The 2024 election isn't even a month behind us, and the recriminations within the Democratic Party are well underway. And, frankly, after the beating they just took, some self-examination is in order; this is a party that was, by and large, fired up over Kamala Harris' anointment as their presidential candidate and seemed to have little idea that it would work out about as well as putting a sixth-grade schoolyard bully in the ring with Joe Louis.
Some Democrats claim they didn't get their message out well enough. They're missing the point; the message itself was the problem for many voters. An op-ed at the Washington Examiner has some details, but I think it misses a point or two.
When they weren’t talking about “transitory” inflation and trying to mainstream transgender athletes competing against biological women, Harris and other Democrats focused on pushing a message that Trump was a fascist and his return to the White House would usher in the end of the republic.
While most Democrats are united in the understanding another four years of “resistance” rhetoric and charging headlong into the left wing’s most progressive policy ideas is a recipe for defeat in the 2026 midterm elections, the handful of elected officials and leaders who have dared to speak out about how the party needs to change have been shouted down and threatened with ostracism.
Clearly "Orange Man Bad" wasn't a winning message, although some of the more strident progressives are still mouthing that loudly and repeatedly - especially those like the hysterical Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), whose district is so safely Democratic that the party could run a Halloween jack-o-lantern for Congress and would win as long as they put a "D" behind its name.
Democrats also ran on a few other major issues, but none of them seemed to resonate. They ran on abortion, but most of the populace already has strong feelings about that and won't be dissuaded from what they already think, and those lines were drawn long ago. And, unbelievably, they ran on allowing boys into girls' sports - and locker rooms.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) tried to verbalize his problem with his party’s position and might wind up getting driven out of the House for it.
“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Moulton said days after the election concluded. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
If Moulton had spoken out earlier, and if more Democrats had spoken out forcefully on this issue, they might have retained some of the votes they lost this cycle.
But this wasn't the main reason for their losses.
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While Trump’s “they/them” ad was hugely successful, Democrats barely talked about transgender issues on the campaign trail and failed to communicate a clear message about economics — the top issue voters said they were concerned about this cycle.
The first layer of this stinker is that the Democrats didn't just fail to communicate a clear message about economics - it's that they had no clear message to communicate. The Biden administration's handling of economic issues was abysmal, and the results of their policies have been keenly felt by run-of-the-mill Americans. The ivory tower academics and coastal elites that make up much of today's Democratic Party are insulated from the effects of those policies, but the rest of us? Not so much.
The second layer is that the Democrat presidential candidate, the one person who should be able to articulate the party's case, utterly failed and transparently dodged every effort to question her on this issue. Part of that is that she was just an awful candidate who could barely string together a coherent sentence if you spotted her two verbs and a conjunction, but the other part is that the message was one of failure, and there was just no getting around that.
As someone once said, "It's the economy, stupid."
If today's Democrats want to do a dispassionate analysis of their 2024 election losses, they need to look not at their messaging but at their positions, which are far to the left of the mainstream. That's why they are losing people like retiring Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV); that's why they are falling behind in demographics that they have long dominated.
The GOP, on the other hand, had to deliver one primary message in 2024, and it's a familiar one: "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"
The election results provide an eloquent answer.
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