Why the 2024 Election Shattered the Democratic Party | Opinion

Since the 2024 election, the Democratic Party has been struggling to reconcile its significant losses, not just of the presidency and Senate majority, but of large swaths of formerly reliable Democratic voters. Debates over what to do next have reached a fever pitch, and, with President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans moving swiftly to reshape all things Washington, the stakes could not be higher for the party and the country.

Do Democrats need a more moderate policy direction, as many former Bill Clinton advisers implore? Is the problem not progressive-leaning policies but poor messaging, as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, believes? Will a younger set of political leaders do the trick? Should the party just “play dead” and wait for the inevitable Republican overreach, as longtime Democratic strategist James Carville suggests?

These are all reasonable questions for a party now at historically low approvals. But what if they are the wrong ones? What if the 2024 election was less about policy and messaging and leadership, and more a bellwether of fundamental shifts in America’s political landscape? This is not to deny the importance of policy positions, whether on immigration, the economy, or cultural issues, which Democrats would be wise to reexamine. But what if longtime party assumptions regarding electoral politics were themselves exposed as deeply flawed? Surely that would demand the most urgent attention.

It appears that is precisely what happened in 2024. Three core narratives guiding Democrats (and many in the media) for decades were shown to be self-serving myths, and no amount of consultant-driven triage will help until the party comes to grips with this new reality.

1. “Democrats own the presidential popular vote.” This myth is so entrenched in Democratic Party circles that “eliminating the Electoral College” is among their most recognizable promises. But the assumption that Democrats are more popular just because their candidate won the national vote in seven of the prior eight presidential elections never held water—the popular vote is a sideshow to centuries-old rules of the game that reward winning individual states (and their electors) not maximizing votes.

Trump 2024 exploded this myth by holding just five campaign rallies in three deep blue states typically ignored by Republican presidential nominees—New Jersey (one), California (one), and New York (three). It is no coincidence that these states witnessed the largest shift toward Trump in the country in 2024 compared to 2020 (around 10 points each), helping him win the national vote by nearly 2.5 million. This is a bright red warning to Democrats that not only can Republicans easily win the popular vote, but some of their safest states may soon be in play.

2. “Republicans only win Congress through extreme gerrymandering.” The notion that only GOP-controlled states draw highly partisan congressional maps never held up to scrutiny—witness a Massachusetts electorate that consistently votes over one-third Republican but has zero GOP seats in the House of Representatives (out of nine). Yet longtime Democratic accusations that Republicans are a minority party that must bend rules to win Congress were debunked in 2024.

In fact, if not for extreme gerrymandering by Democrats in New York, California, Illinois, and elsewhere, Republicans would have picked up roughly two-dozen more seats in 2024, rather than losing a net one. The GOP’s 4 million popular-vote advantage in House races was among its largest since 1928, and jettisoned talk of the Republican Party undermining majoritarian democracy. With multiple blue states projected to shed congressional districts due to population losses, this promises to be a major long-term challenge for Democrats.

3. “Democrats own America’s diverse future.” Ninety percent of America’s over 3,100 counties shifted toward Republicans between 2020 and 2024, with voters of virtually every demographic category contributing to this swing, including younger voters, the non-college educated, et cetera. But Democrats suffered their most devastating losses with racial and ethnic minority groups, directly contradicting the party’s longstanding belief that its appeal to an emerging coalition of “non-white” voters would help secure an enduring majority. Significant moves toward the GOP included Muslim and Arab Americans (15 points), Native American counties (11), Asians (11), and Black people aged 18-54 (29).

But the gravest threat to the Democratic Party’s future lies in its continuing losses among Hispanic voters, by far the country’s fastest-growing demographic group. In 2024, Hispanics shifted toward the GOP by nearly 30 points, including 35 points among Hispanic men and 45 points among all Hispanics aged 18-54. It turns out that even in the age of Trump, Americans of all stripes will vote not based on their racial or ethnic identity, but on which party they believe is better attuned to their overall needs and concerns.

Democrats are understandably tempted to solve their current predicament in traditional fashion—confront Trump with a new “resistance,” tweak their policies and messaging, hope the 2026 midterms go their way. But these are no longer traditional times. Fundamental shifts are occurring in the body politic that have left Democrats on the wrong side of the popular vote, congressional races, and the country’s shifting demographics. It’s time for a total re-do.

Stuart Gottlieb teaches international affairs and public policy at Columbia University. He formerly served as a foreign policy adviser and speechwriter in the Senate (1999-2003).

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.