How Democrats Lost Their Base and Their Message

Nate Cohn

It has long been clear that the rise of Donald Trump meant the end of the Republican Party as we once knew it. It has belatedly become clear that his rise may have meant the end of the Democratic Party as we knew it as well. After three Trump elections, almost every traditional Democratic constituency has swung to the right. In fact, Trump has made larger gains among Black, Hispanic, Asian American and young voters in his three campaigns since 2016 than he has among white voters without a college degree, according to New York Times estimates. In each case, Trump fared better than any Republican in decades.

There are, of course, many explanations for Kamala Harris’ defeat. President Joe Biden was deeply unpopular and exited late, she was an imperfect candidate, and ruling parties around the world have struggled to overcome a post-pandemic and post-inflation hangover. The polls offer support for all of these hypotheses, and given the closeness of the election, it’s entirely possible that Democrats could have won under slightly different circumstances.

But there probably wasn’t a realistic case of young and nonwhite voters supporting Harris at a level the Democrats would have taken for granted just a few years ago. And while the election was still close, this erosion of strength among the party’s core groups has been happening for a long time. In each campaign, win or lose, Trump made major inroads among longtime Democratic voters. First, it was the Northern white working class. Then, it was Hispanic and Asian voters in 2020. Finally, it was young voters and, to a lesser extent, Black voters. In each case, Trump’s gains went far beyond what Democrats had ever imagined.

Even at the times Trump made relatively few gains — say, among Hispanic voters in 2016 or Black voters in 2020 — Democrats nonetheless underperformed. In 2016, despite a campaign dominated by Trump’s inflammatory comments about immigrants and Mexicans, Hillary Clinton failed to improve over Barack Obama’s performance among Hispanic voters. Democrats then lost ground among them in 2018. Similarly, Democratic support among Black voters fell in 2020, and the Black share of the electorate declined as well, despite the outpouring of activism in the wake of the death of George Floyd. Black turnout then slipped yet again in 2022.

The overarching pattern is clear. In election after election, Democrats underperformed among traditional Democratic constituencies during the Trump era. Sometimes, it was merely a failure to capitalize on his unpopularity. Other times, it was a staggering decline in support. Together, it has shattered Democratic dreams of building a new majority with the rise of a new generation of young and nonwhite voters.

This overarching pattern requires an overarching explanation: Trump’s populist conservatism corroded the foundations of the Democratic Party’s appeal. It tapped into many of the issues and themes that once made these voters Democrats.

While the damage was mostly concealed by Trump’s unpopularity, the backlash to his norm-shattering presidency drew the Democratic Party even further from its traditional roots. The extent of that damage is now clear.

The Populist Message

For a century, Democrats had been seen as the “party of the people” — the party against powerful interests and for change. When Obama pursued the presidency, he staked his campaigns on these themes. In 2008, he ran against Washington and promised to take on lobbyists and special interests — a top concern of voters. In 2012, he won by attacking Mitt Romney as a corporate plutocrat who would outsource jobs and help the wealthy, not the middle class. He said Americans needed to focus on “nation building here at home.”

These arguments had been central to Democratic campaigns for decades — evident in a half-century of Democratic slogans: “Middle Class First,” “Change We Can Believe In,” “Putting People First,” “On Your Side,” “A Leader, for a Change.” They’re the arguments that brought millions of working-class voters to the Democrats. Indeed, it was what the Democratic Party meant.

Trump flipped all of it around. His populist pitch deprived Democrats of their traditional role in American politics, gradually weakening their bonds with working-class voters, as well as nonwhite and young ones.

He ran against the establishment and promised to “drain the swamp.” He said he would take on a “rigged system,” and said a global elite privileged its values and interests over ordinary Americans. He pledged to put America First and protect American jobs. This year’s Republican platform was dedicated to the “Forgotten Men and Women of America,” something you would see in speeches from Franklin D. Roosevelt, not George W. Bush or Mitt Romney.

