Let’s not be naïve about the troubles plaguing the Democratic Party. The 2024 election was a kick in the teeth. Democrats lost the presidency and the Senate and failed in what should have been an easy bid to retake the House. Kamala Harris underperformed Joe Biden’s 2020 national popular vote by more than 6 million ballots, and most of the party’s bedrock constituencies saw shifts toward Donald Trump. Harris faced a starkly racist and sexist campaign from Trump. Yet the election also took down white male Democrats with records of staying afloat in turbulent times, including Senators Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and Jon Tester of Montana.

The erosion of Democratic support in 2024 was notable among Latinos and, to a lesser extent, Black men. But it was especially profound among younger, nonunionized working-class voters of all races and ethnicities. “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,” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said in a statement after the election. Former Democratic National Committee member Nina Turner was blunter: “The Democratic Party has…a problem with a class of people, from elected officials to consultants, who care more about their careers than actually delivering for people.”

Those statements drew predictable pushback from Democratic insiders, who have long sought to marginalize the party’s progressive populist wing. But this time, the insurgents didn’t stand alone. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, a conventional Democrat with at least a passing interest in a 2028 presidential bid, said that Sanders was essentially right about a party that “never fully grappled with the wreckage of fifty years of neoliberalism.” That wreckage has long been evident in the shuttered factories and shattered dreams of communities across America. Yet, as Murphy said, Democrats have overlooked “the way people are feeling (alone, impotent, overwhelmed).” Instead of proposing a new New Deal or the next Great Society, Murphy said, “we refuse to pick big fights.” And, as a result, “our tent is too small.”

Desperate to expand that tent before the next election, Democrats rocketed off in every direction. Some proposed “autopsies” to determine what went wrong—a pathetic response to the glaring reality that the party’s current mess has been created by elites who, as Murphy put it, fear that “true economic populism is bad for our high-income base.” Others incoherently and sometimes cruelly pointed fingers of blame at advocates for immigrants or trans people, two groups that Republicans relentlessly targeted in 2024 attack ads. State party chairs and strategists launched bids for top posts in a Democratic National Committee that’s now so discredited that the mention of its name provokes both rage and gallows humor. And yes, all over America, perennially neglected grassroots Democrats persevered, still holding to the belief that it matters to keep a flag flying for economic and social and racial justice, for the environment and for peace—in Gaza and all the other places where a military-industrial complex, unrestrained by either party, spends away lives, largesse, and America’s future.

Current Issue

February 2025 Issue

The outcome of the 2024 election has created a moment in which the party needs to “find its footing in that world,” said US Representative Nikki Budzinski, an Illinois Democrat who won reelection in a swing district by emphasizing her close ties to organized labor. So I went searching for answers in battleground and non-battleground states. I talked with grassroots activists and union members, DNC insiders and reformers, elected leaders and presidential prospects. Everyone recognized that the Democratic Party’s brand was damaged. They didn’t always agree on how to undo that damage. But the conversation provided insights on how to shape the future of the party and the country. And amid the many different perspectives, an argument emerged for a far more populist politics that matches the mood of the moment—with fresh approaches that Democrats are still trying to figure out. Here’s some of what I learned.

2024 Wasn’t a Wipeout, but It Was an Urgent Warning

Trump always lies about election results, so it was no surprise that he claimed “an unprecedented and powerful mandate” in his election-night victory speech. Feckless major media outlets echoed his claim with reports of a “landslide.” When all the votes were counted, however, it turned out that Trump’s 49.8-to-48.3 popular-vote margin was one of the closest in American history. And the Republican majority in the House is so small that it could easily be derailed by GOP infighting.

Those numbers should help Democrats muster the energy for special-election campaigns for House seats opened by Trump’s cabinet picks, for off-year gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, and for the 2026 midterm contests that could flip the House and the Senate. But these seeds of hope are no excuse for neglecting the glaring vulnerabilities of a party that, with an appealing candidate and more than $1 billion at its disposal, could not beat a scandal-plagued 78-year-old convicted felon.

Trump was never going to win a true mandate. But he secured a second term because, as the Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid argued, “Democrats allowed the deep frustration with our broken political and economic system to fester, leaving voters to turn to a figure who promised change, even if it meant embracing the dangerous allure of authoritarianism.”

Whipsaw Politics

That “deep frustration” defines this era of American politics. The Democrats form one-half of a two-party chaos cycle that has seen the incumbent party lose the Oval Office and control of Congress in the last three presidential elections. Traditional strategies for obtaining and retaining power have been upended—a reality that Trump instinctively grasps but that most Democrats can’t wrap their heads around.

Not since Jimmy Carter has a president’s party maintained control of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government for a full four-year term. That’s a challenge for the Republicans, but it is a crisis for the Democrats. The fleeting ability of either party to actually govern produces a fickle politics that is much more easily exploited by Trump’s grievance-obsessed MAGA movement than by measured defenders of democracy—and incremental progress—such as Biden and Harris.

