Later on today, Republicans will take control of both houses of Congress, setting up for a unified control of government when Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th President, later this month. Regardless of what you want the Democratic Party to be, they will essentially be irrelevant in governing America soon. Parties that win elections get to govern. Parties that lose get to complain.

I’ve largely stayed out of the debate over why exactly the Democratic Party lost in the 2024 Election. The reasons for that are fairly simple. First, I think there’s ample evidence that the election should have been much worse for Democrats, based on how they did down ballot from the Presidential race (they did better), so I think I’d be wrong to sit here and tell you how awful everyone did. Second, while I think there were serious problems with the Vice-President’s candidacy, I think it’s unfair to dunk on her after the loss when she didn’t cause most of the problems. Third, while I think Joe Biden does deserve some of the blame for the state he leaves the party in, I basically reject the media’s narrative that he lost the campaign for the party, or even that pushing him out was some stroke of strategic brilliance. My general read on what happened to the Democratic Party is that the root cause of their defeat was a death by a thousand cuts, that many different factors played into their defeat. My big picture opinion is that the problems with the Democratic Party were bigger than Biden, Harris, or even campaign tactics on the trail. Democrats have a mostly systemic problem that would be painful for a lot of people involved if they fixed it.

We make campaigns really complicated and scientific, and really at the end of the day they are more marketing than data science. Whether you’re trying to grow the electorate, shrink the electorate, or whatever, your goal is to convince more people that they want to make the effort to vote, and to vote for your candidate. Most voters don’t have some long checklist of issues they care about, they’ll look at the personal qualities they want and maybe one to three issues they care about. In other words, you want to be talking to the broadest audience possible about things they agree with you on, with the most likable/least offensive messenger possible. If you’re spending a lot of time as a party on stuff that excites 45% of the population, you’re probably going to lose, no matter how well you target voters. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were both generally likable people, who seemed to like things that normal guys liked, and ran competent governments on the day-to-day. There were a lot of people who didn’t consider themselves progressives or activists, many people who didn’t ever donate a dime, who felt fine casting their vote for them. The same could be said for Joe Biden in 2020.

The Democratic Party largely misread exactly why Barack Obama won two terms, and it has plagued them in almost every election after. It was less about changing social norms and demographic tidal waves changing the country, and more about President Obama providing cool, competent leadership coming out of a turbulent time. He wasn’t winning record numbers of Black, Latino, and young voters because those groups somehow are naturally more liberal than the rest of the population. He won them because they liked him, and he offered ideas that they liked when they heard him. I think that the misread of why Obama won has done serious damage to the party’s brand, and maybe gave a false sense of security that lead Democrats to take positions that were never going to sell. Democrats found themselves arguing the virtues of progressive social policy against conservatives, rather than going back to the faithful argument that all Americans deserve rights and security afforded to them simply as human beings. Democrats found themselves defending an open border, rather than a competent, orderly, and fair immigration process that has the resources to keep people safe. We got cornered into virtue signaling arguments about slogans like “Defund the Police” and “Green New Deal,” rather than fairness in the justice system and a clean, safe environment. Because a lot of donors, activists, and operatives in the Democratic Party wanted Obama’s mandate and legacy to be a demographic tsunami that was leading us to a rejection of white, traditionalist, Evangelical male values, we took his impressive electoral strength as confirmation that he won for the reasons we wanted him to. He didn’t. The belief that he did though lead a lot of the Democratic Party being very comfortable in a perpetual culture war that a combined majority of America either didn’t agree with us on, or just didn’t give a damn about. We spent a lot of time telling America what a bad guy Donald Trump and his supporters were. We probably would have done a lot better the last eight years talking about lowering Medicare’s eligibility age, funding public schools, and building more affordable housing. The Democratic Party lacked anything that could make a majority of America feel excited. We didn’t put forward a big idea that most people felt would improve their lives.

