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OPINION

WHAT SHOULD THE DEMOCRATS DO NOW?


EIGHT COLUMNISTS ON HOW THE OPPOSITION PARTY SHOULD ADAPT AFTER LOSING TO DONALD
TRUMP — AGAIN.

12 min
2687

Vice President Kamala Harris phone banks in D.C. on Tuesday. (Demetrius
Freeman/The Washington Post)
Skip to main content
 1. Charles Lane: Listen to the majority
 2. Eugene Robinson: Focus on upward mobility
 3. Karen Tumulty: Win back Latinos
 4. Karen Attiah: Start over
 5. Perry Bacon Jr.: Protect immigrants and trans people
 6. Matt Bai: Leave Washington
 7. Theodore R. Johnson: Compromise — then win
 8. E.J. Dionne Jr.: Take a breath

By Washington Post Opinions staff
November 7, 2024 at 5:50 p.m. EST


CHARLES LANE: LISTEN TO THE MAJORITY

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Democrats need to a) learn and b) think. The main thing they need to learn from
is the popular vote. Despite lacking constitutional significance, it is the most
impressive result of Tuesday’s election. President-elect Donald Trump is on
track to be the first Republican presidential candidate to get more votes than
the Democratic candidate since George W. Bush in 2004. He could well equal
Bush’s achievement of an absolute majority. The voters have delivered this
verdict despite being told relentlessly, by Democrats and allied media
personalities, that Trump is unfit, a liar, crazy, dangerous, racist, a
misogynist, a Russian agent, a felon and a fascist. It didn’t matter,
politically, how much truth there is in this message. A critical mass of the
American people — maybe even most of them — have repudiated it.

Trump is now significantly stronger politically than he was before being
impeached twice, indicted four times and convicted once.

What should this make Democrats think? Not, one hopes, that the people have
proved themselves unworthy of self-government. Alas, some are already indulging
this interpretation, much like the East German official in Bertolt Brecht’s poem
“The Solution,” who informed a restive citizenry that they “had forfeited the
confidence of the government and could win it back only by redoubled efforts.”
As Brecht sardonically noted, “Would it not be easier in that case for the
government to dissolve the people and elect another?”

Democrats have been acting like the proverbial American tourist in France,
trying to get their point across by shouting louder in a language only they
understand. Cast out of the White House, the Senate and quite likely the House
of Representatives, Democrats should stop yelling for a while and listen, really
listen, to the economic and cultural concerns of ordinary people. The electorate
that has just preferred Trump to Vice President Kamala Harris is the only one we
have. Democrats can’t dissolve it and elect another; and without its support,
resistance is futile.

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EUGENE ROBINSON: FOCUS ON UPWARD MOBILITY

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The math is dispositive about what the Democratic Party needs to do. A bit more
than 60 percent of U.S. adults do not have a college degree. According to exit
polls, 56 percent of these noncollege voters chose Donald Trump over Kamala
Harris. So if Democrats want to build a durable majority, they have to find a
way to reconnect with blue-collar Americans — not just White voters but also
Hispanic, who fled to the GOP on Tuesday in numbers Democrats should find
alarming.

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The theme of the Democrats’ appeal should be the promise of upward mobility. The
policy agenda would flow from that: alleviating the housing crisis,
jump-starting small businesses, safer streets, better schools, more affordable
college tuition for your kids. Harris talked about these ideas. Her biggest
problem was Trump’s generational talent for making blue-collar voters believe he
sees them, hears them and is on their side (even if his policies are not).

Four years from now, assuming the Constitution survives, Trump will be out of
the picture. The GOP will own whatever happens between now and then on
immigration, abortion and social issues such as transgender rights. The
opportunity will be there for the right Democratic messenger to win blue-collar
voters back.


KAREN TUMULTY: WIN BACK LATINOS

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One place to start is with Latinos.