Democrats find themselves championing small steps in the right direction—a cap on insulin prices, tackling “junk fees”—while Republicans shout out denunciations of status quo politics that tap into the fury of the two-thirds of Americans who think their country is headed in the wrong direction. In the aftermath of the election, the former Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes wrote in The New York Times, “Democrats walked into the trap of defending the very institutions—the ‘establishment’—that most Americans distrust.”

What Democrats need to recognize is that the 2024 election was not an outlier. It was part of a pattern that is now decades old. Democrats could regain the House, and perhaps even the Senate, in 2026. They might retake the presidency in 2028. But without breaking from their addiction to a managerial politics that prizes restoring “norms” above all else, they won’t break the boom-and-bust cycle in which every win against an increasingly extremist Republican Party is followed by a devastating loss.

Democrats can end that cycle only by becoming a movement party with clearly defined, consistent principles. The investigative journalist David Sirota, a former adviser to Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer and Bernie Sanders, argues that Americans are looking for clear choices. The problem, says Sirota, is that Democratic consultants keep going after “suburbanite Republicans who like Liz Cheney and like deregulation”—and in many cases are already voting Democratic—“rather than working-class Reagan Democrats who’ve gone Republican because Democrats are corporate.”

Harris’s problem in 2024, says the anti-monopoly writer and activist Zephyr Teachout, was that she and too many other Democrats “didn’t pick fights.” Instead of presenting their party as a fighting force for working people of all ethnicities and backgrounds, Democratic leaders have become addicted to the political opium that offers no cure for MAGA upheaval, save for the promise that at least we’re not as bad as those guys.

Against a Republican Party that is increasingly hostile to democracy, and in a decaying media environment in which Big Lies and false promises immediately gain traction, Democrats have to be more than a milquetoast alternative.

Murphy recently conducted a survey of Connecticut voters and found that 82 percent agreed with the statement that “one of the biggest problems facing America today is that a handful of corporations and economic elites have too much power and the government is doing too little about it.” That, says Turner, is why “neoliberalism is failing electorally.”

Yet Democratic candidates give frustrated voters little to latch on to. “The true swing voters don’t swing between Republicans and Democrats,” says Washington Representative Pramila Jayapal, the former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “They swing between the voting booth and back to the sidelines if they’re being ignored or taken for granted.”

Getting those voters engaged is the key to ending the pattern of whipsaw politics. Unless Democrats figure out how to do so, they are never going to get a chance to govern as boldly as Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson once did. And they run the risk that low turnout among their base and potential voters will let the Republicans continue to capitalize on disaffection in a way that allows the GOP to keep winning close elections.

The DNC Is a Disaster

“The Democratic Party is, increasingly, a party dominated by billionaires, run by well-paid consultants whose ideology is to tinker around the edges of a grossly unjust and unfair oligarchic system,” Sanders says. And nowhere is that more evident than within the DNC. The Democratic National Committee has never been in the business of building class consciousness. Indeed, says Larry Cohen, the former president of the Communications Workers of America, the DNC has put itself on the wrong side of that fight—as a fundraising operation that spends more time chasing big donors than building a party, and that shares consultants with corporate interests and the billionaire class.

In 2024, the DNC should have provided Harris with more than just money. She needed a network of state and local parties that were genuinely in touch with the base and impassioned about a progressive populist agenda. That would have allowed her to mount a campaign that was distinct from Biden’s collapsed reelection bid—with a deeper acknowledgment of working-class anger and a willingness to break with the White House’s failed, and politically damaging, stance on Gaza.

The DNC wasn’t prepared to engage with the politics of 2024. But what about the future? Cohen, himself a longtime DNC member, and the group Our Revolution argue that the DNC must ban dark money from primaries, invest in state parties and grassroots organizing “instead of giving lucrative contracts to out-of-touch political consultants in DC,” and “recommit to a progressive platform and small donor democracy.”

No matter who chairs the DNC in the coming years, the direction of the committee—and the party—will be defined by whether there is a willingness to make those essential changes.

“Keep the Headquarters Open!”

One of the worst collapses in support for Democrats in 2024 came in rural America. While Biden won 42 percent of the rural vote, Harris fell to 34 percent. Democrats will never take back power with those kinds of numbers. They need to start listening to the former Texas agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower, who says the party must begin “lifting up the workday majority and taking on what I call the 6 Bs: bosses, bankers, billionaires, big shots, bastards, and bullshitters.”

In speaking to rural voters, the party has to emphasize not just farm issues but keeping small-town schools open, saving post offices, maintaining infrastructure, and helping young people find work. In addition, Hightower says, there’s a duty to “literally reconnect by moving organizing staff and party resources out here, building trust by becoming a visible, active part of local communities.”

Ellen Holly knows what that looks like. She’s a retired teacher who has spent years building up the Democratic Party in Wisconsin’s conservative Walworth County. In 2024, while national surveys showed an eight-point swing toward the Republicans, Harris won a few more votes in the county than Biden had in 2020 and maintained roughly the same percentage of the vote there—despite surging support for Trump. What’s the secret? Holly and the more than 500 members of the county party have transformed traditional canvassing into “neighbor-to-neighbor, values-based conversations.” They’ve also turned their party into a service organization that maintains a free pantry and holds monthly community coffees at its headquarters in the county-seat town of Elkhorn.

