The Tribune

with CHARLIE HARPER

The US Democratic Party gathered earlier this month at a fancy convention venue on the southern edge of Washington DC to pick their new party leader. The man they chose is a party veteran named Ken Martin, from Minnesota.

On the surface at least, he doesn’t seem to be someone whose first priority will be to strip the party down to its bare bones and try to build it back up to a truly competitive level in time for the Democrats to have a good chance to recapture control of the Senate and House of Representatives in the next election upcoming in 21 months.

Martin has a daunting task. Some polling services report that the Democratic Party is regarded negatively by as much as 57 percent of the American electorate. This is not a good way to win elections.

A low public approval rating is one thing, and not to be dismissed lightly. The Democrats clearly misjudged the public mood on issues like inflation, immigration and a leftist social consciousness that came to be known as “woke”.

But there’s a bigger problem. Publicly at least, the Dems don’t seem to be able to acknowledge that they have twice in the past decade lost elections that they had no business losing. There is ample evidence that millions of votes in the past three presidential elections were not cast in favour of Donald Trump.

They were, instead, direct repudiations of the Democratic Party. After an initial burst of incredulity and finger-pointing, the Blues have begun to examine how this happened. Some thoughtful analysis is emerging.

A centrist group called The Third Way, whose members include respected veterans of both US major political parties, has shared with selected media their assessment of why the Dems lost the election, may have generally lost their way, and how they might get back on track.

“Democrats must work now to build a sustainable majority. This means a lot more than playing better the cards they now hold. They need a reshuffled deck and a new deal,” the authors wrote.

According to The Third Way, Democrats may have been too eager to “cure” the economic malaise left behind by the COVID-19 pandemic. The massive remedial spending bills for which President Joe Biden and his supporters so consistently claim credit were inflationary; how could such an infusion of government spending not be?

Where the Democrats miscalculated was in failing to appreciate the effects of that inflationary pressure on lower-income working families. That, the authors write, “is because so many Democrats today are upper-middle class, college educated and actually somewhat disconnected from the strains felt by working-class families”.

In November’s general election, Trump prevailed in households where the annual income was less than $100,000; Kamala Harris won in higher income households.

This represented a dramatic change. The 2024 election was first time in 32 years that the GOP won a majority of votes from lowest-income households. And it was the first time the Democrats had won the majority in households where the annual income was above $100,000.

There’s lots more. The Democrats have been the beneficiaries of generally solid support from organized labour for over half a century. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan made some significant inroads into that bedrock support. But until Trump came on the scene 30 years later, labour usually delivered dedicated organisation, logistical assistance on election days, and lots of votes for Democrats.

Last November, union support for Harris lagged. Despite Biden having been the first president to join an active picket line, labour continued to drifting away from the Democrats. The large, powerful Teamsters Union declined to endorse either candidate. Support from other large unions was mixed and uneven. The economic divide mentioned above no doubt accelerated that trend.

Black and Latino voters are also drifting away. For example, a study at the University of California at Irvine showed a startling change in their views toward immigrants. Polling commissioned by the university showed a big rise between 2020 and 2024 on the percentage of these voters who agreed with the idea that “immigrants drain natural resources.”

This shouldn’t have shocked or even surprised the Democrats. Cubans who have gained political and economic strength in Florida and elsewhere for over 50 years since arriving as penniless refugees, for instance, might well become more conservative as they accumulate assets that they want to keep – without higher taxes, social programs that they don’t see benefiting them, or a sturdy economic safety net that they no longer need.

Black voters have similarly registered gains over the decades since the landmark equal rights legislation in the 1960s. It should baffle no one that they now show increasing interest in keeping a firm grip on these advances, and that they might be wary of immigrants also.

It is certainly ironic that progressive Democrats and liberals have continued during the past twenty years to cling to ideological tenets that have lost their appeal for the very segments of the American population who have most benefited from them.

So the Dems need to change their approach. It certainly seems likely that the initial behaviour of the current Trump administration will alienate many millions of voters who supported him in November. The Senate election cycle will swing back in a blue direction in 2026. Trump & Co got hammered in his last mid-term election in 2018. There’s plenty of opportunity ahead for his opposition to rebound to a position of strength in Washington.

Will they succeed in taking advantage of such opportunities? The Third Way analysts suggest focusing on Pennsylvania in search of a viable return path to power in Washington.

They describe the Keystone State as a microcosm for the US. “If Democrats can figure out how to turn Pennsylvania reliably Blue again, they will be well on their way to regaining a sustainable national political advantage.”

That’s fine. But these analysts would do well to drive virtually anywhere in Pennsylvania beyond the outer suburbs of its two major cities – Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. There, on the farms, small fading towns and villages far from bright lights and amid the hills and in the forests of the rest of the state, Trump signs have endured for a decade.

These remote parts of the state have long been regarded as “Alabama without the accent.” The residents have little use for high-minded rhetoric and inspiring pronouncements from Washington. As long as their social security, welfare, veterans benefits and other transfer payments from the federal government arrive on time, these voters have no use for government.

The American constitution bestowed disproportionate influence on such rural areas throughout the country. That was a major concession needed to secure its legislative passage in the first place. States like Idaho and Wyoming have two senators just like New York and California. And Americans, particularly as they approach and reach retirement age, continue to move south to the sunny regions of Arizona, Texas and Florida.

The demographics of the American electorate, for so long regarded as ensuring the viability and even supremacy of the Democratic Party, now work against it. While Trump’s current crusade against immigrants is meant to emphasize his commitment to fulfilling campaign pledges, it’s also subtly designed to exclude groups of potential voters who, historically, would be more likely to favour Democratic candidates.

It is altogether too easy to regard the Democratic Party as isolated, elitist, ignorant of and indifferent to the needs and desires of working-class Americans. A further irony in their current situation is that from the Chicago convention in August throughout her entire campaign for president, Kamala Harris never stopped talking about “working-class Americans,” and how much her administration would do for them.

If the Democrats do manage to get their act together in the next couple of years, they may benefit from fractures in the Republican Party that could well intensify. Even in the early weeks of the second Trump administration, the signs of future rifts between titans such as the president and Elon Musk and the tech oligarchs are already apparent.

These are all people accustomed to seeing their orders followed. They are in control of enormous enterprises and populate lists of the most- wealthy individuals in the world today.

What happens when they don’t get what they want from this administration? It won’t be a pretty picture.