The Democratic Party Doesn't Work

The party has been rotting for years and years. Now we're all paying the price.

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Several years ago, the Republican National Committee started opening “community centers” in minority-majority cities and towns across the country: Hispanic communities in Texas and Georgia, Asian-American areas in Orange County, Black neighborhoods in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, and heavily Native communities in places like Robeson County, North Carolina. In September 2022, the RNC said it had hosted 5,000 events at dozens of these centers, spread across 19 states.

“The RNC’s purposeful engagement forges the way for stronger relationships with minority communities and a stronger Republican Party,” then-chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, said at the time. “Unlike Democrats, Republicans do not take minority communities for granted, and we will continue to work to earn each vote ahead of November.” 

As Alex Sammon wrote for the American Prospect in 2022:

The community centers were established to bore the opening further, making the appeal directly to racial minorities inside their communities, with an extremely offline, grassroots offering. This wasn’t a soft sell: The centers beckon potential voters with everything from movie nights to free dinners to holiday parties to gun safety trainings, thrown by local organizers and paid for by your friends at the RNC, which has dedicated millions of dollars to the program. If those tactics sound familiar, that’s because they were once used to great effect, by groups as varied as the Black Panthers in Oakland or Democrats in New York’s Tammany Hall.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee criticized these centers as a political stunt, and a lot of them shut down in the Trump Republican Party’s typically chaotic and confusing way. But it was difficult not to recall the community centers as it became obvious on Tuesday that Donald Trump was going to be elected president a second time. 

The working class shifted right all over the country on Tuesday. In South Texas, counties like Starr, which gave Barack Obama Assad-like margins in 2012, went for Trump by double-digits after dropping precipitously for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. Trump will likely be the first Republican since George W. Bush to beat the Culinary Union’s turnout machine and win Nevada, with an exit poll showing 60 percent support for Trump from Latino men and 45 percent support from union members. 

Few shifts were more noticeable than in Passaic County, New Jersey, a heavily Latino county, which abruptly flipped to Trump after slowly turning away from  Democrats over the past 16 years. In Paterson and Clifton, two of the county’s largest cities, the party barely existed; dozens of Democratic Party committee seats were vacant until August. The same party that had made Passaic a stronghold for nearly 30 years had functionally stopped existing until there was an emergency.

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Everything that was true about Donald Trump before Tuesday is still true today. In fact, he’s worse: He’s much older, his rhetoric is more violent, and the energy behind his campaign in 2024 was anemic compared to 2016. There was real grassroots energy behind Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign that was completely nonexistent before President Joe Biden got out of the race, with consistently large and energetic rallies, thousands of volunteers canvassing, and more than $1 billion raked. Trump raised roughly a third of that and farmed out his  get-out-the-vote operation to Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk. 

And yet Trump managed to triumph on the back of the kind of multiracial working-class coalition, albeit a shaky one, that has eluded the left for decades. Why?

The daggers are already flying among Democrats. Predictably, immigrants andtransgender people are being scapegoated by some of the more soulless cretins in the party. But we have to look at this from both a short and a long-term perspective.

The short-term problem is relatively easy to diagnose. The main culprit for the loss in the presidential election, given Democrats elsewhere held up surprisingly well, is Biden, who has now cemented his legacy as one of the worst presidents of the modern era. Although Biden appointees advanced meaningful labor, industrial, antitrust, and consumer protection policies, he was personally a disaster, insulated from criticism with no ability to articulate even the positives of his administration. 

Biden funded genocide in Gaza and wars on two continents with no end in sight, feeding the perception that the world had grown more chaotic since Trump left office. Biden said, before he dropped out, that he alone could keep NATO together; voters said “okay” and threw the Democrats out anyway, when Harris threw together a campaign that, judging from early returns, appears to have lost the bet that attempting to personally win the vote of David Frum was worth deflating some of the constituencies that could have bailed her out in the Upper Midwest. 

But the Democrats’ failures didn’t begin with Biden. Most of these trends can be traced back more than a decade, after Obama’s last run. Despite declining margins beginning with Hillary Clinton, the Democrats believed they would keep these constituencies and forgot exactly why they won those voters in the first place, as the New York Times reporter Astead Herndon pointed out. 2024 was thus the culmination of years and years of rot that the party ignored.

Much of that rot comes from one thing: Tens of millions of people think the Democrats are talking at them, not to them. The 2024 campaign centered around issue after issue that the party simply refused to grapple with. Waving away inflation, high energy bills, and astronomical housing costs with charts and graphs did not work. Not forcefully articulating what they actually believe about civil rights, as Trump blanketed the airwaves with “Kamala is for they/them” ads, did not work. Complete non-engagement with anger over the genocide in Gaza, and even broader resistance to funding and participating in foreign wars that many justifiably feared would eventually involve American troops on the ground, did not work. The default posture of the Biden-era Democrats and the nonprofit and consultant apparatus surrounding them was dismissiveness. It did not work. 

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With that said, there’s little evidence thus far that this was an epoch-defining realignment election. There are, undoubtedly, some first-time Trump voters who are now Republicans for the foreseeable future, drawn to the antagonistic cultural conservatism of the right. But Trump’s grasp on his voters is not absolute, as shown by Biden’s significant electoral victory just four years ago. Trump himself is significantly less capable and, like Biden, will rely on a group of unlikeable sycophants around him to carry out his agenda. Also like Biden, Trump’s mental state is clearly in decline. There’s no predicting how that decline will play out. JD Vance could very well be the president within the next four years, and either way, there’s far from any guarantee that the next Republican nominee — the first non-Trump candidate since Mitt Romney — would be able to hold Trump’s fragile coalition together. 

Moreover, Trump has no real solution to any of the problems he’s said he would fix. Assuming the Republicans end with the slimmest of House majorities (though Democrats still have an outside shot at winning the chamber), we’re probably getting more tax cuts, new crypto laws, potentially weed legalization, and some extra-fascist immigration policies, in large part thanks to the Democrats’ embrace of Bush-era Republican immigration rhetoric. His administration will overreach in disgusting and terrible ways that don’t address the material concerns of his voters, and no one will be better off for it except executives, lobbyists, and the people grifting off of his name and power. 

So he has myriad opportunities to screw this up, as people who voted for him and others who stayed home watch his true agenda take shape. The pendulum will likely swing back in the next two or four years — not out of any real love for the Democrats, but because they’re the only other party with ballot access in all fifty states and the money to run sustained national campaigns.

The big question is what happens when that pendulum does swing back, and the answer starts with what the Democrats do about it now. The consultants need to go. The loser attitude of the national party leadership, led by a once and future Boeing lobbyist who forcefully resisted dumping Biden from the top of the ticket, needs to go. The leadership of Northeastern local parties that are run like personal fiefdoms of the most corrupt and ineffective people you’ve ever seen, need to go. The Democrats need to learn how to talk to people again, to name the forces that make their lives more arduous and annoying, to appeal to what people believe are the best qualities about themselves, and to regain even a shred of credibility when they say they’ll work in the common interest. A “ground game” isn’t about what you do six weeks before an election. It’s about what you do in the years before that to build trust.

The Democrats once had an identity of being a party for the working class, and now that identity is defined by hating Donald Trump and protecting institutions that no one feels are particularly effective. One gave them a coalition that lasted decades, while the other appears to have lost every branch of government for the second time in eight years. For a party that wants to win and wield the sort of generational power needed to undo the damage done and yet to come, it shouldn’t be that difficult of a choice.