Trump’s Election Victory was far more than a failure of Democratic Messaging.

A majority of Americans prefer a more conservative path forward. To win again, Democrats need to remake their party and platform, not simply fix their messaging.

Since Donald Trump stormed back to power in grand fashion, many autopsies of Democratic failures have accurately diagnosed most of the factors that led to such a devastating loss. Kamala Harris and her campaign dodged substantive questions and failed to define her policies, if they ever truly existed at all. She was crowned with the nomination by Biden and other party elites rather than democratically selected and fittingly inherited Biden’s unpopularity. January 6th and abortion were predictably not the winning issues Democrats thought they would be, both because voters were rightfully skeptical about apocalyptic predictions of a national abortion ban or the end of democracy, and because the issues were of lower relative importance to voters. The Democrats’ problems, however, run far deeper than campaign messaging mishaps. 

The Democratic party lost the 2024 election because over the last eight years they allowed a deluded progressive minority to capture their party and pull it leftwards. Their platform lacks coherence or sense, and they’ve lost their diverse working-class coalition because of it. The party needs a serious reinvention with a new cast of characters, or they’ll keep losing and continue to fail to address issues like climate change which Republicans threaten to worsen. 

First and most importantly, the Democrats need a new economic platform. Joe Biden won the 2020 election because Trump handled the pandemic poorly and people were tired of Trump-related chaos. Liberal partisans mistook–perhaps willfully–a rebuke of Trump as a popular mandate to let their bad ideas loose on the economy. The defining principle of the new top-down Democratic economic philosophy is heavy government intervention in the market to guide it towards a progressive vision of the nation. Rather than allow the free market to spark the competition, innovation, efficiency, and growth that have allowed the U.S. economy to continually outshine all others, Biden and his statist progressive allies are, as a praising New Yorker article put it, “the first… in decades to treat government as the designer and ongoing referee of markets, rather than as the corrector of markets’ dislocations and excesses after the fact.” Biden, Harris, and the Democratic party envision a centrally planned economy, in which their progressive government is the “designer” of the economy. 

Biden’s early experiments in economic planning to achieve social goals have already proved disastrous. To force a mass conversion to electric vehicles, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency issued new rules which mandated that electric vehicles make up 32% of automaker sales by 2027, and that gas-powered cars are no more than 29% of new cars by 2032 (enter the administrative state, the Democrats’ favorite tool for pushing their progressive agenda and circumventing the system of checks and balances on executive authority). The catch: not nearly that many people want EVs. As a result, automakers have been forced to lay off thousands, shut down EV plants, and cut shifts. A 2019 United Auto Workers study predicted the rules would destroy 35,000 jobs and livelihoods at union plants. Biden and his bureaucrats forced automakers to build the cars that Biden wanted people to drive, not the ones people were actually willing to buy. It resulted in thousands of lost jobs and billions in losses for the American auto industry. 

Democrats need a major but simple course realignment on economic policy to return to national competitiveness. They must remember or learn that market forces will ultimately reign supreme over any amount of centralized planning as they did with EVs. Their disastrous and unpopular turn to statist economics is visible throughout their platform. They disincentivize economic expansion through anti-growth policies like hikes on capital gains taxes and constant harassment of companies through FTC chair Lina Khan’s blind hostility to business. When all else fails they turn to reckless and inflationary government spending to influence the economy in their preferred direction through unilateral executive spending on student loan forgiveness and healthcare expansions. 

The economy has grown over the past four years, but that’s almost entirely because it was due to rebound after the pandemic and the fact that our government is set up to limit the ability of one party to make sweeping reforms. In essence, the economy has grown despite Biden and the Democrats, not because of them. 

Though she tried to appease business interests with some vague moderation, Harris did not depart from Biden’s progressive economic plans. Though she never really delineated or justified her plans (perhaps for a reason—they don’t even pass the sniff test), Harris’s main plan to deal with economic problems was brute government force. Grocery prices too high? Why tackle inflation when you can just ban alleged ‘price gouging,’ a step towards government price controls. Rent too steep? Rent control. Too expensive to buy a house? She skips incentivizing an increase in housing stock to grow supply in favor of cutting checks to support people in buying homes that their finances ultimately can’t afford. 

Over the past four years Democrats have showcased and implemented many of their economic ideas. Americans have seen first hand that voting blue will stagnate the economy, cost American jobs, and depress their purchasing power. On the other hand, Trump’s economic policy successes, which drew on economic liberalism and traditional conservatism (which Trump does not embody by any means), grew the economy without major inflation. The economic dichotomy in voters’ minds between Trump’s first term and Biden’s was the singular most important factor in this election. Trump and the conservative ideals which he brought to the White House delivered. Americans made more money and could buy more. To value this above any other issue is not ‘stupid or immoral’, as many coastal liberal elites with secure jobs in the knowledge economy sneer. In their relative security, it’s easy for a good portion of Democrats, especially the many which inhabit the proverbial bubble of Middlesex, to forget that the price of gas and groceries determines if working class families can get by. 

Though Donald Trump proves that a strong economic platform can make voters look past the worst of personal flaws or cultural issues, it’s worth noting that Democrats have also hurt their election chances by angering a large portion of the nation through contempt of ordinary Americans, a development which has served the Republicans well by driving usually unlikely voters to the polls in order get their revenge for perceived cultural oppression.

Democrats brag about being the party of inclusion and tolerance but have long since abandoned that value gin practice. While the Democrats have laudably championed civil rights especially for LGBTQ+ Americans in past decades, they increasingly condemn those who disagree with them politically. They’ve grown to be a party tolerant of all identities and no ideology but their own. A 2021 Axios poll found that among college Democrats 71% wouldn’t date a supporter of the other party to only 31% of Republicans when asked about Democrats. 37% of Democrats wouldn’t be friends with a supporter of the other party to 5% of Republicans. They demand that you think what they think and exert great societal pressure to elicit conformity. This is the driving force behind young male desertion of the left and broader resentment of liberal elites. You can observe the contempt that liberal pressure breeds for the ideas of political correctness and progressivism here at Middlesex, as some students, especially male ones, feel (rightly or wrongly) that the school administration uses their power to dictate what students should think and do. They take these feelings and apply them to national politics, releasing their frustration with Trumpian anger.

In 2024, campaign strategy mattered on the margins, but the broad shifts in public sentiment that allowed Trump to sweep the swing states and win the popular vote ran far deeper than messaging. In the end, Trump won not because of his enormous personal appeal to his supporters, but because Americans cared about policy in this election and Trump and the Republicans down ballot offered a better (if flawed and inconsistent) path forward. The results of the 2024 election indicate that the majority of Americans culturally and economically prefer a more conservative future. If Democrats heed this warning, they’ll move back towards the center, dump the statist economics and progressive cultural views, and figure out how to merge popular economic policy with worthy social fights like climate change action. More likely, they’ll move leftwards again based on the deluded notion that they lost because they weren’t progressive enough. When Trump rose to power, he kickstarted the remaking of the Republican party and re-energized the party to electoral success. An equally consequential reinvention may be that of the Democrats’ over the next few cycles, so long as they want to start winning again.

Jack Elworth