation from the state’s leading official and one comparison to a Nazi collaborator, made by a local party official. “The backlash proves my point,” says Mr Moulton. “We go around the country saying if you don’t agree with my absolutist view, you fail the litmus test: You’re not only wrong—you’re a bad person.”With that attitude, many voters do not even bother to consider policy. “I felt this was a cultural election. I think that people don’t trust us on the economy and on immigration, not because they’re analysing our policy, but they just feel that Democrats are preachy, arrogant and out of touch,” says Mr Moulton. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a congresswoman from Washington who won re-election in a rural district by overperforming Ms Harris by around five points, agrees. “You can’t have a conversation about policy if you signal to somebody that you’re not listening to them, or you think you’re better than them. Everything else is off the table after that,” she says. Mr Trump’s performance among Hispanic voters ought to stir Democrats awake, Ms Perez adds. “Asking people to have some kind of generic loyalty to a brand because of ethnic or racial identity is much less compelling to people.”Others in the party think that the answer lies in plainer economic messaging. Chris Deluzio, a Democratic congressman from the suburbs of Pittsburgh, won his own tight race even as Ms Harris floundered in the state. “I hope my party pays attention to races like mine, where you’ve got candidates clear about who they’re fighting for and who they’re fighting against,” he says, citing his stances on protecting workers from powerful corporations and opposing trade deals that hollowed out the rustbelt. “There’s often a tendency in my party for people to look for win-win framing, but also sometimes there’s a bad guy.” This is similar to the economic strategy that Mr Biden tried at the national level, through industrial policy, infrastructure spending, and pro-union rhetoric; he may simply have lacked the oratorical capacity to explain it. And then there are some Democrats who spy a middle road. “The Republicans engage in identity politics that is intertwined with Christian nationalism. The Democrats engaged in identity politics that is intertwined in evaluating individuals based on group identity, rather than as individuals. I think the path for Democrats is to reject both,” says Jake Auchincloss, another Democratic congressman from Massachusetts. “I’m worried that the version that Democrats are going to align on is Diet Coke when is Coca-Cola: dial down the wokeism and then amplify the economic populism.” There is a version of a Democratic Party that embraces supply-side progressivism rather than the preachy variant; and one that rejects protectionism and instead embraces free trade as a tool for containing China. It is closer to the iterations of the party that thrived under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, even if it is unfashionable now.In Rashomon style, political actors will all tell different stories about why parties lose. But the one that dominates is powerful. It structures how the party remakes itself in its wilderness years. Fresh elections for the leadership in the coming months will be important because the victors will write the definitive post-mortem of the 2024 election. After their loss to Mr Trump in 2016, Democrats chose not to conduct a formal autopsy, and drifted into a movement of mass resistance. With hindsight, this backfired. No comparable resistance movement appears to be mounting towards Trump II. But ruling out one strategy that didn’t work before is not the same as alighting on a new one.
