What Happened

Why Democrats lost the 2024 election and how we can win again

The last 48 hours have obviously been incredibly shocking and difficult for many of us across this country and the world. Not only did Donald Trump win the election, but he won by a bigger margin than any Republican nominee for the presidency since 1988. With it he carried Republicans to a solid majority in the Senate, and potentially control of the House of Representatives as well.

I think there are a multitude of reasons for this, many of which will take time to unpack and reflect on. I really believe Kamala Harris did the best she could, especially considering the extremely unusual and challenging circumstances she had to contend with, and I don’t think there’s any doubt that she was leaps and bounds a more stable, competent, capable candidate than Trump, as evidenced perhaps most vividly by her trouncing of Trump in their one debate.

It breaks my heart, especially as someone who was a vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton’s in 2008 and 2016, that America yet again declined to elect it’s first female president, and now likely won’t have one for some time. The exit polls show Kamala’s favorability was actually better than Trump’s, so this isn’t primarily her fault I don’t think. This is, I believe, about a broader problem within the Democratic Party that must be acknowledged and contended with.

Congressman Ritchie Torres, a Democrat from New York, put out a statement yesterday that I believe is a pretty good summation of the main challenge Democrats face: “Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left, which has managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like 'Defund the Police' or ‘From the River to the Sea’ or ‘Latinx’… There is more to lose than there is to gain politically from pandering to a far left that is more representative of Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok than it is of the real world. The working class is not buying the ivory-towered nonsense that the far left is selling.”

I have said for awhile now that I believe it’s the Democratic Party’s drift in a direction- not just on messaging and the issues it emphasizes, but on policy- that doesn’t match up with what the majority of people want that is responsible for the losses we have suffered as of late. This is not a recent development- we lost the House majority in 2022 because swing district voters in places like New York and California perceived the party as having “lost the plot” on issues like crime. Public safety should be an easy and obvious priority for Democratic elected officials, especially considering the urgent concerns many had given the spike in crime we have seen in recent years. But instead many Democratic leaders told the electorate that the increase in assaults and burglaries they were seeing wasn’t real, that their fears were unfounded. Voters responded by electing Republicans, who even if they were catastrophizing and driving up paranoia as a political tactic at least appeared to be responsive to citizens’ discontent and unease.

That’s why I worked for Rick Caruso in 2022 when he ran for Mayor of Los Angeles; he ran as a “get real, can do Democrat” who was pro-gay, pro-choice and largely in line with the mainstream progressive view on social issues but also believed in supporting small businesses, adequately funding law enforcement and dealing with the homelessness crisis, an issue many Democrats were unwilling to touch because of the fear of being politically incorrect.

I think my theory of the case has been borne out in the results we saw on Tuesday across California and other blue states; California, despite being a heavily liberal state on most issues, overwhelmingly passed, with over 70% of the vote, Proposition 36 to strengthen criminal penalties for repeated theft offenses and certain drug crimes. We saw L.A. County resoundingly reject it’s District Attorney, George Gascon, in favor of Nathan Hochman, who will take a much harder line against the chaos, lawlessness and “anything goes” atmosphere we have seen on the streets of Los Angeles lately.

Even in the race for the White House, despite being her home state, Kamala Harris only carried California by 17% of the vote- a massive decrease in the Democratic vote share since the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. In the normally blue state of Illinois, she only won by 8 points, and in New York her margin was only 11%. The most disturbing result was in the state of New Jersey, where Harris defeated Trump by a margin of just 5 points!!

These are states where the issues of crime, homelessness and the plight of small businesses have taken on a particularly visible and critical role in the last few years, and I think many people were just sick and tired of feeling like the sorry state of affairs wasn’t being addressed by the incumbent establishment. I’m not saying that voting for Donald Trump was the right way to handle it; I’m simply stating that I think this vote was a way for the populace to express their dissatisfaction with the status quo and a desire to see a common sense, results oriented, solutions driven approach from the Democratic Party which in their view has been lacking thus far.

The Democratic Party needs to rebrand itself and reorient it’s policies away from ideological dogma, and that doesn’t just apply to domestic issues, that also applies to issues like the Israel-Gaza conflict where many Americans perceive the center of the Democratic position on this topic to be sympathetic to the terrorists and Hamas. While there may be some voters in Michigan who voted against Harris because they thought she was too hawkish on this front, that simply isn’t where most American voters are. The Democratic Party as a whole needs to take a strong and bold stand against Hamas, terrorism and in favor of protecting Jewish people, and polls show a vast swath of Americans fall in line with that position.

The Democratic Party shouldn’t be afraid to take on the pressing challenges that working and middle class Americans care about. We should champion and focus on economic issues, supporting businesses, tackling the border in a tangible, strong way while simultaneously protecting DREAMers, fighting crime and solving homelessness. Even though he is more to the left on these issues than I personally agree with, I will say I think Bernie Sanders had a point when he said after the election that “it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them”.

The party has become too focused on ideological purity, theoretical debates and woke word salad instead of solutions, and that is the first thing that needs to change. As horrifying as this election result has been, we should also look at it as an opportunity- a chance to start fresh, to rebuild, to create a new Democratic Party that is oriented around a “can do, get real” attitude and spirit. That is a party that can, and will, win. We can win back the disillusioned voters we have lost and get the country back on track towards the future that we all want and believe in.