For sure there are other problems with the party. Our campaigns are overly bloated and inefficient, our messaging is too narrow, perhaps our candidates are too cautious. We waste our power on Capitol Hill when we win worrying about process arguments and norms. We view digital and online campaigning as largely a fundraising tool, rather than the battleground. I could go on. None of that on its own is what does us in though. If you don’t know what people like about you, it’s really hard to sell those attributes.

To the extent Joe Biden deserves blame, perhaps the timing was just bad. An 82 year old man just isn’t going to look and act like a 62 year old man. That’s not his fault, nor does it necessarily mean he was incapable of actually doing the job. Perhaps he should have run in 2016. Perhaps, given how close Kamala Harris lost, he should have never (been forced to) dropped out at all. Unfortunately, I think Joe Biden’s biggest political miscalculation in 2020 was trying to appease the numerous but small factions of people in the Democratic Party with his candidacy. Some people were never going to be happy and enthusiastic with Joe, because his brand really was different than the rest of the party. There’s a reason he looked like the most moderate guy on the debate stages in 2020- he knew better than to chase slogan politics. The unique brand that got him nominated and elected in 2020 should have been something he defiantly defended. Doing so would have given him much more space to address inflation, to address global issues, and to deal with a Congress that was increasingly dysfunctional for the latter half of his career in Washington. Governing as a fairly standard ideological Democrat boxed him in with a large chunk of America.

When Kamala Harris de facto took over the Biden campaign in the Summer, I privately told family at the time that she had no chance. Here she was, with terrible approval ratings, serving under a President with bad approval ratings, jumping into the race late, swimming uphill against the demographic history of our country (we elect white guys), and frankly her last Presidential run didn’t go great. She far exceeded my expectations of her. She was a disciplined and focused candidate, she raised money, she motivated people, and most of all, she didn’t make big mistakes. She picked a Vice-Presidential candidate who did the least harm even, a move that is almost always smart. She damn near won despite everything. About the only thing I can say bad about her was that previous Presidential campaign. Her instincts coming out of the 2018 midterms were to chase the lefty activists who seemed to have momentum in the party. Most of America was never there. Trump’s campaign effectively used her words against her. She just couldn’t quite get clear of being viewed as the average Democrat. She just couldn’t quite out run the past. Most of the reasons why (bigotry, the nature of her current job, poor media coverage, etc.) weren’t her fault. That doesn’t change the sense in hindsight that this was baked in from the jump.

The evidence suggests Democrats should have gotten blasted worse in this election. Basically every other governing party in the developed West has either lost or lost seats since the Covid-19 pandemic has faded from public view. Senators Rosen, Gallego, Baldwin, and Slotkin won swing states that Vice-President Harris lost, as did Governor Stein, while outgoing Senator Bob Casey out performed Harris in PA. House Democrats basically held the status quo. All this happened while Donald Trump won the election and the popular vote. If the Republican Party had matched his performance across the country, they would hold a sizable majority in both houses of Congress, comparable to now. This could have been way worse for Democrats. That they avoided it is worth some congratulations.

If you want people to buy your product, you have to sell them something they want. Republicans are always going to try and define the Democratic message as something terrible. The Democratic Party didn’t really push back against those perceptions. Most Americans view Democrats right now negatively. Allowing the GOP to define the Democrats as a “globalist” (such a gross term) status quo, Beltway insider, ideological, “DEI” (I know, horse shit), nerd party isn’t going to work. Marching out a collective of the same old faces and leaders, a surrogate list that still looks like 2009, and messaging points that are approved by every partner in the coalition isn’t breaking that mold.

In short, I think it’s time for some of our leading voices to take a break. Too many of our leaders listen too much to activists and donors in our party, and their views of the world just don’t jive right now with most of the people. Elections are won out where the people are, and the next generation of Democratic leaders should take the timeout we’re in to get out and meet them. Learn what the product is that they want from us, and run with it. Most people aren’t looking for a Bolshevik Revolution in America, but they do want something to be excited and hopeful for. Twenty years from now, the world will remember Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi fondly for the actually good governance they gave us over these past couple decades. We boxed them in though, and it’s time for Democrats to get outside of the box.

To a better 2025.