Following their trouncing by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement in the 2024 election, Democrats continue to plod through the stages of grief, vacillating between denial, anger and bargaining. This behavior is increasingly taking the form of self-soothing talk among its leadership, consultant and media class that their defeat in the 2024 election was not as extreme and dire as it first appeared (Trump won the popular vote and the Electoral College; the Republicans now control both chambers of Congress) and that a big rebuild and reassessment of the party and its strategy, messaging and leadership are not necessary.
At the Atlantic, Russell Burman details this reasoning in his new article “Maybe Democrats Didn’t Do So Badly After All”:
Now a clearer picture of the election has emerged, complicating the debate over whether Democrats need to reinvent themselves—and whether voters really abandoned them at all.
Trump’s popular-vote margin has shrunk to about 1.5 percent — one of the tightest in the past half century — and because some votes went to third-party and independent candidates, he’ll fall just short of winning a majority of the vote nationwide. Compared with incumbent governments elsewhere in the world, Democrats’ losses were modest. And in the House, they gained a seat, leaving the GOP with the second-smallest majority in history. A trio of Republican vacancies expected early next year will make passing Trump’s agenda even more difficult, and Democrats are in a strong position to recapture the chamber in the midterm elections, when the incumbent party typically struggles.
The final results are prompting some in the party to push back against the doom-and-gloom diagnoses of Murphy, Sanders, and others who say the Democratic brand is in tatters and needs an overhaul. “If the Democratic brand was fundamentally broken and needed to be thrown out, this election would have been a complete blowout. And it was not. It was way too close,” Yasmin Radjy, the executive director of Swing Left, a Democratic organizing group, told me. Another Democrat, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly, put it this way: “We lost an election. We didn’t lose the country.”
In some areas, the election looked like a red wave; compared with four years ago, the presidential vote swung to the right by about 10 points in some of the most populous blue states, such as New York, California, and New Jersey. But down-ballot races offer a solid case for Democratic optimism. The party label appeared to be far less of an albatross for Democratic congressional candidates than it was in strong Republican years such as 2010 and 2014.
Donald Trump supposedly does not have a mandate, they argue, because his victory was a very modest one, as The Nation summarizes:
FDR and Reagan had the numbers that were required to claim a mandate. Trump doesn’t. That’s why it is important, as he prepares to reoccupy the Oval Office, for progressives to unspin the narrative of the election that put him there. Yes, Trump beat Kamala Harris. But not by much. And the narrowness of the GOP advantage provides an opening for Democrats—along with a dwindling but potentially decisive cadre of rational Republicans—to block the worst appointments and most dangerous policies of a president who gained only a plurality of the popular vote.
The big lie Donald Trump told after the 2024 election was that he’d won a “powerful mandate” from the American people. He hadn’t, and neither had his MAGA movement. The United States is, undoubtedly, a divided nation. But a majority of Americans who cast ballots in the 2024 presidential election actually agreed on one thing: They did not want Trump as their president. With almost all of the votes tabulated, we now know that around 50.2 percent were cast for someone other than Trump….
Let’s crunch some numbers, shall we?
Trump’s margin was historically narrow. The president-elect’s 1.5-point advantage over Harris was, as a postelection analysis by the Council on Foreign Relations notes, “the fifth smallest of the thirty-two presidential races held since 1900.” Trump won 4 million fewer ballots than Joe Biden did in 2020. In 2024, if roughly 120,000 voters had switched their preferences in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, Harris would have won the Electoral College and the presidency.
Donald Trump, for his part, has claimed a mandate. He behaves (and will continue to) as though he has a mandate to rule as the country’s first king. The polls show that the American people appear to be endorsing Trump’s “mandate” on such issues as “the border” and “the economy.” Arguing the details about vote totals will not stop Trump’s power and autocratic rule. In all, such obsessions are the equivalent of complaining about the referees when your team loses the big game. In the end, perception is usually treated as reality in politics.
