What, If Anything, Will Democrats Learn From This Election?

The party put little effort into understanding the 2016 and 2020 elections, and now it's reaping the consequences.

Votes are still left to be counted, but it is clear by now that former President Donald Trump is once again the president-elect, prevailing over Vice President Kamala Harris in not only the Electoral College but also the popular vote. This marks not only the first time he has ever come close to majority support, but also only the second time since the end of the Cold War that a Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote.

"Of the counties with nearly complete results, more than 90 percent shifted in favor of former President Donald J. Trump in the 2024 presidential election," The New York Times found on the morning after the election. "Early results showed that even a number of states where Vice President Kamala Harris was ahead had shifted right."

"Trump picked up more votes in every state apart from Utah and Washington," added the Financial Times. "Across the US, the data suggests women, urban voters and the Latino vote did not come through for Harris, while rural areas came out strong for Trump."

With the U.S. Senate also lost and the House very much in peril, Democrats may find themselves in the wilderness yet again. But what lessons will they take from this experience in electoral repudiation? For that matter, will they learn anything?

It's not a foregone conclusion that they will: In the three elections in which Trump has competed, Democrats largely treated him as an existential threat, making a case for his inherent unfitness for office but often forgetting to mount a positive campaign for themselves. And then, after losing to him in 2016—even after beating him in 2020—the party did no apparent soul-searching to determine why voters would pick such an unfit candidate.

Ironically, it's a lesson they could learn from Republicans. In 2012, after losing two presidential elections in a row, Republicans conducted a "full autopsy" on the moribund party and its electoral failures, hoping to determine how to appeal to voters going forward. To compile the report, which was released the following year, the panel conducted conference calls, online surveys, focus groups, and more than 3,000 "group listening sessions."

Democrats, on the other hand, did no such self-inquiry when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. "Democrats didn't even attempt to do an autopsy in the wake of 2016, relegating debates about the party's future to places like Twitter and cable news," wrote Jon Favreau, a progressive commentator and former speechwriter for President Barack Obama.

That may not be entirely true. In fact, Democrats tasked then-Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D–N.Y.) with compiling an autopsy of the 2016 election, only to then effectively bury it: Maloney presented the report to lawmakers "during a members-only gathering at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee headquarters" in 2017, Politico reported, but "members were not allowed to have copies of the report and may view it only under the watchful eyes of DCCC staff."

Clinton herself conceded defeat but apparently never quite accepted it. In the months after the election, she blamed her loss on sexism, Russian hacks, then-FBI Director James Comey's late-October announcement that the bureau had reopened its investigation into her use of a private email server…but never herself or her campaign.

True, none of those explanations is without merit. But Russian hackers did not keep Clinton from ever visiting Wisconsin during the general campaign, and Comey's letter did not enable Trump to turn out "a flood of rural and small-town working class voters" in Pennsylvania, as William A. Galston of the Brookings Institute wrote.

Even the 2020 election, when Joe Biden beat Trump by more than 7 million votes, provided an opportunity for reflection. "Democrats…are entitled to a temporary feeling of triumphalism," Ross K. Baker wrote in January 2021, "but there is also cause for them do some reflection on how they should reach out to the tens of millions of voters who rejected them and who are sullen and even rebellious."

Instead, Democrats reacted as if Trump was a comic book supervillain they had banished back to his home planet, never to return.

"Relax, A Trump Comeback In 2024 Is Not Going To Happen," read the headline of a December 2020 piece by Politico's John Harris. "The Trump years were not just a hallucination," Harris wrote. "But chances are they will soon enough come to feel like they were — which won't leave much opportunity to return to real power."

"Donald Trump will never be allowed to step foot in the Capitol again," Lawrence O'Donnell proclaimed on his MSNBC show, days after the incursion on January 6. "Never. Unless he insists on testifying in his own defense in his Senate second impeachment trial."

Indeed, the Capitol riot likely should have marked the end of Trump's political career: Even setting aside his potential culpability, his behavior during the violence sufficiently demonstrated his unfitness for any future returns to the White House.

But given that both Democrats and Republicans failed to convict in his Senate impeachment trial, the only way to keep him from office was to defeat him at the ballot box. Instead, Democrats apparently took Trump's unfitness as so manifestly self-evident that it was not worth interrogating why 74 million people voted for him in 2020, and whether they would do so again.

To be clear, an autopsy by itself can't turn a party's prospects around. One of the GOP report's top-line recommendations was that the party should be more amenable to immigrants, specifically from Latin America: "If Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies." Some Republicans were open to it: Just two days after the 2012 election, Fox News host Sean Hannity told his radio audience he had "evolved on" immigration, advocating "a pathway" to citizenship "for those people that are here."

The punchline, of course, is that in the very next election, the party nominated Trump, who began his campaign by calling Mexicans "rapists" and pledging to build a wall on the southern border.

But ironically, Trump's electoral successes have included increasing his share of Hispanic voters: Trump won nearly 30 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2016, which rose to 32 percent in 2020 and an estimated 46 percent in 2024.

A Democratic autopsy of the 2024 election would therefore ask why nearly half of all Hispanic voters would choose Trump over Harris—along with increasing numbers of nearly every other demographic group.

Even at this early juncture, possible explanations abound. Inflation, resulting from COVID-19 pandemic policy and exacerbated by Biden-era spending bills, topped many voters' lists of concerns, and voters who listed the economy as their primary concern picked Trump by a 4-to-1 margin. Joe Biden's insistence on staying in the race amid plummeting poll numbers likely also hindered Harris' ability to course-correct from an unpopular incumbent.

But to reach any sort of conclusion, Democrats will have to ignore their natural instincts to cast blame elsewhere, on disinformation or foreign interference or minor gaffes on the campaign trail. Whether they like it or not, Democrats received a drubbing on Tuesday, and only sincere soul-searching will yield any useful explanations.