A very simple prescription for Democrats: Just wait

Democrats are smart to listen to the voters who rejected them and stay humble about what they might learn. But the emphasis here is “listen” — the actual answers as to what to do next will likely only reveal themselves once they see how Trump governs and how the public responds. In the meantime, there are a few reasons why they shouldn’t leap to cure-all explanations so quickly.

The issues of the next election will not be the issues of today. Amid the finger-pointing about campaign tactics, one thing everyone in both parties seems to agree on is that President Biden’s unpopularity — especially his record on inflation and immigration — was a major drag.

But those two issues will not look the same going forward, nor is it clear they’ll even be high up in the voter priority list come 2026 or 2028. Biden will be gone in January. Democrats are now relieved of responsibility of governing and free to retake the Trump role of critic-in-chief when the other side screws something up, or over-reads their mandate, or faces a no-win problem that requires upsetting some people — and they will. It’s easy to win votes on Israel, for example, when simply saying Biden’s approach is bad, with little further detail, is an appealing message to a slice of Jewish and Muslim voters. It’s harder to do that when you’re the one in charge and own the decisions.

But, of course, Israel-Gaza might not even be a significant issue in 2026. What will? It’s hard to say. Take 2004, when Democrats despaired that President George W. Bush — who also won his first election without a popular vote mandate — had found a winning combination of faith and national security voters. Almost immediately, his Social Security privatization push began dragging down his approval, and then a worsening Iraq War and a widely criticized response to Hurricane Katrina dragged the party down further, then various scandals in the White House and Congress, and finally an economic collapse nobody saw coming led to a landslide. By 2006, Democrats had a unifying set of issues to run on, by 2008 they had identified a charismatic candidate who fit the moment.

This isn’t an exceptional story, it’s the typical one after every party loss: The form of their eventual comeback rarely is obvious the day after the election. And it’s rarely as simple as “Go on Joe Rogan.”

Parsing a Harris loss isn’t as easy as it looks. The Harris campaign is getting nitpicked to death in the aftermath of the election, as is natural after a loss. Some of these criticisms may prove correct, but it will also take time to identify which ones are more solidly backed by data and reporting and come up again in future elections. There are also some specific reasons to be wary of early reads on her performance.

For one, there’s a really simple problem in evaluating Harris: It’s not entirely clear her campaign was bad, or was merely doing its best in a terrible national environment she inherited at the last minute from her predecessor. In the battleground states where the campaign devoted its time, resources, and ground game the race was mostly close and turnout was stronger — while votes are still being counted, it looks like a 2-point swing would have won her the Rust Belt and the presidency, and just a little more would have added Georgia. Meanwhile, states with little attention from the campaign, like New York or Texas, swung hard to the right by much wider margins, while only a single state (Washington) appears to have moved left at all.

It strongly suggests that, like so many other incumbent parties worldwide after the pandemic, the campaign faced strong headwinds that it was unable to overcome. There was polling evidence (and yes, the polls were more accurate this time) ahead of the election that Harris campaign’s economy-focused ads at least helped mitigate her weakness on inflation, for example. Her favorables also shot up during the race, so there’s some evidence her biographical ads really did help her image. It didn’t add up to a victory, but figuring out the delta between the battlegrounds and the rest of the country, and which attacks on her stung and could sting again, is going to be a long process for Democrats.

The top of the ticket’s traits may not be transferable. One oddity of the election is that it was the most resounding Republican win in 20 years in the popular vote, including an unprecedented breakthrough with Latino voters, and yet the picture down-ballot looks much more like the status quo. Republicans are still set to win the popular vote among House candidates, but their expected majority looks narrow and Democrats held up surprisingly well in places like New York where Harris collapsed. In the Senate, up to four states may have split their tickets for Democrats — Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona — and in Pennsylvania, Sen. Bob Casey looks poised to lose by a narrow margin.

In North Carolina, Gov.-elect Josh Stein easily won his election over scandal-plagued Mark Robinson, but Democrats won key races elsewhere on the statewide ticket as well. The Republican wave was real, but relatively weak, in state legislatures around the country.

Some of this can be attributed to favorable district lines. But other elements include Republicans voting for Trump and a Democrat, or (as seems prominent in Nevada, for example) not voting for anyone at all in races down the ballot.

What does it all mean? Hard to say. But it complicates some easy takeaways that the Democratic “brand” is fatally compromised, at least for now. Contrary to popular assumptions, Trump proved uniquely popular with some voters, thanks in part to his perceived economic success in the White House, and tended to outrun others in his party. In the last nine years, no Republican has quite replicated Trump’s power in battleground races — and those who try the most typically do worse than less MAGA alternatives. Predicting how a post-Trump nominee would fare (which right now looks like JD Vance) is very hard; they might not be able to draw out his voters, they might have greater upside with voters he’s repelled, and a ton of their appeal will depend on his record in office.

Similarly, concerns voters had with Harris did not always attach themselves to other Democrats this cycle. One possible theory is that many of the attacks on cultural issues, immigration, and transgender rights that dogged her in Republican ads were largely dredged up from her presidential campaign in 2019, which came at a time when politicians with national ambitions were racing to the left. But many down-ballot Democrats either skipped that process, emerged later, or adjusted to the backlash years ago: You’ll hear a lot of criticisms about “defund the police” or saying “Latinx” on TV, but as David Weigel notes, few recent examples of actual elected Democrats using or entertaining this language.

There are difficult and divisive questions for the party ahead, like how to respond to the hundreds of millions of dollars in transgender-related ads (though some winning senators faced the same attacks), as well as Trump’s inevitable immigration crackdown. But the next round of candidates will not be so burdened by what has been — future recruits and presidential hopefuls may have more flexibility to adopt new ideas and rhetoric without a parade of clips and opposition research undermining their new message.