It’s pretty generally acknowledged at this point that President Trump won the 2024 election with help from a lot of working-class voters who’d previously cast votes for Joe Biden. The Democratic theory about how they could return to power was that Democrats would drive Trump’s numbers down with constant criticism and soon enough those voters would see the error of their ways and return to the Democrats. In short, Democrats were counting on a backlash to save them.
But so far it’s not happening. Trump’s numbers have gone down but Democrats numbers haven’t really gone up. The voters who left the party don’t see a good reason to go back.
…in interviews with nearly 30 predominantly working-class voters who supported Mr. Biden in 2020 before defecting or struggling deeply with their choices last year, many had a stinging message for the Democratic Party.
Just because we have misgivings about Mr. Trump, they say, it doesn’t mean we like you.
“I think I’m done with the Democrats,” said Desmond Smith, 24, a deli worker from Smithdale, Miss., and a Black man who said he backed Mr. Biden in 2020 at the height of the racial justice protests. But last year, disillusioned by what he saw as the party’s overemphasis on identity politics and concerned about illegal immigration, he voted for Mr. Trump.
Asked how Democrats could win him back, he said, “Fight for Americans instead of fighting for everybody else.”
That’s just one anecdote but polling seems to suggest a lot of former Democratic voters aren’t returning as Dems hoped. A Democratic strategist suggested a backlash wouldn’t be enough this time. “They think that this is about Trump’s numbers getting worse,” he said, adding “They need to worry about their numbers.”
There are various reasons people aren’t flocking back to the Democratic Party but one thing that clearly turned people off was all the lying about Joe Biden’s condition. Democrats went way out on a limb claiming he was sharp as a tack then turned on a dime the moment their secret got out.
Democratic leaders had insisted that the plainly frail Mr. Biden was vigorous enough to run, and they had encouraged skeptical voters to fall in line. Instantly after he dropped out, they urged Democrats to unite behind the candidacy of Kamala Harris, who was then the vice president.
That did not sit right with Mr. Bielski, who said he was already distrustful of Democrats who had pushed pandemic-era lockdowns. Ms. Harris, he said, “wasn’t someone that I got to vote for in a primary.”
Another problem for Dems, all the wokeness taking over the party. It was a turn off, including among minority voters.
Many in this multiracial group of voters said they thought Democrats had gone too far in promoting transgender rights or in emphasizing matters of racial identity…
“It seemed like they were more concerned with D.E.I. and L.G.B.T.Q. issues and really just things that didn’t pertain to me or concern me at all,” said Kendall Wood, 32, a truck driver from Henrico County, Va. He said he voted for Mr. Trump last year after backing Mr. Biden in 2020. “They weren’t concerned with, really, kitchen-table issues.”
Other messages that got through to voters included the America First focus on keeping us out of foreign entanglements and the sense that the border was out of control under Biden.
But despite hearing all of that direct from the voters themselves, some Democratic commenters still think these voters were tricked somehow. For instance:
“Most of the viewpoints of these people are false narratives created by MAGA.”
The border situation was a false narrative? Democrats didn’t lie to voters about Biden’s fitness for office? Democrats weren’t pushing gender affirming care and men competing in women’s sports? All of these things were really happening. People saw what Dems were doing and didn’t like it. At least some readers get it.
Many excellent points, all will be ignored by current Dem leadership, which is focused entirely on tactics — finding a new Joe Rogan, appealing to voters based on identity (young males) — rather than their positions on real issues.
A corollary point is that exactly none of the current favorites for the 2018 democratic nomination present any hope of this changing.
What’s most concerning is the number of deluded socialist revolutionaries in the comments. Here’s the top comment:
Today the Democratic and Republican parties function as two wings of the capitalist party, with the Democrats often playing good cop to the Republican’s bad cop. The billionaires control Congress, the Presidency and the Supreme Court. Nothing short of a revolution in peoples’ thinking will change this situation into one that prioritizes the health and well-being of all. I’ll vote for Democrats the day they start calling for universal high quality health care, truly taxing the rich, drastically reducing funds for the military and seriously addressing the climate crisis. In other words, probably never.
Ten minutes with a calculator ought to be enough to disabuse anyone of these delusions, but people like this aren’t interested in reality. They’d rather live in a fantasy world where all their problems are the result of someone else’s successes.
