How the Democrats Can Win Back Power in America
The path back to power may seem bleak, but Matt Bernardini examines the ways in which US progressives can appeal to voters.
This past week, American news coverage has been dominated by the litany of actions that Donald Trump has already taken to consolidate his power and further turn America into an oligarchy. It’s hard to believe that it’s only been a week. The next four years may feel like an eternity. And while it’s difficult to imagine, there will, likely, be an election in 2028. Democrats will need to be ready to take back power and reverse the right-wing shift that America is undergoing.
Instead of being a fluke event, it appears that Trump’s 2016 victory was the first major sign of a shift in American’s political preferences. For decades, more Americans have identified as Democrats than Republicans. This was evident in the presidential election results. From 1992 to 2020, Republicans only won the popular vote once. Yet now, for the first time, more Americans are identifying as members of the GOP than the Democrats.
And in key states, the divide is getting even worse. Florida, which used to be a swing state, now appears to be solidly red. Republicans now have 1 million more registered voters than Democrats, and with Trump easily winning the state in November, it will be a big task for Democrats to get it back. Unfortunately the trend is the same in Pennsylvania, which is considered the nation’s new bellwether state. In 64 of the Keystone state’s 67 counties, Republicans have gained a registration advantage. And after Pennsylvania had gone Democratic in presidential elections for almost 30 years straight, Trump has now won it two out of three times.
Yes, voter registration can be a lagging indicator, meaning that these voters who were registered Democrats already were voting Republican, but they just hadn’t made the official switch yet. Still, with Trump’s latest victory in the popular vote, the trend towards the GOP should be concerning for anyone on the left.
The Road to Recovery
For Democrats and leftists, the path back to power seems bleak. Trump and his cronies will continue to consolidate power in the courts, and with tech billionaires now controlling many of the channels that people get their information from, Democrats are now definitely at an institutional disadvantage.
Yet they can win back power. Even after all this, it’s important to remember that Trump did lose the popular vote by 3 million in 2016 to a wildly unpopular Hillary Clinton. And his win in 2024 was one of the smallest in American history. Despite what many Americans wrongly believe, Biden’s 2020 victory was far greater than Trump’s in November.
The Democratic party has become far too reliant on political consultants and the professional educated class of voters, eschewing leftist economic policies that help the majority of Americans, for wishy-washy centrist politics that appeal to few people outside the beltway. For example, Harris’s popularity was highest right after she was nominated and through the Democratic convention. She picked Tim Walz as her Vice President, a progressive midwestern governor who was not shy about taking the fight to Republicans. She even had a decent set of policy ideas, including offering a ban on grocery price gouging.
However, after the convention she shifted her messaging to make it more aligned with Wall Street and the consultant class’s interests. She even began listening to her brother-in-law, the Chief Legal Officer at Uber. Therefore, her campaign began to tailor its policies to a Wall Street audience. She did away with the price gouging ban. And subsequently her favorability ratings began to drop.
“The result was a Democratic candidate who vacillated between competing visions for how to address the economic problems that voters repeatedly ranked as their top issue,” the New York Times wrote.
That inability to strike a clear and consistent message is a major part of the problem. As Trump has shown, even if voters don’t agree with a candidate’s message, they appreciate someone who appears as if they have a plan. And for many folks, including those I talked to in Pennsylvania, Harris came across as someone who had no plan.
Many progressives, myself included, thought that Bernie Sanders could win because he had a consistent plan that appealed to a broad swath of the American public. As much as it might not make ideological sense, there are Trump to Sanders voters who will vote based on whether or not they perceive someone as part of the Washington establishment. There were even voters in New York who voted for Trump, and the progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“I feel you are both outsiders compared to the rest of DC, and less ‘establishment’,” one of those voters told her on X/Twitter after Ocasio-Cortez asked her own supporters for feedback.. Another, “both of you push boundaries and force growth”. And: “It’s real simple … Trump and you care for the working class.”
Another one said: “You signaled change. Trump signified change. I’ve said lately, Trump sounds more like you.”
Are Trump’s policies really going to change things for the average person? No, of course not. They will only continue to hurt these voters and increase economic inequality. But what this does show is that voters want change.
Democrats can now use their time in the opposition to craft a platform dedicated to change. For one, they should come out strongly in favor of a Medicare for all system. The recent assassination of the United Healthcare CEO showed that most Americans, Republicans and Democrats, have utter disdain for our for-profit healthcare system. A strong campaign around Medicare for all would be a welcome change for many voters.
Similarly, Democrats should coalesce around an increase in the federal minimum wage. Polling consistently shows that a majority of voters support such an increase. And while blue states have taken the lead in raising their minimum wages, the federal level minimum wage has not changed since 2009.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, for the next election cycle, the Democratic party should allow for an organic primary campaign to expose Americans to many of the younger and more progressive Democratic politicians that the party has.
As Matthew Karp noted in Harper’s, the Democrats have been far too reliant on anointing old, out-of-touch centrists from a bygone era.
“Barack Obama anointed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and then, in a crunch, Joe Biden in 2020; Biden, in turn, anointed Harris when he stepped down,” Karp wrote. “Squashing the Sanders insurgency was one thing, since the rebels were all outside the castle, but this is a party that simply does not welcome internal ideological debate.”
The party has many good midwestern governors who have shown how to win and govern in a progressive way. Going with a candidate like Gretchen Whitmer or JB Pritzker would be a perfect way to signal to voters that the party is ready for change in the post-Trump era.
The problem with seeking ways to improve the Democrats chances of election is that they are equally in hoc to large funders as the Republicans and not the progressive sort! (are there any?) There is a political group think in the US as much as there is in the UK about how things are supposed to work and this does not include giving any real political (small 'p') power to local communities who may not be part of the group think.
The legitimacy of both Democrats and Republicans has been severely weakened which accounts for the rise of Trump who, for all his republican associations, is seen as the antidote to some of the group think because he purports to challenge it all. The Republican Party has disappeared, morphing into an extreme right wing project and the Democrats have moved in to space vacated by the Republican Party in the same way as in the UK the Conservatives are in the process of morphing into Reform and Labour has already moved into the old-style Conservative space.
It reminds me of a cartoon character running desperately on the spot as the road beneath them rolls quickly behind and then the road runs out and there is nothing to stand on. It requires a new party capable of standing on its own ground and letting the others slide off to the right. I have no illusions about the difficulty such a party would have in gaining traction in the current political set up where both the media and the money favours the status quo but grass roots beginnings are a solid basis for a longer lasting organisation.
Harris went in too late but yes after the initial surge of interest there was a deflation.
Agree completely about the Bernie Sanders observation …he would have played DT at his own game ….except Bernie Sanders is the real deal.