And about ~55-60 million votes in midterm elections?
Those are roughly the numbers the democrats need to win federal elections (the numbers needed to win state and local elections are much lower, and its important to vote in those too).
Biden got 81 million votes in 2020, Harris got 75 million votes in 2024. However, Harris lost at least 4 million votes in solidly blue states like CA, IL, NY, MA, WA, NJ compared to Biden. Likely due to protests against the war in Gaza. however even if those people voted, the election outcome would be the same since those states went blue anyway.
Harris lost 2 million votes in California alone, getting 9 million in 2024 vs 11 million for Biden in 2020. But again, those votes didn’t matter since CA went blue anyway and its EVs went to Harris anyway.
Is there anything that can realistically be done to get the democrats to win an additional 5+ million votes? I’m sure if there was, someone would be doing it.
It feels like in presidential elections, both parties have a basement of 75 million votes. Its just whoever gets enough extra votes to get to 80 million who wins.
I don’t know what can realistically be done. I feel like theres about 90 million non-voters, and maybe 10-20 million swing voters and they determine the outcomes.
Absolutely they can. IMHO, the USA is a nation desperately thirsting for Bernie/AOC/Yang-type economic leftist populism, but is a slightly socially conservative nation.
Unfortunately, the Democrats have actually often given voters the opposite; candidates who are socially liberal but economically conservative (continuing to let health insurance companies like UnitedHealthCare be rapaciously greedy, for instance, letting minimum wage stagnate, and not taxing the rich much.)
The moment the Ds nominate someone who is like Bernie, but holds centrist-conservative social views, they will dominate coast to coast. I’d even describe 80-85 million votes as being too low a floor in that scenario.
Since they already did- and the demographics are moving their way, sure. No problem.
Only in solid blue districts.
The Democrats do nothing of the sort- the Democrats dont pick candidates- the voters do.
The Democratic representatives are constantly getting increases in the Minimum wages - California: $16.90 (+ more in some cases), New York: $17.00, and so forth. In fact quite a few red states have increased the Minimum wage- Florida: $14.00 and increasing to $15.00 soon. The issue is a GOP majority House, the Democrats cant overrule that majority- look at the The Raise the Wage Act of 2025 Introduced by House Democrats- but nixed by the GOP.
As to Taxes- Democratic Senators in 2026 introduced plans to increase the top income tax rates to as much as 49%, and also the
And there have been Wealth tax proposals recently- all nixed by the GOP.
So, yes the Democratic House and Senate want to increase the Minimum wage and increase the top marginal tax rate. But they cant do so, as they are a minority.
I agree with this, partly. I left off the last part because, to me, it’s much less about their politics and more about their personalities - Bernie and AOC specifically. They speak well. They are sincere. They are authentic. They are likeable and relatable. All the things. With that said, maybe those types of politics and those personalities just go hand in hand.
Regardless, I think the margins / outside your base, will be driven by personalities and can get you to 80M +. I’d feel much safer with that than someone less personable who checks some “necessary” political boxes.
“The Inside Story of How Democrats Lost the Working Class”
How could working-class Americans desert the Party that supports them and vote for MAGA Republicans? This is a hotly debated topic, and a mystery that needs to be solved if American democracy is to recover. (I’m sure there are several threads on this topic, but among the top 20 or so most recently bumped threads here, this one seems most appropriate.)
I just read an opinion piece by Evan Barker that points to an answer The Inside Story of How Democrats Lost the Working Class
(You may need to make a free account to read the piece.It’s based on her recent book Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative.)
Her answer to “How did Democrats Lose the Working Class” is the same answer that many of us have been giving, but perhaps Ms. Barker’s eloquence and detailed story will finally get through to the super-woke do-gooders who have led liberal thinking to perdition, and thereby turned America over to the right-wing kakistocracy.
For personal reasons, healthcare – not pronouns – was the issue of greatest concern to her. Eventually in 2024 in disgust she "voted for Donald Trump. It felt like the biggest middle finger I’ve ever raised to the party I’d supported for most of my adult life. When he won, I was utterly euphoric.”
If Democrats want to win the White House back they should listen to her story.
Anyone who is “utterly euphoric” that a racist misogynist conman criminal liar got elected President is NOT someone anyone should be listening to for advice on how to get people to vote for the opposite of that.
She’s chosen her side. You don’t get published in the “Free Press” if you actually care about the working class.
LOL. This is a parody article, right? (and I couldn’t even read most of it, its paywalled)
My understanding is the democrats have lost the high school educated white working class. They haven’t lost the working class in general.
POC who are working class still vote democratic. Black women are the most working class demographic and they vote 96% democratic.
College educated white people who are economically working class still support the democratic party.
Not only that, but even when you control for income, there is a 40 point gap between white college educated and white non-college educated people. Whites with a college degree who make 100k+ a year are about 40 points to the left of whites with a high school diploma who make 100k+ a year. The same applies to whites making under 30k, or 30-60k, 60-100k, etc.
The reason is because whites with a college degree have less bigotry and authoritarianism than whites whose educations ended in high school. When you control for bigotry and authoritarianism, the education gap among whites disappears.
Its entirely plausible that Evan Barker has a point, and progressives constantly trying to out-purify each other by punching down is alienating a lot of voters. I wouldn’t be surprised. But the end result is democrats didn’t lose the working class, they lost whites who score high on authoritarianism and prejudice irrelevant of income.
The real political shift in the last 20 years is that whites (and white adjacent POC) who score high on authoritarianism are becoming republicans, while whites and white adjacent POC who score low on authoritarianism are becoming democrats.
