I was going to comment on James Joyner’s post, DLC 2.0?, but it was getting long, and I realized I had even more to say.
There is a long-standing debate in the comment sections of OTB, and in the wider world over what ails the Democrats, especially in terms of “messenging” and whether certain words or phrases are the real reason that they lose elections.
First, to listen to all this talk would make one think that Democrats are perennial losers who can barely eke out a win here and there. But this is hardly the case.
Apparently, I can’t stress the following fact enough: from 1992 to 2024, Republicans have won the popular vote only twice (2004 and 2024). And yes, they have won the presidency four times in that span, owing to winning the Electoral College and not the popular vote in 2000 and 2016.
To be clear, I fully understand the president is not elected by popular vote, but do note that almost always the popular vote winner also wins the Electoral Vote. Further, it also provides a pretty good empirical metric of overall popularity. While it may well be true that some strategic recalibration could help in certain states, it is also true that the magic words in question may not exist.
At the barest of minimums, the notion that the Democratic Party is some hopeless wreck that needs to engage in endless hang-wringing strikes me as not supportable by the facts and the general nature of American politics, regardless of whether I like or dislike specific messages or positions from the party. I will hasten to add that there is no current central message from “The Party” because there is no central messenger.
I will again stress that American parties are shaped by presidential nominees, not national party chairs, nor “The Party” as some clear entity. Indeed, the Democratic Party is currently in the part of the cycle of American politics wherein it is at its weakest, i.e., the two years after having lost the presidency. We are likely to move into the next phase wherein they win some off-term elections (e.g., the Virginia governor’s race) and likely re-take the House in 2026. Then the race for the Democratic nominee will start in earnest. The party will then take on greater coherence sometime in 2028. This is just how it works.
Consultants think that consultations and reports drive the party because, well, that’s how they make their money. Ditto pundits and the chattering class in general. But as James noted in his post, the GOP consultants told their clients after 2012 to be nicer to immigrants, and yet 2016 rolled around, and because of the nomination of Trump, the party went hard right on immigration.
American parties are driven by presidential candidates. Full stop. Even more so, they are driven by presidents. Else, there is no central organizing principle because there is no central principal.
Here’s the popular vote breakdown for each presidential election from 1980 to 2024 (source). Winners are colored by current party-color designations (I am always struck that Reagan-era Reps would have hated being red), and the bolded and italicized entries are electoral vote/popular vote inversions.
Did Reagan dominate Carter in 1980 because he was The Great Communicator, or was it more because we were in the middle of stagflation?
Did Clinton end up beating the man who was, for a while, the most popular president in the history of popularity polls (at the time) because he triangulated to the center, or was it more because the country went into recession from 1990 into 1991?
Did Obama win in 2008 because he was an incredibly articulate, not vulgar, sometimes even professorial (!) orator? Or was it maybe in large part because of the economic mess that had started under the Bush administration?
Did Trump win in 2024 because he is an “authentic” loudmouth, or was it more because of long-term anger over inflation?
I am not actually proffering a mono-causal answer, but people are tying themselves in knots over word choices and “messaging.” I am quite confident in saying that economics is a far more important variable than messaging and rhetoric as a general matter and is definitely more important than the kinds of things people get in a knot about, such as overly academic language or whether Trump is perceived as a normal guy or not.
While I am not saying the candidates and campaign don’t matter, I am saying that they matter less (perhaps far less) than the typical conversation over messaging and left/center/right acts like they do.
One thing I don’t see evidence for is that 2024 was lost over trans rights, and certainly not that Latinx was the straw that broke Harris’s back. It surely wasn’t because of terms like intersectionality.
Do I think these things bother some voters? Sure. But I also would need to see stronger evidence than I have that there were more voters motivated by such things than were motivated by frustrations over inflation.
I would say one concluding thing about candidate quality. I think the reason 2024 was as close as it was was because Trump was a poor-quality candidate. I know a lot of OTB readers, and Democrats writ large, ask the question this way: “How could we have lost to Trump?” I get that. But the real issue is “How did the Republicans only win such a thin margin given inflation and Biden’s low popularity?” And the answer is: Donald Trump was their candidate. I cannot prove a counter-factual, but I think a more “normal” GOP candidate would easily have won the majority of the popular vote with something that looked more like an inversion of 2020.
