Over the course of the last decade, President-elect Donald Trump broke both national political parties.
He first stormed into the 2016 Republican primaries with both an agenda and a style that sharply cut against GOP conventions. Since then, the Democratic Party has defined itself by opposition to him, rather than its own values and platform. President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 looks, now more than ever, like an electoral brake tap in a race away from the establishment.
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For most of the last 20 years, American voters have been screaming that they don’t believe their government serves them well. Before Trump, Democrats nominated — and the country twice elected — Barack Obama, a candidate who ran against leaders that walked the country into forever wars and a finance-and-housing crisis that nearly toppled the economy.
Add to that this nugget: This is the first time since 1896 that voters have ousted the incumbent party in three straight presidential elections. (In the 1880s and 1890s, they did it four consecutive times.)
In this election, there was no greater symbol of the aimlessness of the two parties’ old guards than the Cheney family and the Democratic presidential nominee wrapping their arms around each other in an embrace that they somehow didn’t find awkward. Their marriage of convenience gave more credence to Trump’s arguments that elites serve their own interests first.
Like Obama’s two elections, Trump’s second win was decisive by modern historical standards. There’s no need to tally how many thousands of votes he won by in the closest swing states.
But if there’s a silver lining — or a ray of hope — for Democrats, it is that the national shift in the electorate can still be measured as a handful of percentage points. This wasn’t Ronald Reagan taking everything but Minnesota and the District of Columbia in 1984.
Democrats have time now to assess how their party can become more responsive to public sentiment as they look forward to the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., harshly criticized them for alienating white, Black and Latino working-class voters. He might be the wrong person to make that case — given that he was an architect of and cheerleader for Biden’s economic agenda — but he has a point.
Democrats would be smart to start with the issue that Trump hammered on — and which was the top concern of the plurality of his voters: the economy.
For four years, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris tried to convince voters that their plans were working instead of shaping their agenda to respond to the economic pain so many Americans feel. First, they said inflation wasn’t a problem. Then they said it was transitory. Eventually, they noted that its rate was slowing. With little exception — hard-to-implement promises to ban price-gouging — they hardly stopped to acknowledge the harm cumulative inflation wreaked on working families.
They threw out facts and figures to explain that the economy is in better shape than its counterparts across the world. Harris’ economic policy offerings were largely expansions of Biden proposals, such as more generous homebuyer and child tax credits than he called for. In the political equivalent of Bill Buckner booting a ground ball in the World Series, Biden didn’t warn the public when he took office that the pandemic spending of the previous year was likely to cause inflation.
But the other thing Biden and Harris failed to do — despite the president’s reputation for empathy — was listen to the outcry for help and shape their agenda around it. Democrats will have no one to blame but themselves if they don’t figure that out before the next election.
In the interim, Trump now has the power to reform government — the institutions of democracy — because he has rebuilt the Republican Party around a more populist and protectionist vision for the economy that proved persuasive to the electorate.
To fight effectively for the issues they care most about, from the form of government to abortion rights, Democrats have to make sure voters don’t see them as a threat to economic prosperity.