If they proceed at the current pace, the Democrats (and their surrogates, news media and other opinion leaders — as well as rank-and-file voters and supporters) will not reach the depression and acceptance stages of grief anytime soon. As I have repeatedly warned here at Salon and elsewhere, they do not have the luxury of time.
In a sharp essay and call to action in the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie considers the Democratic Party’s lack of urgency and reluctance to rise to the challenge of Trumpism and the larger right-wing (fake) populist authoritarian movement. The Democratic Party needs to be in full opposition mode. Instead, the party and its leaders are mostly cooperating with, normalizing and de facto surrendering to President-elect Trump and the MAGA Republicans:
An opposition would use every opportunity it had to demonstrate its resolute stance against the incoming administration. It would do everything in its power to try to seize the public’s attention and make hay of the president-elect’s efforts to put lawlessness at the center of American government. An opposition would highlight the extent to which Donald Trump has no intention of fulfilling his pledge of lower prices and greater economic prosperity for ordinary people and is openly scheming with the billionaire oligarchs who paid for and ran his campaign to gut the social safety net and bring something like Hooverism back from the ash heap of history….
The Democratic Party lacks the energy of a determined opposition — it is adrift, listless in the wake of defeat. Too many elected Democrats seem ready to concede that Trump is some kind of avatar for the national spirit — a living embodiment of the American people. They’ve accepted his proposed nominees as legitimate and entertained surrender under the guise of political reconciliation.
There are other reasons for Democrats to try to take the initiative. There are still many Americans rightfully concerned with an authoritarian turn in the United States. Again, nearly half the electorate did not vote for Trump. They deserve leadership, too. Indeed, the party’s refusal to fight sends ripples through civic life. If Democratic leaders won’t fight, then it’s hard to expect civil society, or just ordinary people, to pick up the slack. Either democracy was on the ballot in November or it wasn’t, and if it was, it makes no political, ethical or strategic sense to act as if we live in normal times.
At the Hill, Democratic Party strategist Max Burns writes:
For the better part of two years, Democrats told voters that their country was on the precipice of disaster. Winning in November was imperative, party leaders insisted. Failure would bring catastrophe, not only for America’s democratic institutions but for the economy and working-class people as well.
In normal circumstances, a party that fell short of preventing a crisis like that would be expected to engage in real introspection about what went wrong. Leadership changes would be expected. Like Republicans in the aftermath of 1960 or even 2008, the party would radically re-evaluate the decisions that led to this moment.
Not so in this Democratic Party, where long-time leaders are trudging forward as if nothing happened.
The result has been yet another schism between the base and the elites, with rank-and-file voters left to wonder why the party’s most visible young voices are once again being kicked to the side in favor of the same crop of stalwart septuagenarians. Democrats’ status quo leadership elections would be understandable for a party that outperformed expectations. But this is a party that just lost the White House, the Senate and blew a real opportunity to reclaim the House.
Instead of listening to demoralized and frustrated Democratic voters, the party elders chose to protect leadership that has lost the confidence of the people. If the party has learned a lesson from the debacle of Nov. 5, it sure isn’t acting like it.
Last month’s elections proved that voters aren’t willing to wait around while Democrats get the message that it’s time for a change. The sooner Democrats realize that, the better for the party — and our democracy.
Demonstrating the validity of Burns’ and Bouie’s concerns, President Biden and Vice President Harris made a joint appearance at a Christmas holiday party last Sunday that was hosted by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to thank the donors who collectively gave more than two billion dollars in the election. Harris told the attendees, “Our spirit is not defeated. We are not defeated … We are strong, we are clear about why we are in this….We cannot let any circumstance or situation or individual ever take away our power … we know what we stand for, and that’s why we know what to fight for.”
As is his way, Biden offered one of his folksy sayings: “My dad would say, when you get knocked down, you’ve just got to get up, get up. The measure of a person or a party is how fast they get up.” Biden added, “The bad news for you all is I ain’t going nowhere. We’re going to stay engaged.”
Harris and Biden’s encouragements ring hollow. They are trying to rally the very same supporters that they led to a great defeat last month.
