Democrats Are Facing Doom—And No One Seems To Even Have Any Suggestions
There are no bad ideas in a brainstorm!
It’s the day after the election in 2024. Joe Biden has won 51% of the popular vote against Donald Trump. The result is that Donald Trump has won a clear electoral college victory, the Republicans have held the House of the Representatives, and scored a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
It is hard to imagine a more ridiculous outcome than this but it’s also not at all difficult to image. At first it might seem like it was just more fo the same from 2016, but actually this would be worse. Way worse. In 2017 the GOP had an incredibly slim Senate majority. In 2025, the GOP could have the largest Senate majority they’ve had in a hundred years.
David Shore has been warning about this impending nightmare situation for a few years now. In this Ezra Klein feature about him last year, there is an interactive where you can see how the numbers play out. It is very depressing.
A lot of this has to do with the electoral college and the Senate having a bias for the GOP and 2024 being a very bad map for Democrats since a bunch of tough seats scored in the 2018 wave are up for reelection. But making it even worse is the continued education polarization which has exacerbated all of these issues for Democrats since 2016.
Simon Bazelon has a post up today at Slow Boring recounting all the gory details of these probabilities. But the main takeaway is, you know, not good!
Even if you make a bunch of really optimistic assumptions, it’s not great. Let’s say that Trump runs in 2024 but is as unpopular as always and Biden wins reelection by a margin large enough to overcome the electoral college problem. Let’s also say that in that scenario, because of the sort of fortunate way redistricting has gone for Democrats, that they retake the House (since they’re almost certainly going to lose it this year.) Even in this scenario the Democrats will be facing a GOP Senate majority. So in addition to the end of any actual legislative agenda Biden might have, there is also the very good chance that he won’t get judges confirmed.
As depressing as this is, probably more depressing is that no one really seems to have even a theory for what to do about it. The left’s solution seemed to be a mixture of voting rights bills and theories of mobilization, but the voting rights bills didn’t pass and even if they did there is scant evidence it would help Democrats much, and the mobilization-as-excalibur plan is pretty unfounded.
Moderates also seem to have no plan. They can complain about the left being annoying, I guess, but in reality they’re not going to lose a bunch of red state senate seats because their part nominates a DSA member. They’re going to lose because ticket-splitting is rarer than ever before and that’s life.
One way this argument constantly flashes up is between the popularists like Shore and the traditional liberals in the party. But both seem sort of not to accept the real constraints. The popularists think the party should push back more against some of the toxic left wing ideas that moderates in purple/red states don’t like. But in some sense that is out of the party’s control. There is a large and vibrant faction of the Democratic Party that believes a lot of progressive stuff that America doesn’t like. Social media and the media ecosystem that lives off it guarantees those positions are going to be talked about a lot. They’ll be lied about in the right wing press and triumphed in the left wing press. There is no way of gatekeeping this. That’s just a real constraint the party has to deal with. At the same time, the left doesn’t want to grapple with the real constraint that is our electoral system and they don’t want to accept that actually they do need to win a bunch of votes from people who have pretty conservative views on a lot of stuff.
I have no idea what the answer is, and unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like anyone else does either.
I mean I think something that would help is actually proposing and passing a bill Joe Manchin would vote for instead of insult him relentlessly. Schumer is concrete shoes for the party at this point and him not being dumped is laughable.
Dem leadership has to go far the other way, rail against unpopular leftist positions. The dem civil war will really be 95% of dems vs 5% of online libs, but it will play out really huge in media and might win over those swing votes. The 5% of online libs don't vote anyway.