Are Democrats on a Historic Winning Streak or a Party in Decline?

The answer to this question sheds light on the strategy for 2024, including the top of the ticket.

Recently, the Ezra Klein podcast featured two shows with guests holding opposite views on the prospects for the Democratic Party. The first – pollster and strategist Simon Rosenberg – looks at recent election results and sees a very strong Democratic Party. The second – political analyst Ruy Teixeira – believes Democrats’ electoral prospects are weakening because working class voters are abandoning the party. 

Together, the shows are a fascinating discussion that I think bears on the ongoing debate within the party as to how to litigate the 2024 election. If Rosenberg is right – then Democrats are well positioned to win in 2024 even if parts of the electorate have some concerns about the top of the ticket. If Teixeira is right, then Democrats are facing a challenging election because they have lost a key voting bloc, possibly leading to a repeat of 2016 in 2024. 

Let’s start with Rosenberg’s thesis that Democrats are entering 2024 in a position of strength. He notes that Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections and that Democrats won or far exceeded historical trends in elections in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2023. Democrats are winning special elections for House seats. Abortion referenda in deep red states have demonstrated the potency of this issue, which drives Democrats to the polls and makes Republicans unattractive to a large chunk of the electorate. 

This view of the party’s condition is bolstered by last week’s special election in New York, in which Thomas Suozzi registered an almost eight percent victory in a district Democrats lost to serial fraudster George Santos by over seven percent in 2022. Of course, special elections are low turnout affairs, the results of which will not necessarily translate to the general election this fall. Nonetheless, a 15 percent swing is significant, as is Suozzi’s over-performance in a district that had only a two percent Democratic advantage in voter registration and an area of the country where Republicans had enjoyed a recent resurgence in popularity. Most significantly, Suozzi showed that Democrats can campaign on how to solve the immigration and security problems on the southern border and draw a contrast with Republicans who voted last week to continue the current chaos. 

Democrats are also well positioned, Rosenberg argues, because the country rejects MAGA extremism and the Republican party has become a MAGA party. MAGA is great at roiling people on social media and running angry rallies, Rosenberg notes, but is terrible at nominating candidates that can appeal to a general election audience, bad at fundraising, and bad at political organizing.  Biden has weaknesses as a candidate, Rosenberg readily admits, but his problems pale in comparison to thos of Trump – who is mentally diminished, mired in conspiratorial fantasies, deeply distracted by multiple lawsuits and criminal prosecutions, and verbally undisciplined (as witnessed by his statement this week that he would encourage Russia to attack NATO allies that were not paying their full share of NATO expenses).

The second show featured analyst Ruy Teixeira, who argued that given the dysfunction of the Republican party and the electoral toxicity of Donald Trump – Democrats ought to be “cleaning the Republican’s clock.” But they are not, Teixeira pointed out, because working class voters have become so disenchanted from the Democratic Party. Teixeira and his co-author John Judis have argued in a book published this fall that the Democratic party has been consistently bleeding working class voters since 2012 as it has become more and more reliant on professional, urban, and college-educated voters. In the 2020 and 2022 elections, this trend even extended to minority working-class voters, a vital part of the Democratic coalition. Without these voters, Teixeira believes Democrats cannot constitute a majority party and will continue to underperform in national elections.

Teixeira posits two explanations for why working-class voters are no longer voting Democratic: economic policy and culture. He first argues that as the party became populated by more high income urban and suburban professionals in the 1980s, the Democrats abandoned their traditional pro-labor, populist economic policies. Instead, from Bill Clinton forward, Democrats have adopted neoliberal economics based on free trade, globalization, reduced prices, and increased immigration, policies anathema to the working-class. Second, he claims that in recent decades Democrats have culturally moved far left of where most working-class voters feel comfortable on issues relating to gender and race, as well as issues such as climate, crime and immigration. Trump won in 2016 by attacking both Republicans and Democrats on their economic policies and identifying with working-class conservatism on race and gender and antipathy towards immigration and environmental protection. 

Teixeira discounts all the special election and voter referenda the past two years as low turnout elections, claiming they are dominated by the type of high frequency voters that are now the core of the Democratic base. Teixeira points out that polling for the upcoming general election shows that Democrats are suffering with disaffected voters and working class-whites and reveals disturbing weakness with working-class Black and Hispanic voters. He believes that Democrats’ claim that Biden is presiding over a strong growing economy is not resonating with electorate that will be at the polls for 2024. Indeed, multiple polls have shown Trump with a double digit lead on who could best manage the economy. A New York Times focus group with independent voters also concluded that Biden was perceived as ineffectual on economic policy. Instead of the strong Democratic victory that Rosenberg is predicting, Teixeira believes working class indifference toward Biden and the Democrats could, unthinkably, bring Trump into the White House again. 

