This is an edited transcript of an audio essay for “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the essay in the player above, or by subscribing to the podcast on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
I find myself thinking about the 2004 election. In my lifetime, until today, that was the most total rejection liberals experienced. In 2000, George W. Bush was this accidental president. He’d lost the popular vote. He’d won the Electoral College after winning Florida by a few hundred votes. But by 2004, the lies and the failures and travesties of his administration were clear. The disaster of the Iraq war was clear. And the result was that Bush went from accidental president to unquestioned victor. He won the popular vote cleanly. On the electoral maps, the center of the country was a sea of red. What made that loss hurt so much for liberals was that by 2004, Americans knew who Bush was and what he had done. They chose him anyway.
That is roughly what happened Tuesday night. Donald Trump’s victory was not one of the grand landslides of American political history. As I write this, estimates suggest that he is on track for a 1.5-percentage-point margin in the popular vote. If that holds — and it may change as California is counted — it is smaller than Barack Obama’s win in 2008 or 2012, Bush’s in 2004 and Bill Clinton’s in 1992 or 1996. It may prove smaller than Hillary Clinton’s margin in 2016.
But it is a huge gain compared with 2020, when Trump lost the popular vote by nearly five points. And yes, I know, presidential elections are not decided by the popular vote. But it matters where the mood of America is moving, and the popular vote tells us more about that than the few hundred thousand voters who swing Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
So what’s behind Trump’s gain? One theory is that this is the postpandemic, postinflation, anti-incumbent backlash. We’ve seen it in country after country. Whoever was in power in 2021 and 2022 is getting annihilated in elections. This is true for parties on the right and parties on the left. In Britain the Tories had their worst election ever. In Japan the Liberal Democratic Party — which is, confusingly for us, a conservative party — had one of its worst elections ever. Left-of-center governments have fallen in Sweden and Finland and Portugal. Look a bit north, and Canada’s Justin Trudeau is hideously unpopular. As Matthew Yglesias wrote, if you look at this internationally, the interesting question might be why Trump didn’t win in a landslide. If Nikki Haley had been running, she probably would have.
But Trump didn’t just win this election. Democrats lost it. President Biden, at 81 years old and hovering beneath 40 percent favorability in most polls, should never have run for re-election. And for months and months and months, the leaders of the Democratic Party, with very few exceptions — shout-out to Dean Phillips — refused to say that. As poll after poll showed supermajorities of voters thought Biden was too old for this job, the party continued to suppress any serious challenge to him. It suppressed its own doubts. It ignored its own voters, to say nothing of the voters it was going to need to win in 2024.
I was one of the people arguing, beginning back in February, for some kind of competitive process: a mini-primary leading to an open convention. Those processes create information. Yes, they mean argument and dissension and fracture. But it is through argument and dissension and fracture that you discover what you do not yet know. It is through the bruising process of primaries and debates and speeches and interviews that you learn which candidates are able to connect to the mood and moment of the country.
But Biden stepped aside mere weeks before the Democratic convention, after an extraordinary mobilization by members of Congress and Democratic donors. The hour was late. The party was scared. It had wasted so much time. And in wasting that time, it had refused to face up to a core problem: Biden wasn’t just too old. Voters were unhappy with his administration, with the wars abroad and the prices at home and the absence of leadership that made them confident that the people in charge knew what they were doing. The line in the Democratic Party was and is that Biden’s record ranks him as perhaps the greatest president since Franklin D. Roosevelt; the tragedy is that he is not 15 years younger. But Americans did not and do not believe that — and Democrats never reckoned with that fact or came up with an answer to it. That, more than any other reason, is why Kamala Harris lost.
Harris was dealt a bad hand. She had no time to set up her own campaign. No time to work out its themes or policies or personnel. And she was running, inevitably, as the champion of an administration people were angry at. She could not separate herself from Biden without being accused of disloyalty. But I’m not sure there was any answer she could have given that would have worked. It’s not credible to run as a vice president disowning the record of the administration in which you served. I think she ran a strong campaign, given how little time and how little room she had to build it. But she faced a very difficult problem: A popular incumbent can run on her record. A challenger can promise change. Harris could do neither.
But what if Democrats had given themselves the gift of a real primary contest? The party has plenty of talent. And Harris had real weaknesses. She can be amazing on the stump. She is a killer in debates. But one thing Harris was not able to do — not in 2020, not in 2024 — was define what her campaign was about, aside from keeping Donald Trump out of the White House. She ultimately ran as the guardian of the institutions. A candidate with Liz Cheney on one side and Liz Warren on the other. But she took for granted the worth and health of those institutions. Was the endorsement of the Cheneys — and the enthusiasm with which it was embraced — a sign of the Democrats’ big tent or a sign of its internal confusion?
And Harris was burdened by all that had come before her. The Democratic Party had spent years kicking people out of its tent. I went and listened to the appearance Elon Musk made on Joe Rogan’s podcast on Monday. It was strikingly right wing and conspiratorial. It wasn’t that many years ago that Rogan had Bernie Sanders on for a friendly interview. And then Rogan kinda sorta endorsed him. Rather than celebrate, online liberals were furious at Sanders for going on “Rogan” in the first place. I was still on Twitter then, and I wrote about how of course Sanders was right to be there and this was one of the best arguments for Sanders’s campaign. If you wanted to beat Trump, you wanted to win over people like Rogan.
