Ruth Bader Biden

The Dems got slaughtered in the 2024 MAGA Wave. What's next?

Bunch of autopsies and finger-pointing (as well as finger-wagging) since the Dems got trucked by Trump and company, and I am but one lonely and meager voice, so I don’t need to belabor this. Let’s go high-level and incorporate some videos and then think about next steps.

The High-Level

These are the reasons you are hearing:

• “Biden should have exited earlier.”

• “Kamala didn’t have enough time.”

• “People are racist.”

• “I guess grocery bills matter more than my reproductive freedom.”

• “There should have been an open primary.”

• “Maybe Dems should pander less to elites.”

• “Trump can talk to the common man.”

• “The Dems got too woke.”

• “No one can vote in good conscience for a party that wants to Defund police officers.”

• “Dems love endless wars.”

• “They’re all misogynistic theology bros.”

• “White women fucked us.”

• “Hispanic men fucked us.”

There are more takes, but that’s a smattering. Of those, all of them have some merit, but the varying degrees of merit are pretty vast. Here, even Jon Stewart tries to walk the “woke” argument, but at the end of this video, he even needs to concede that most Democrats didn’t run on “woke.”

Just to quickly address the “woke” issue, the one thing this video is missing is an understanding of perception vs. reality. I don’t think most Democrats in 2024 ran on woke stuff. However, that one year or so after COVID infuriated a lot of people, because they felt talked down to, and they felt like they couldn’t say anything right, and everything felt performative but you couldn’t say that part out loud either. That was 2.5 to 3 years ago, but that perception still exists about the Democrats. They had to deal with that in this election. They got mauled.

Chris Murphy, a Senator from Connecticut who some think is in the party’s future, also weighed in and used the “we don’t talk to people the right way” argument:

I would say that argument is more resonant.

The one thing missing from this video is reality/rationality in the sense that political campaigns become expensive. Kamala seemingly way over-spent, but even a good Senate campaign with a conservative budget will run you into the tens of millions, especially if the race gets heated. Most people cannot inspire enough $10 donations to make that work, so they need a few “big money” people in their corner. There is a lot made of the fact that Kamala had more billionaire donors than Trump did, which seems to be accurate. The difference at the national level is that Trump speaks to one group (the working poor, ostensibly) and everyone with a pulse knows he’s going to do things to benefit the other group. Kamala didn’t speak to the voting block group well, and was perceived as being in the pocket of the other group, which is a lose-lose.

So, what now?

Just this morning, Andy Beshear (the Governor of Kentucky) wrote an op-ed. He’s starting to get his name out there nationally, I guess. Get that dude on Rogan ASAP!

Beshear won his state by five points. Trump, from the other party, then won it by 30 points. Beshear also won despite seeming to be “pro-LBTGQIA,” which a lot of Kentucky residents recoil from. So, he’s a “blue model” for a “red wave,” which is what the Democrats need nationally too. Essentially, you need someone that can root a progressive value in something logical (I.e. appeals to faith) and doesn’t seem to be stealing your money and sending it 8,000 miles away. And you need someone who can sit in a bar and bullshit, and you need someone who is OK with elements of truly-progressive ways of looking at the world, but can distance themselves from the craziest parts of that.

Beshear could be that guy, but right now he has no national profile.

If you look at Democrats who won down-ballot races in areas that otherwise went big for Trump — you see some of the same themes. To quote that ditty above:

How? These Democrats ran on strikingly similar themes — part progressive, part moderate, part conservative. Above all, they avoided talking down to voters and telling them they were wrong to be frustrated about the economy, immigration and post-pandemic disorder. “The fundamental mistake people make is condescension,” Gluesenkamp Perez told my colleague Annie Karni after the election.

In short, these Dems were balanced on immigration, semi-populist on the economy, and ran away from the culture wars. That needs to happen at the national level.

Remember, as mentioned in that Stewart video above: in 1984, the electoral map was 49 states to Reagan, one to Mondale. Reagan won 525 electoral votes. That was crushing. Eight years later — less than a decade, guys — Clinton won the thing. In 1984, a week after Reagan trounced Mondale, do you think any left-leaning people thought that was possible? Probably not. So, the Dems still have life. But they definitely need to make some adjustments.

Let's also look at some of these factors — and see if we can learn anything there.

What do you think are the next steps?