“Keep the headquarters open!” Holly counsels, saying that Democrats will grow their numbers only if they recognize that “politics is year-round organizing” that requires being active even if there is no election. Her point was proved several days after the 2024 vote when the Elkhorn headquarters was packed with volunteers planning for the next election.

Don’t Surrender to Reaction

One of the most disturbing trends of the postelection period was the narrative that Democrats were derailed by Republican attacks on the party’s support for immigrants and criminal justice reform and, in particular, transgender rights. Yes, the Republican attacks were vicious, and they were backed up by big money—including $215 million spent nationwide on anti-trans ads. But were the ads effective? “This trans ad was not driving the vote,” David Plouffe, a senior adviser to Harris, said on Pod Save America. “The most effective ad…was [one tying Harris to] Bidenomics…because that was kind of core to people’s concerns.” Plouffe’s assessment was backed up by a study from Ground Media, which found that Trump’s inflammatory advertising “yielded no statistically significant shift in voter choice, mobilization or likelihood to vote.”

Another signal that these sorts of attack ads did not work was the win by Delaware Democrat Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender person elected to Congress. Instead of abandoning or neglecting people who are under attack, Democrats should learn to talk, as McBride did, about “how far we’ve come, that no matter who you are, what you look like, where you come from or the gender with which you identify, that you can live your truth and dream big dreams all at the same time.” Then they can focus on the messages that pull working-class voters together, as McBride did when she talked about a progressive vision for strengthening and expanding the safety net.

Democrats won’t get ahead by surrendering in the face of the scare tactics of “professional provocateurs” who practice divide-and-conquer politics. They’ll win with McBride’s message that “our democracy is big enough for all of us.”

New Media Amplifies Right-Wing Lies

The legacy media is collapsing. local newspapers are closing at an exponential rate, and many local radio stations have become little more than streaming services for national conservative rants. That’s a disaster for Democrats. “When you let local media disappear, it’s replaced by right-wing noise,” says Craig Aaron, of the media reform group Free Press. The biggest media story of 2024 was Elon Musk’s use of X as a bullhorn for the Trump campaign. And things will only get worse, Aaron says, as “tech and media billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos join Musk in sucking up to Donald Trump.”

What the right fundamentally understands, Aaron explains, “is that the real major moves in media are the structural ones that involve buying up media platforms and remaking them over in your image.” Republicans are focused on those structures: packing the Federal Communications Commission with cronies, cutting funding for public media, and using the legislative process to stack the deck in their favor. And Democrats? For the most part, Aaron says, they’re still focused on traditional platforms. That doesn’t work in an era when, according to the Pew Research Center, 26 percent of adults get their news from YouTube.

Democrats need a realistic strategy for engaging with Americans who are informed by the new media ecosystem. Smart Democrats have begun to recognize, as Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler (a candidate for the DNC chair) points out, that “today, millions of voters get most of their information about Democrats from Republicans. To win, we have to change that—by communicating and organizing everywhere and on every platform.”

A key platform may be the front step. One of the smartest thinkers on these issues is Emily Tseffos, a veteran rural organizer who warns that Democrats are “at a disadvantage when it comes to fighting disinformation.” To turn the tables on the Republicans, Tseffos says, Democrats must “train local folks to combat disinformation at a hyper-local level. Invest in our folks to empower them to push back against the latest rumor about litter boxes in the local elementary school, fight against book bans, protect our immigrant neighbors.” That’s genius. Such a strategy takes time, resources, and energy. But it is hard to imagine a more effective way to push back against a broken media system, and the broken politics that extends from it, than by empowering millions of grassroots activists to steer the conversation back toward truth.

Master the Issues of the Future

The 2024 campaign was defined by anxiety about the future. trump’s response was a backward-looking “Make America Great Again” promise that denies climate change and embraces failed economic strategies (blanket tariffs, trickle-down tax policies, retrograde approaches to manufacturing). But even though Harris had many good ideas—such as investing in care and caregiving—her campaign failed to counter Trump with a compelling vision of a future that works for working-class Americans.

Going forward, Democrats have to double down on proposals like the Green New Deal, not merely because it is smart policy but because, as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reminds us, it’s the most effective counter to the right-wing lie that voters must choose between a robust economy and saving the planet. And Democrats can’t stop there. They must address what may be the most immediate source of fear about the future: the transformation of how we work, learn, and live by artificial intelligence. Very few Democrats are capable of talking about AI. But California Representative Ro Khanna does—often in progressive populist language. “Progressives should make the case that [the increased use of AI] needs to translate to higher wages for workers and a share of the profits with stock ownership,” he says. “With the right values, technology can be pro-worker, pro-climate, and pro–American industry.”

What Khanna knows is that Democratic discussions about the future must be relentlessly on the side of working people—not billionaires and tech CEOs. “No more excuses,” Zephyr Teachout says. “Populism or bust.”