Liberals got so angry at me for that, I was briefly a trending topic. Rogan was a transphobe, an Islamophobe, a sexist, a racist, the kind of person you wanted to marginalize, not chat with. But if these last years have proved anything, it’s that liberals don’t get to choose who is marginalized. Democrats should have been going on “Rogan” regularly. They should have been prioritizing it — and other podcasts like it — this year. Yes, Harris should have been there. Same for Tim Walz. On YouTube alone, Rogan’s interview with Trump was viewed some 46 million times. Democrats are just going to abandon that? In an election where they think that if the other side wins, it means fascism?
In 2016, Democrats were shocked to lose to Trump. But that loss had the consolation of chance. Democrats won the popular vote, and you could make a very good case that if the James Comey letter hadn’t hit right at the end of the campaign, Hillary Clinton would have won. I believe that. And so the response was resistance. In 2020, Trump lost the popular vote decisively, but millions more people voted for him than in 2016. He came within a few hundred thousand votes of winning the Electoral College again. That was true despite the chaos of his administration, despite the harm he caused during the pandemic. And it was true in part because he began to win over Black and Hispanic voters who Democrats thought they had a lock on.
And now we’re here. Trump got the win in 2024 he could see only glimmers of in 2020. He got it despite Jan. 6, despite the criminal charges and convictions, despite the wild statements and weaving rants. Democrats did everything they could to convince voters Trump was unfit for office, and voters gave Trump his first-ever popular vote victory.
Emotionally, there are two ways Democrats can respond: contempt or curiosity. I’ve seen plenty of contempt already. If Americans are still willing to vote for Trump, given all he’s said and done, then there’s nothing Democrats or Harris could have done to dissuade them. There’ll be a desire to retreat, to hunker down, to draw the boundaries of who is decent and who is deplorable ever more clearly.
But Trump sharply improved his margin in New York City. These are voters angry about prices, about immigration, about a sense of disorder and failure. Trump seems to have made huge gains among voters making less than $50,000 a year. The Democratic Party is losing voters who lie at the core of its conception of itself.
Democrats have to go places they have not been going and take seriously opinions they have not been taking seriously. And I’m talking about not just a woke-unwoke divide, though I do think a lot of Democrats have alienated themselves from the culture that many people, and particularly many men, now consume. I think they lost people like Rogan by rejecting them, and it was a terrible mistake. But I’m also talking about day-to-day Democratic governance. When voters are this unhappy with the way you’ve wielded power, you have to want to know why. That work has begun in the Democratic Party — you saw it in the Biden administration’s eventual pivot to border enforcement — but it was clearly too little and too late.
There’s another part of the 2004 comparison that I’ve been thinking about. Immediately after that election, Democrats became obsessed with winning back the heartland. There was a vogue for tough-talking politicians like Brian Schweitzer, the Democratic governor of Montana. There was a belief that Democrats were considered weak and if they were ever to be competitive again, they’d have to be seen as strong. They’d have to moderate, both ideologically and culturally. To win again, they would need to become more like what had defeated them.
But Bush’s win in 2004 was not the beginning of a Republican realignment. It was the end of the Republican Party as we knew it. Because what liberals believed about Bush was true. His administration was a disaster, and within a few years, nearly the whole country would agree. By the time of the next presidential election, Democrats had opened the door to a new politics that seemed almost unimaginable in 2004. Yes, Barack Obama’s convention speech in 2004 was startlingly good, but he was still an antiwar Black man with the middle name Hussein whose politics were forged in Chicago. That wasn’t what Democrats thought would win Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Indiana in 2008. But it was. And the Bush administration’s overreaches, failures and scandals left the reputation of G.O.P. elites so absolutely smashed that the stage was set for Trump’s eventual takeover of the party.
Trump is surrounded now by people who are more relentlessly focused on carrying out his will and their own. Republicans have the Senate and the Supreme Court and may well win the House. That is a huge amount of power for a man not known for wielding power carefully or responsibly. Maybe JD Vance and Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. bring judiciousness. I think it is as or more likely that they egg Trump into ideological overreach. And my God, the corruption we are about to see. So is this the beginning of the Trump realignment, or will this end with Trump’s name and reputation as tattered as that of the Bush dynasty he destroyed?
I don’t pretend to know. But Democrats need to admit that they are at the end of their own cycle of politics. The Obama coalition is over. It is defeated and exhausted. What comes next needs to be new. That means going to new places and being open to new voices. A politics right for the next era will not be a politics designed to win the last election. It’s not going to be predictable, from where we stand right now, just as Obama’s 2008 victory would have sounded laughable in 2004 and Donald Trump’s 2016 win violated everything Republicans believed after their 2012 defeat. Finding what is next, amid the pain of what is about to come, is going to require a lot of conflict and a lot of curiosity.
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