So, who is right and what does this mean for the next eight and a half months?

My first observation is that I agree with Rosenberg that Democrats’ strong performance at the polls in recent years is significant. I believe it shows that there is an anti-Trump coalition in the electorate that is willing to have the Democrats in power. Part of this coalition supports Democratic policies and leadership; other parts have abandoned the GOP as it has become unprincipled, divisive, and unable to govern responsibly.  

However, I do not agree that the Democrats’ “win streak” dates all the way back to 2018 as Rosenberg does because 2020 was actually a weak year for Democrats despite the Biden victory. Given Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic and the dire state of the economy in 2020, Democrats should have had a resounding victory, but they did not. Biden barely won in the electoral college and Democrats lost 10 seats in the House with their share of the vote declining by three percent. One could argue that these loses were offset by a three-seat gain in the Senate, but two of these pickups were due to the quirkiness of the runoff in Georgia that Trump sabotaged for the GOP.  Democrats also lost Senate seats that had seemed winnable in Maine, North Carolina, and Iowa. 

Decisive Democratic victories in 2018, 2022, 2023, and in by-elections and referenda all have to be considered in light of the fact that the one commonality of these elections is that Trump was not on the ballot. Many believe that Trump is a deep liability for the GOP, but I am not so sure about that. The cult of personality he has with non-college educated whites, who are generally not deeply connected to politics and certainly don’t have a deep affinity for the traditional GOP, created a very different type of electorate in 2016 and 2020 than Democrats faced in other years. As Teixeira has noted, these working-class voters that Trump brings to the polls are deeply disaffected from the Democratic Party because they see Democrats as not representing their economic interests due to their policies on climate and immigration, and they are culturally uncomfortable with some of the ultraliberal identity politics that, rightly or wrongly, they associate with Democrats and Biden. This is the electorate Democrats will be facing in November.

In light of this, my second observation is that to defeat Trump in 2024, Democrats will need their “A” game in every aspect of the campaign, from the top of the ticket down to grass roots activism to drive every part of the anti-Trump, pro-Democrat coalition to the polls. 

I agree with Rosenberg that recent elections have shown most of these elements to be in very good shape. 

The one exception, which really came into focus last week with the (very unfair) Special Council report and then Biden’s poor White House press conference, is confidence in the top of the ticket, mainly due to President Biden’s age. This issue alone has led many astute (and anti-Trump) commentators (including Peggy Noonan, Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens, and Ezra Klein) to conclude  that Biden should not be the Democratic nominee and predict that, if he is, Trump will win a second term.

I have not reached that conclusion yet myself, but I do have less confidence than I expressed in a post last month that the country’s anti-Trump majority is willing to come out and pull the lever for the 81-year-old Joe Biden. Yes, polls this far out don’t say much about November, but it is disturbing to see, as inflation eases and the economy remains strong, a poll from Michigan showing Biden losing to Trump 42-37, with 16% of the votes going to third-party candidates Robert Kennedy, Jr., Jill Stein, and Cornell West. Polls like this ratify my conclusion that there is a strong anti-Trump coalition waiting to be motivated but call into question whether this mobilization can be accomplished with Biden at the top of the ticket. And it is important to note that the polls are getting worse, not better as we move closer to the election.  

I am torn as to the best path forward for the Democrats. Rosenberg is correct in his assertion that Biden has been a good president, and he is responsible for creating a record that Democrats can run on and win. But having been a good president in the past is not the same as being a good presidential candidate going forward. A candidate is not just a representation of a set of policies.  Voters look to a presidential candidate for a vision for the future and a reassurance that the country is in good hands. They want to hear these things directly from the candidate, not from proxies, and not during speeches read from a teleprompter.

I have predicted in a couple of prior columns that voters would be sufficiently motivated by preventing Trump from winning to cast a vote for Biden despite their concerns about him. I now believe that Biden owes it to the voters and the Democratic Party to show over the next few months that he is capable of performing at the level he will need to be at to win this election. And if increasing his exposure backfires and causes greater uncertainty in the President’s capabilities, then it is time to look to Plan B -- whatever that may be.

Losing a winnable election and allowing a second Trump term is unacceptable for the Democratic Party, for the country, and the world.