As of the time that I wrote this sentence, Donald Trump was leading Kamala Harris by 2.2% in the United States popular vote, though with much of the outstanding vote being concentrated in the liberal state of California, this number is likely to contract to something close to a point-and-a-half victory for Trump nationwide. In 2020, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump with a 4.5% victory in the popular vote, and the margin was considered so narrow that Trump’s supporters stormed the United States Capitol to dispute the results. With a victory a third as narrow by the popular vote, Democrats have been asked to capitulate to what must be regarded as the true reflection of the will of the American people.
I have a few theories as to why this is. The perception of how much of a blowout a presidential election is seems to boil down to a combination of three factors: Who won the popular vote (Democrats lead 7-2 in elections since 1988), who won the electoral vote (Democrats hold a 5-4 lead), and which party’s share just looks bigger on a red and blue electoral map (more subjective, but with the possible exception of Bill Clinton’s Montana-including 1992 coalition, the map consistently looks more red than blue). With the current urban-rural divide in the United States, it is practically impossible for Democrats to look dominant. Another factor is that while Election Night coverage is treated as a first-past-the-post race to 270 electoral votes, there is effectively a predetermined outcome based on fifty-one separate races which have mostly concluded by the time results are projected. There is a bias in coverage towards states whose polls close earlier—the reason Kentucky is frequently the first state called is not because it is the most politically uncompetitive state (like many “red states”, its largest cities, Louisville and Lexington, tend to vote Democratic, but they are ultimately overwhelmed by elsewhere in the state) but because they process results fairly quickly. During the Trump era, two former swing states, Ohio and Florida, went red fairly early in the night because of how they tabulate votes, and this set a (sometimes misleading) pro-Trump tone.
But if 2004, the last time a party got the popular vote-Electoral College-map vibes trifecta, is any indication, the lesson will not simply be that Republicans did well in 2024; the lesson will be that they have asserted a truly remarkable, historic victory which constitutes a mandate for absolute rule. To be clear, it is much more healthy for a democracy for a political party to recalibrate itself following an electoral loss, so as to better address the needs of the American electorate, rather than, say, dressing up in audacious bear costumes and trying to defecate in Nancy Pelosi's office. But it seems almost inevitable that all of the wrong lessons will be learned.
There is an extremely obvious thesis statement for why the Democrats lost, one which does not forgive the party of its individual sins but which places the improbability of them emerging victorious in proper context. Democrats lost in 2024 for the same reason that every party in power in the western world in 2024 has lost a share of votes, whether the party was considerably to the left or right of the Democratic Party, because there was economic hardship around the world in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Functionally shutting down the economy for a year caused economic stress (while Donald Trump's handling of it, to put it lightly, left much to be desired, it's hard to deny that he faced a legitimate challenge with the emergence of the pandemic), and inflation devastated the middle-and-lower classes around the world.
Democrats could have handled this better. They could have explained (it may not have been easy, but it very much helps that it was true) that inflation was an unavoidable problem, but that Democratic policies would help to ease the tensions far more than Republican policies, to the extent that they have politics beyond yelling about Democrats. They could have noted that high grocery prices were not caused by some dial that the government turns but rather by increasingly powerful and unregulated semi-monopolies and that while Donald Trump is often called a populist, he is in reality a crotchety billionaire who does not even pretend to care about the struggles of everyday Americans anymore. It's possible that these things would not have worked, but in any election with a distinct winner and loser established regardless of margin of victory, whatever Democrats did must now be viewed as bad, even as Kamala Harris made a nearly-historic comeback from Joe Biden's low poll numbers early in the summer.
The party keeps searching for One Big Thing that can be reversed and change everything. Many have tried the ultimate self-congratulatory takeaway: Democrats lost because they nominated a woman of color. This is a theory which presents the Democrats as undeniably noble and makes any further self-reflection borderline offensive. Those who believed that Kamala Harris should have picked Josh Shapiro as her running mate made their argument, though there is little reason to believe that Tim Walz was particularly unpopular, and even if (and it's a big "if") Shapiro could have delivered Pennsylvania, this alone would not have been enough.
But ultimately, some people would rather just blame a minority. This happened in 2004, when Republican opposition to same-sex marriage activated the conservative religious right. Democrats, by and large, weren't even campaigning on a pro-gay rights platform--same-sex marriage was already illegal in nearly every jurisdiction in the country, but Republicans largely supported a Constitutional Amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. A few years later, that Democrats had been on the less-wrong side of history, when gay marriage became legal nationwide and its popularity skyrocketed, became a political advantage. But more importantly, it was the right thing to do.
I am not convinced that anti-trans panic had any meaningful impact on the presidential election. This does not mean that pro-trans politics are necessarily a strong political issue for the left, but rather that it does not seem to be of exceptionally high priority for most people. Republicans, of course, have framed these debates under their own terms, using language about protecting women's sports (every competitive women's sports organization in the country has strict rules regarding hormone levels to assure that, to use a particularly ludicrous suggestion, the league is not simply a bunch of men claiming that they are women) and protecting children, largely because Democrats mostly haven't talked about trans issues. In some ways, I think Democratic silence is instructive behavior--if trans people living their lives aren't a big deal, why should others try to make a big deal out of it?--but the more conservatives push anti-trans messaging, the more it becomes clearly that trans people need genuine allyship.
But while I don't think anti-trans panic had a meaningful impact on the 2024 election, it wouldn't matter if it had. Democrats have overwhelmingly popular positions on just about every issue as an organic result of their own worldviews--they should be allowed to have some positions based not on polling but on what is simply the right thing to do. The extreme shift on gay marriage--Barack Obama ran the most socially liberal campaign in a generation while still opposing gay marriage in 2008--demonstrates that our social views are not inevitable. And while opposition to gay marriage at least had some tenuous biblical backing (which, to be clear, should not inform national policy), opposition to trans rights largely comes down to an unarticulated sense of discomfort. This is the sense we are going to use to determine our future?
Democrats are consistently being asked to defend unpopular positions that their candidates have not actually taken. Liberals are ridiculed for advocating for defunding the police, a dead-on-arrival activist slogan. They are ridiculed for using the term "Latinx" or for being "too woke". If Democrats took an explicitly anti-trans stance, it would not stop Republicans from accusing them of whatever the most hateful stereotypes one could imagine. It would probably land much like the Biden's pro-Israel Middle Eastern posture: Republicans still call them anti-Israel. There is nothing Democrats could theoretically do to assuage fears of the most rabidly anti-trans corners of the political discourse.
Can Democrats force the issue and make trans rights viewed as a legitimate civil rights issue? I'm not sure, but whether it would work politically should not define the actions. Democrats should stand up for trans people because it's the right thing to do.