The flight of Hispanic voters from their traditional home in the Democratic
Party should be recognized as a blaring warning siren. Exit polls showed 46
percent of them voted for former president Donald Trump; the former president
won 55 percent of Latino men. He swept 14 out of 18 counties along the
Texas-Mexico border, doubling his 2020 performance in those historically
Democratic strongholds. Trump bested even the numbers won by Texan George W.
Bush in 2004.

Hispanics by and large shrugged off the offensive language that Trump and his
supporters used, including the late-breaking “floating island of garbage” joke
that so many Democrats were convinced would be fatal.

What they listened for, and never heard from Democrats, was a recognition of
what was going on in their own lives — and a persuasive argument for how Vice
President Kamala Harris and her party would make their circumstances better.
Instead, they saw Democrats denying that there was chaos at the border,
enforcing prolonged shutdowns during the pandemic that devastated their
livelihoods and spending so excessively that it ignited inflation.

So spare them prissy labels such as “Latinx.” Recognize that many are socially
conservative. They are less moved by abortion rights, LGBTQ+ issues and social
justice arguments. As Danny Ortega, an Arizona Democratic activist told Tim
Alberta in the Atlantic: “They may think Republicans are racist, but some of
them are going to vote for the Republicans anyway, because they’re better on the
economy, better on small business, better on regulation.”

Yet this rapidly growing segment of the electorate can be won back. Democrats
could start by paying closer attention to what Latino voters are saying, the
realities they are living. And when Trump’s grandiose promises fail to deliver
much besides chaos — as they will — Democrats should be ready with a set of
economic solutions that actually work.

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KAREN ATTIAH: START OVER

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While former president Donald Trump’s victory indicates a shift in America, the
right didn’t win everywhere. A number of progressive ballot measures, including
in red states, passed across the country: raising minimum wage, increasing sick
leave and reinforcing access to abortion.

I am not terribly optimistic for the Democratic Party — which now feels lost to
sea. The arrogant gamble to toss aside progressives, young people, and Arab,
Muslim, Palestinian and Lebanese constituencies angry over U.S. support for
Israel’s bombardment of Gaza fractured the Democratic base. The party will have
to shake the perception that the people shouting about saving democracy are
members of a party that people increasingly feel is beholden more to big-money
interests and out-of-touch consultants than to its own voters — particularly
when it comes to the economy. How can a party talk about democracy while
alienating its base and talking down to voters? If they can’t get it right for
2026, honestly, tear the party down and start from scratch.

For those looking to sell books on authoritarianism, this will be an opportune
time. I’m optimistic for people who are interested in other ways of building
grass-roots power. Community building will be really important. We must continue
to help the most marginalized and to regain social trust.

I hope that this will be a time for reflection for the Democrats. Defeat carries
deep and powerful lessons, if we are willing to look.


PERRY BACON JR.: PROTECT IMMIGRANTS AND TRANS PEOPLE

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I’m already seeing comments from Democratic members of Congress saying the party
needs to distance itself from transgender Americans. I’m very worried the second
Trump administration is going to demonize college professors and students,
transgender people and undocumented immigrants in particular — and that
Democratic politicians are going to go along with it (or not object much),
thinking it will electorally help the party.

That’s not the right moral stance. And I don’t think it’s politically savvy
either. The Democrats had some of their best recent electoral performances in
2018 and 2020, when they consistently attacked former president Donald Trump for
being anti-immigrant and embraced the protest movement after George Floyd was
killed. The governors who won in 2022 and 2023 in purple and red states, such as
Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, opposed anti-trans legislation pushed by Republicans.

In contrast, look at what Vice President Kamala Harris did in this campaign. She
walked away from many of her pro-immigrant stances, bragged about owning a gun
and refused to attack Trump’s mass deportation plans. She lost resoundingly —
while also saying a bunch of things I doubt she really believes.

Democrats are never going to outdo the Republicans in terms of being mean to
minorities. Rather than moving to the right on social issues, they should focus
on economic ideas that actually resonate with people. Most people don’t run or
aspire to run a small business. So it was strange that one of the few economic
ideas that Harris harped on was a small-business tax deduction.

