Tuesday’s election results are the latest confirmation of something that’s obvious if you think about it for even a millisecond but is basically unacknowledged by Democratic strategists and pundits engaged in constant intraparty feuding: It’s not November 2024 anymore! Americans are much more frustrated with Donald Trump and open to the Democratic Party and liberal positions than a year ago. Democrats should stop relitigating the 2024 election and instead embrace the new opportunities and responsibilities they have in facing an authoritarian madman.
Both progressive and moderate Democrats had major wins on Tuesday, and there were clear indications of a shift left among voters. In Virginia, where Kamala Harris won by six percentage points in 2024, center-left Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger won by about 14 percentage points. Democrats also gained at least 13 seats in the Old Dominion’s House of Delegates, taking their majority from 51 seats to at least 64. New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill won by about 13 points in a state Harris carried by about six last year. That was a strong performance, particularly considering that Sherrill had to overcome the unpopularity of outgoing Democratic Governor Phil Murphy. And while Sherrill has traditionally positioned herself as a moderate Democrat, she ran on the populist idea of freezing utility rates in the state.
New York City replaced its Democratic-but-not particularly-liberal Mayor Eric Adams with socialist Zohran Mamdani, who ran on free childcare and buses and rent freezes. Michelle Wu, the progressive mayor of Boston, became so popular because of her fiery opposition to Trump that her more centrist Democratic opponent dropped out before Election Day, allowing her to run unopposed in the general election.
All three Pennsylvania Supreme Court judges aligned with Democrats who ran to retain their seats were victorious. Democrats flipped two seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission, the party’s first wins since 2006 in elections for statewide, nonfederal offices in Georgia.
Sure Boston, New York, New Jersey, even Pennsylvania on some level are, yes, Democratic-leaning areas in the Northeast. But I suspect we would have seen shifts all over the country if there had been elections nationwide, because basically all available data shows a major swing away from Republicans over the last year.
About 46 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Trump last November, compared to 53 percent with an unfavorable view. But now, about 56 percent of Americans disapprove of the president and only 41 percent approve, according to averages of polls done by the site FiftyPlusOne. Going from -7 to -15 net popularity in a single year is a huge decline.
Trump’s approval has dipped in almost every state, with his biggest drop coming in very red Oklahoma, according to The Economist.
Republicans won the U.S. House popular vote by about three percentage points in 2024, but now trail by three points in polls. Most analysts say that the Democrats are favorites to win the House.
You can see these shifts on the ground too. In 2024, there was a mass protest movement against the Democrats, with college students and others organizing against the Biden administration’s Israel-Palestine policies. Now, as the recent No Kings demonstrations showed, grassroots energy is directed against Trump and Republicans.
Yet, in the face of all this encouraging change, much of the discourse about the Democratic Party remains trapped on November 5, 2024, and even worse, at times rooted in the Bernie Sanders-versus-Hillary Clinton primary of 2016 or Sanders-versus-Biden in 2020. Seemingly, every week there is a new column or report analyzing how Democrats lost last year’s elections and arguing that the party must change dramatically to win in the future.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for research, rethinking, and self-criticism. But the circumstances of the 2024 election were fairly unique and don’t exist anymore. The Democrats aren’t defending a president most of the public felt was too old to run for reelection, a Gaza policy hated by the party base, or a surge of inflation that Biden was blamed for. With Trump back in office, they don’t have to remind voters that he is an autocratic tyrant more interested in enriching himself than helping average Americans. Much of Trump’s increased support from 2020 to 2024 among Black voters, Latinos, and those under age 30, the focus of much of the Democratic angst, has already evaporated.
Despite what you read in centrist screeds (center-left strategists and pundits are those most aggressively bashing the party and suggesting it’s in permanent electoral peril), Democrats’ biggest problems aren’t alleged left-wing excesses but new issues that have emerged over the last year. The party has a moral duty to defend the targets of this administration, such as immigrants, transgender Americans, and anyone—from James Comey to Letitia James—who has ever battled the president in public. It also must defend American democracy itself, because it’s the only anti-authoritarian party we have left. At the same time, the party must win elections, while facing the troika of state-level Republicans, Trump, and the U.S. Supreme Court rushing to entrench gerrymandering so deeply that the GOP is guaranteed to control the House no matter how much it loses the popular vote by.
While there are new challenges, Democrats also have some opportunities that didn’t exist last November. Trump’s unpopularity has created a path for Democrats to win not only the House but perhaps the Senate too. Strong Senate candidates like Ohio’s Sherrod Brown and North Carolina’s Roy Cooper are running in part because Trump’s lackluster ratings give them a better chance of winning.
Also, Mamdani’s stunning campaign has shown some strategies and tactics that others in the party can borrow. You can’t run on his exact platform in Georgia or Montana, but proposing simple ideas instead of the Democrats’ usual tax credits and 14-point plans is a clear lesson from his win. So is focusing intensely on affordability and being innovative in social media use. Some of Mamdani’s advisers are now helping Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner and Nebraska’s Dan Osborn, and perhaps they can flip seats in challenging areas by simply being more interesting candidates than the usual Democrats.
Even looking to the 2028 presidential contest, the closest analogy to 2024, so much has changed. California Governor Gavin Newsom, who in the period immediately following the 2024 election was criticizing progressives and having Trump-friendly figures on his podcast, spent the last few months selling his plan to gerrymander California’s House seats to make up for Texas’s redistricting. Maryland Governor Wes Moore, who seemed to be positioning himself as a cheery, nonpartisan figure in the mold of Barack Obama, is now urging lawmakers in Maryland to work with him to further gerrymander that state. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has had to grapple with essentially an invasion of Chicago from the Trump administration, and he’s stood his ground admirably.
This isn’t the first time Democratic pundits have fixated on an election defeat and winning the last election as opposed to the next one. I am old enough to remember 2005, when Democrats supposedly needed to find a white male candidate and appeal more to evangelicals. Barack Obama won in an electoral landslide three years later. Or 2017, when the party had to move right on racial issues. Instead, Joe Biden won while running one of the most racially progressive platforms in recent history and embracing the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing.
Let me not oversell my point here. There are some long-standing challenges for Democrats that these reports and analyses correctly touch on. Leaving aside 2024, the Democrats won a lower percentage of whites without college degrees, Asians, Black, and Latinos in 2020 compared to 2012. (That was made up for by big gains among white college graduates.) The party really struggles in the Great Plains and Mountain West, making it very hard to control the Senate. A growing number of Americans describe themselves as independents because they feel neither Democrats nor Republicans represent their interests well. Democrats have to figure out if they are a party for billionaires or average workers, because you can’t be both.
But so much of the Democrats’ internal discourse is still about 2024. That was a terrible loss, because it put an authoritarian back in power. It is not clear that loss was preventable. More importantly, that loss can’t be prevented now. The good news (and it’s really good news) is that either the country was never as conservative as it seemed on November 5, 2024—or Trump has birthed a more liberal America. Liberals can and in many ways are winning this war—and that would be easier if they stopped fighting one another over the last one.