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In the months ahead, Democratic Party officials and operatives will analyze election returns and voting patterns to try to make sense of what happened on Election Day. There will be a push to identify problems that can be easily solved by the same campaign experts who have allowed one of the least popular politicians of our time to dominate politics for three consecutive elections and rewrite the political order in a way we haven’t seen since the Goldwater movement laid the groundwork for Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
Like Goldwater after 1964, the Democratic Party can seize defeat to establish a new order — but the era of tinkering around the edges is over.
Donald Trump didn’t just win. He won big, including longstanding Democratic constituencies. Look no further than solid blue New York: Vice President Kamala Harris had the worst statewide performance for a Democrat since 1988. In New York City, her margin of victory was 17 points lower than Joe Biden’s in 2020.
The numbers don’t lie: This was a rejection of our party’s leadership.
How did we get here?
The contemporary Democratic Party emerged from the “greed is good” era of the 1980s in part by co-opting pieces of the Reagan agenda. President Bill Clinton built a coalition — part working class, part Wall Street — that led Democrats back to the White House without redefining the political system. The limitations of this “third way” came to a head during the long recession following the financial crisis, when the party was tasked with charting a new direction. The truth is, it never did.
Faced with a global economic crisis, leaders of both parties worked to perpetuate a neoliberal order that people no longer trusted. Rather than create an agenda intimately tied to the people’s pain, the Democratic establishment helped rescue the institutions that had just pushed the economy to the brink of collapse, further cementing the public’s view that our political and economic system was rigged for the rich and powerful.
Tragically, our party has failed to rescue itself ever since. Mr. Trump’s success in 2016 and this month underscored the flaw inherent in the Democratic approach of promising to move forward while looking backward.
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