The loss to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement on Election Day should have been a profound moment of clarity for the Democratic Party and its leadership. Unfortunately, such a moment of clarity has not yet occurred. What Democrats need at this moment is bold leadership and clarity. Unfortunately, no such leader holds power.
During a speech earlier this month in Chicago at his foundation’s Democracy Forum event, President Obama also tried to chart a path forward for the country’s embattled democracy and by extension his political party. In a non-partisan speech (Trump was not mentioned by name) Obama emphasized themes of democracy and pluralism in a time of extreme polarization, division and ascendant American fascism and authoritarianism.
Obama’s speech was criticized for being too conciliatory and hopeful, if not naïve, about the prospect of coming together with a Republican Party and MAGA movement and its other “conservative” supporters who reject compromise, civility, truth, reality, facts, the rule of law and democratic institutions and who have elevated a political strongman to the highest political office in the nation.
On this, Obama said:
Now, I should tell you that when I’ve mentioned to a few friends that our foundation would be hosting a forum on democracy and pluralism, I got more than a few groans and eye-rolls. And it’s understandable, after all; here in the United States we have just been through a fierce, hard-fought election, and it’s fair to say it did not turn out as they hoped. And for them, talk of bridging our differences when the country and the world seem so bitterly divided felt like an academic exercise. It felt far-fetched, even naïve, especially since, as far as they were concerned, the election proved that democracy is pretty far down on people’s priority list. I understood their skepticism; maybe you have had a conversation with a friend that felt the same way. But as a citizen and part of a foundation that deeply believes in the promise of democracy — not only to recognize the dignity and worth of every individual, but to produce freer, fairer, and more just societies — I can’t think of a better time to talk about it.
You see, it’s easy to give democracy lip service when it delivers the outcomes we want. It’s when we don’t get what we want that our commitment to democracy is tested. And at this moment in history — when core democratic principles seem to be continuously under attack, when too many people around the world have become cynical and disengaged — now is precisely the time to ask ourselves tough questions about how we can build our democracies and make them work in meaningful and practical ways for ordinary people.
And that’s why we’re here. That’s what these forums have been about.
Here Obama considers the real challenge of trying to coexist in a democracy (however ailing) and political culture with a political party, political movement and other forces that reject such principles, norms and values.
Now, at this point you may be thinking, “All that sounds pretty good, but pluralism depends on everyone following a certain set of rules, that’s what you say, Obama.
It’s a problem. And when that happens, we fight for what we believe in. There are going to be times, potentially, when one side tries to stack the deck and lock in a permanent grip on power, either by actively suppressing votes, or politicizing the armed forces, or using the judiciary or criminal justice system to go after their opponents. And in those circumstances, pluralism does not call for us to just stand back and say, ‘Well, I’m not sure that’s OK.’ In those circumstances, a line has been crossed, and we have to stand firm and speak out and organize and mobilize as forcefully as we can.
I often wonder, how it must feel, emotionally and intellectually, for Obama to look at Trump’s second victory and what it will mean for multiracial pluralistic democracy and his legacy as the country’s first Black president. Obama is a great man of history. Donald Trump, America’s First White President (twice) is a great man of history as well. But their respective projects and legacies are anathema to one another. What will it mean for the nation as it tries to (or not) collectively reconcile such (dis)continuities?
At MSNBC, commentator Ben Burgis is extremely critical of Obama’s speech as exemplifying elite liberalism and meritocracy in an era of gangster capitalism and globalization and worsening income and wealth inequality, thus leaving the populist rage and anger of the working class and others left behind by that order to serve as fuel for Trumpism and authoritarian populism. In his essay “Obama still doesn’t get why Trump won. That’s the problem,” Burgis explains:
During Obama’s eight years in power, America’s wars in the Middle East ground slowly onward. This was a crucial factor in the rise of Trump, who was able to (deceptively) market himself as “anti-war.” And on the economic front, Obama continued George W. Bush’s policy of bailing out “too big to fail” banks while leaving homeowners who lost their houses in the 2008 crash underwater. He oversaw eight years of mounting economic inequality.