Trump is telling a compelling story with a clear villain — essentially,
“Hardworking Americans are paying taxes and having that money go to services for
illegal immigrants.” Democrats need their own story — something like, “You can
have good health care and a steady job and not pay exorbitant prices for
groceries and child care if we start making the billionaires pay their fair
share and stop allowing them to take all of the profits from your hard work.”

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MATT BAI: LEAVE WASHINGTON

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Here’s a bit of political arcana: It has now been 28 years since Democrats last
nominated a presidential candidate who hadn’t first served in the U.S. Senate.
In the past 60 years, only four Democrats have won the office. Two of them
(Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton) were governors who won by campaigning against
the system, and another, Barack Obama, ran as an outsider who had barely served
in Washington. The other is Joe Biden, who won at an extraordinary moment,
mid-pandemic.

Democrats have become an entirely Washington-centric party that celebrates its
legislators. I don’t know exactly how Democrats rebound and rebrand in the
second Trump era. But the party has to look away from Washington and get back to
the states, where most successful reform movements have been born. Sure, it’s
harder in these celebrity-obsessed times to get a hearing as a relative unknown,
the way Carter and Clinton once did. But Pete Buttigieg showed that it can still
be done — if you have talent and a story to tell.

If I were a younger, ambitious Democratic governor who thought I understood
where the country was going, I’d hit the road and start making my case before
President-elect Donald Trump had finished unpacking his boxes. Outsider
movements win. Washington parties don’t.


THEODORE R. JOHNSON: COMPROMISE — THEN WIN

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President-elect Donald Trump is not returning to Washington with a conservative
policy agenda but rather one of rapid and regressive change. And his election
does not resolve the recent infighting among congressional Republicans or
prevent the coming power struggle between the party’s factions. So, Democrats’
first order of business must be to assemble a governing coalition — even if they
are in the House minority — to ensure the business of the country doesn’t stall
out with partisan stalemates. They’ll need to be opportunistic in partnering
with reasonable Republicans to modulate the administration’s worst impulses.

Their second order of business is finding a new winning electoral coalition. The
Obama formula for victory — one that Biden successfully revitalized — was
high-turnout elections coupled with lopsided multiracial support: upward of 90
percent of Black voters and more than two-thirds of those who are Latino, Asian
or from another ethnic minority group.

That approach, which suggested racial demography was destiny, seems to have
unraveled. Trump rebuilt George W. Bush’s winning coalition in 2004 by
capitalizing on a set of cultural and economic grievances shared by people
across races. But his solution is laden with intolerance, and it comes with
threats of state violence. Democrats will have to show how progressive policies
on immigration and the economy offer fairness and efficiency without MAGA’s room
for despotism.

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E.J. DIONNE JR.: TAKE A BREATH

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Then the Democratic Party needs to start with these problems:

 1. The Biden administration’s policies were focused on uplifting noncollege
    voters in red states. None of this seemed to penetrate. Why? Was it because
    the benefits of investment programs take a long time to be clear? Or was it
    bad salesmanship? Or was it because prices so dominated public thinking that
    none of this got through?
 2. We know there is great diversity in the Latino community, particularly big
    differences between men and women and between evangelical and
    non-evangelical Latinos. Don’t be so shocked by what happened. George W.
    Bush got 40 percent to 45 percent of the Latino vote. What brought so many
    Latinos back to the GOP?
 3. Fight Donald Trump’s abuses with everything in your arsenal. But figure out
    why even a share of voters who saw him as extreme voted for him anyway. How
    can the dangers the former president poses be made more concrete for more
    people?
 4. Have a conversation on culture wars that is animated by an insistence that
    the party will not sell out women, LGBTQ+ people and people of color as well
    as by a desire to use language and arguments that are congenial to
    middle-of-the-road voters. This also means thinking more deeply about the
    role of religion in shaping political views.
 5. Don’t get obsessed by categories such as “center” or “left.” Most voters
    don’t think that way. You shouldn’t, either.


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