The Democratic Party Needs to Do Something, and It's Not This

The Democrats obviously have a big problem. Yelling at Ezra Klein isn't going to work.

Photo by Gaia&Co on Unsplash

I know it feels like it’s been eighty years, but Trump is only nine months into his second term. Since the 2024 election, Democrats (both politicians and regular people) are struggling with the fact that for the first time in a while, a Republican won the popular vote. And not only did a Republican win, but (and I’m about to go full #LibOut here) a Republican who was impeached twice, indicted four times, and for the past several years has seemed to be on the cusp of being thrown into jail every other week in an Uncle-Phil-Jazzy-Jeff style running gag, much to the glee of your Unitarian aunt.

Obviously, this wasn’t what most of us would have expected five years ago. The GOP also won a trifecta, so the failure wasn’t specific to Kamala Harris. According to YouGov, 64% of Americans view the Democratic party unfavorably. The GOP has gained with voters of color, especially black voters, who were previously taken for granted as Democratic voters. And a Reuters/Ipsos poll has Americans trusting Republicans over Democrats for the majority of issues. Take, for example, that with all the anti-democratic rhetoric and corruption that Democratic voters feel is obviously a Republican problem, voters rate Democrats and Republicans very closely on democracy and corruption, within the margin of error:

I am not a political strategist. If you are looking to read an article about the one thing that Democrats can do to win again, I’m not your girl. But I do have a bad habit of listening to a lot of people talk about their opinions, and I’ve come to realize there are a few very bad talking points about what Democrats need to do next.

If you’re a person with any kind of sway in politics (and I’m not) it’s important to identify that Democrats (and Democrat influencers/media personalities) have a problem and continuing business as usual is probably not a good idea. Second, if your silver bullet for the Democratic Party is something you think is simple and blatantly obvious, you’re probably wrong. Whatever fixes the Democratic Party will probably be fairly radical and rely on more than one key issue.

The first bad argument I’ve heard, which I don’t think even comes from Democrats at all, is that when it comes to winning elections again, we just can’t. Reverse Obama be like.

I am doing a 25% off discount on all annual subscriptions for the remainder of the week. This would only apply to new annual subscriptions, not monthly transitioning to annual.