He’s not interested in giving the working class as a whole more structural power in our economy or our society. In other words, this is the same old centrism.
Those eight years saw flashes of left-wing populist outrage like Occupy Wall Street and the first Bernie Sanders campaign. These were handily defeated by the powers-that-be, though, from the NYPD clearing the protesters from Zuccotti Park to the Democratic Party quelling the Sanders insurgency. And at the end of the day there was nowhere for all that populist energy to go but Trump.
Obama’s liberalism is far more concerned with shattering glass ceilings for deserving strivers than raising the floor of material security for everyone. And that’s exactly the kind of liberalism that failed the first time — so spectacularly that a grotesque pseudo-populist demagogue was Obama’s immediate successor.
Now Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, is running out the clock on his presidency, and Trump is returning to power, this time with far more working-class support. Meanwhile, more than a few Americans have despaired so thoroughly of fixing our society through politics that they’re willing to cheer for an assassin murdering a health care CEO in broad daylight on the streets of Manhattan.
We urgently need a far better response to the current crisis than anything the dominant faction of the Democratic Party is offering. And the first step is to stop listening to Barack Obama.
In Obama’s speech at the Democracy Forum, some observers heard fire and growing motivation from the former president for direct intervention. By comparison, I heard (and read) a speech that was more mournful and, like the Democratic Party and other pro-democracy Americans, publicly working through the stages of grief about the 2024 election.
To that point, in an excellent article in Rolling Stone, Elizabeth Yuko explores the concept of “political grief” in the context of Trump’s victory in the 2024 election:
In fact, there’s an even more specific term for what we’re going through.
“Political grief is a very real thing,” says Melissa Flint, PsyD, a professor of clinical psychology at Midwestern University Glendale, noting that it occurs on both individual and collective bases. “When one struggles with a particular ideology held by those in political power, there is grief.”
This type of grief also reflects the feeling that your worldview or political beliefs — what we think is right vs. wrong, or morally valid — is under attack, she explains. In addition to the election loss, you may be mourning potential losses of your own rights and economic stability, as well as worried about the impact it might have on reproductive rights and public health. Political grief may also involve the fracturing of relationships as a result of ideological disagreements, or grappling with your identity if your values are at odds with the rest of your community.
You may also be mourning your future safety. “At the heart of political grief is a sense of despair due to the loss of predictability and safety in governmental structures,” writes Darcy Harris, PhD, a professor at King’s University College in Ontario specializing in non-death loss and grief, in her seminal article on political grief.
According to Harris, there’s also “a sense of paralysis” that occurs when you question whether those in power are capable of making decisions for the good of the country during a time of such political polarization. For those experiencing political grief, “loss of an election is equated with loss of identity, loss of agency, and loss of voice,” she writes. Its impact can be personal and painful.
Yuko continues, “What about the feelings of disappointment associated with the fact that more than half of the voting public chose a candidate who is a convicted felon, was accused of inciting an insurrection and routinely makes inflammatory and inaccurate remarks about women and marginalized populations? “We must acknowledge this as grief,” says Dion Metzger, MD, a psychiatrist practicing in Atlanta. “It’s not only the loss of the candidate you voted for, but also the dread of what’s to come. Grief and fear are two very strong emotions to have at once.”
The Democratic Party’s leaders need to be able to think in multiple dimensions, pragmatically, both about how they can win the political battles on the ground in the here and now, as well as in the future. In all, the Democratic Party needs much better vision and visionaries.
Trump and his MAGA agents and thought leaders possessed such a vision and that is why they were able to dominate on Election Day — and likely far beyond as they remake American society to serve their antidemocratic, anti-pluralistic and inhumane political and societal project. If the Democrats had a strong leader, he or she would have one standing order: Grieve later, learn from the defeat and reorganize to fight back now. With such a strong leader, the Democratic Party would now have its marching orders instead of being lost and slowly forming a circular firing squad.