Trump’s co-opting of these longtime Democratic themes was effective in three ways.

First, he adopted populist positions on entitlements, foreign policy, immigration, infrastructure, trade and more. On many of these issues, Trump came closer to the views of organized labor or Bernie Sanders than Romney — views that millions of working-class Democrats agreed with. Without these positions, he would have been vulnerable to the attacks that Democrats leveled against Republicans in the past.

Second, Democrats were deeply vulnerable to Trump’s anti-establishment critique. Over the prior two decades, Democrats took centrist and business friendly positions on key issues. Clinton, for instance, supported NAFTA — which was enacted by her husband — and was initially a supporter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. She supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. These issues divided the Democratic Party during the 2016 primary; they also made it possible for Trump to argue that Democrats were the party of elites and a rigged system.

Third, Democrats were burdened by power. Even as early as 2016, disillusionment was growing. Obama enacted much of his agenda, but after eight years he wasn’t seen as having delivered full employment or “change” to business-as-usual in Washington. The rise of a new left and the strength of the Sanders campaign was one obvious expression of that disillusionment. For less progressive Democrats, the same dissatisfaction manifested in declining turnout and ultimately an openness to Trump — a path followed by some Sanders supporters as well.

In 2016, this added up to an enormous breakthrough for Trump among white voters without a college degree. The success of the Sanders campaign suggested there was opportunity for more, but Trump’s deep personal unpopularity and his penchant to offend young voters, women and Black and Hispanic voters prevented an even larger breakthrough in 2016.

The Cost of Anti-Trump Politics

Even as Trump co-opted much of the traditional Democratic message, he offered Democrats an alternative path to victory: opposition to Trump himself.

“Stronger Together,” “Restore the Soul of the Nation,” “We’re Not Going Back” all tell the tale. These slogans weren’t about the middle class, change or the future. They were just different ways of expressing opposition to Trump.

Was this a mistake? Not necessarily. Trump was deeply unpopular. He was seen as a threat to American society and democracy, and millions of white, college-educated, traditionally Republican voters were newly available to the party. While Democrats might have been better off with a populist campaign, it’s not clear they could have pulled it off against Trump, given his distinct views on the issues and their own vulnerabilities on them. Anti-Trump messaging may have been the best card Democrats had to play.

While the backlash against Trump breathed new life into Democrats, in other respects it pulled the party further from its moorings. Many Democrats saw Trump as racist and sexist, or as proof that America was a racist and sexist country. It inspired a new wave of progressive activism on race and gender — from #MeToo to Abolish ICE — that often drew heavily from the language of academia. It nudged the party even further from economic populism and its working-class roots.

As Trump broke norms, disregarded public health officials and threatened a postwar foreign policy consensus, the two parties even found their usual roles reversed. Democrats became the party of institutions, the national security apparatus, norms and, ultimately, the status quo — not change.

The social upheaval during and after the pandemic caught Democrats flat-footed. The party’s activist base had been enthralled by calls for a more compassionate immigration and criminal justice system, when suddenly the pandemic and its aftermath brought a spike in crime, rising homelessness and a new wave of border crossings. In just a year or two, liberals and progressives were seen by many as discredited.

With hindsight, this conservative reaction dealt a lasting blow to Democratic standing even before the 2024 election cycle began. Many of the most surprising swings in the election were foreshadowed in the 2022 midterms, when states like Florida and New York surged to the right. In fact, the 2024 results were more closely correlated with the 2022 midterm results for the U.S. House than the 2020 presidential election. This pattern has no modern precedent, and it suggests that the backlash against Democrats during 2021 and 2022 affected the political allegiance of millions of voters — and ultimately the electoral map.

A new cast of characters in Trump’s orbit — Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk and Joe Rogan — also seemed to turn toward the right during this period. In their eyes, they didn’t change; the Democrats did. They were hardly alone.