FWIW, what does work to bring high school educated whites back into the democratic party is labor union membership. Whites whose highest level of education is high school or some college who are members of a labor union vote democrat about 20-30 points more than white high school graduates who are not in a labor union.
But because the democrats work for the rich just like the republicans, they will never pass meaningful labor reform.
Labor unions and the working class more generally were once a dominant force in the Democratic Party. As millions cannot afford healthcare or sink into poverty, the Democratic should – but doesn’t – benefit, as the Party that supports the working class.
But The Democratic Party is now dominated by elites.
Ms. Barker worked to elect Bernie Sanders and Jasmine Crockett. Was it stupid for her to become a MAGA nut just to say “F U”? Sure. But 12% of Sanders voters in 2016 voted for Trump in the general election and many more stayed home on Election Day. Do NOT just dismiss these voters as stupid: Win them back!
TL;DR - about half of Sanders-Trump voters were secretly republicans, about half felt whites do not have special advantages, and only 20% of them approved of Obama. Basically, they were never democrats, they were racially resentful republicans who crossed over and voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary. And who knows how many of them voted Sanders just to be anti-Hillary Clinton, not pro-Sanders.
In 2018 in CA, Diane Feinstein ran against Kevin de Leon for senate. De Leon did better than Feinstein in the rural, republican areas. But his positions were to the left of Feinstein. Republicans didn’t vote for De Leon because they liked his positions, they just didn’t like Feinstein. I’m sure something similar happened in 2016 among Bernie-Trump voters who were voting against Hillary.
Meanwhile the Sanders voters who voted for Clinton, the vast majority of them identify as democrats, the vast majority recognize racial injustice, and the vast majority approved of Obama.
Keep in mind that only 13 million people voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary, so 10% of them is 1.3 million people.
of those 1.3 million people, half or more are actually closeted republicans who hold white racial resentment. Appealing to them is not going to win the democrats any nationwide races.
Democrats need to do ‘something’ to build a coalition of 80-85 million. But appealing to a small sliver of racially resentful whites isn’t going to achieve it.
She [Evan Barker from the article posted by Gordon_G] remembers standing in a line for a handshake with “public enemy number one”, the man “I’d spent eight years working against”. She recalls feeling guilty for even being there, “knowing how long I had despised everything he stood for”, while Trump supporters would have given anything to swap places with her.
“My experience with the president was quick; a photo op in the lineup,” she writes in her book. “But when he met my son, his face lit up. ‘That’s a beautiful boy!’ he exclaimed.”
Later, as she joined the crowd for Trump’s speech, she says she enjoyed chanting “USA! USA!” with the audience. “It felt good. On the other side, I never felt allowed to love my country,” she says.
So she thinks Trump is safe to have around her children. Then she started chanting MAGA chants, claiming she was never allowed to love her country as a democrat.
In the article she talks about how horrible health insurance was for her and her family before the ACA, before talking about how she voted for Trump despite Trump trying repeatedly to destroy the ACA.
I’d also add something else, which is that Democrats put way too much emphasis on someone’s race/skin color in assuming they will vote (D). Many Democrats make it all about white vs nonwhite, not realizing that a whole lot of non-white folks are comfortable with, and supportive of, MAGA-style tyranny, cult of personality, an authoritarian regime, etc.- as much so as any Proud Boy or KKK. Nonwhite conservatives hate liberals a whole lot more than they fear white folks.
I once had the misfortune of attending a MAGA-type event in Corpus Christi. (Technically, it was an evangelical Christian conference but it was a de facto MAGA rally.) The crowd was maybe 60-70% Hispanic, Asian and black. The main speakers were Hispanic. It may have been the most racially diverse crowd I’d ever been in. And a whole lot of folks there were totally fine with Trumpy authoritarianism and squelching of freedoms. Not for one moment was that Corpus Christi rally about “whites stepping on brown folk,” it was about “Let’s stomp on those liberals together, MAGA folk!”
In October 2022, an audio recording of a private 2021 meeting attended by de León, fellow Council member Gil Cedillo, Los Angeles County Federation of Labor President Ron Herrera, and Council president Nury Martinez came to light in which Martinez made racist remarks about the adopted black son of their white City Council colleague Mike Bonin, comparing Bonin’s treatment of his son to the way one handles a handbag. They also used slurs against indigenous Oaxacan people who live in Koreatown, and discussed redistricting in order to break up black voting districts, turning them into Latino ones through the process of gerrymandering. He apologized for taking part in the conversation, but refused to resign.[46]
If these people can’t be bothered to prevent a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, and a bald faced liar, a bad liar at that, from becoming president then I certainly don’t know how to win them back.
Trump makes her feel good. For a lot of his supporters, I think that’s a big part of his appeal.
A good example of trying to win stupid people is as follows:
-During the first two years of COVID, short-term inflation spiked due to an idiotic “print trillions of dollars in money during a supply shock” strategy, as every economist could have predicted would happen (and did).
-This policy was begun under, and by,Donald Trump in 2020 during his first term, and can essentially be laid at his feet.
-Despite the inflation happening in 2020 and 2021, by 2024 the Biden administration and the Fed had returned inflation to under 2% per year, without interrupting the return to pre-pandemic levels of unemployment. Managing inflation without causing an unemployment spike is very hard, and the Biden-era government pulled it off.
-Instead of campaigning on this tangible and remarkable achievement of the administration she was a part of, Kamala Harris accepted the false narrative of “runaway inflation” in 2024, and proposed solving it by instituting federal price caps on grocery stores, a policy that is both economically illiterate and totally beyond the power of the federal government to do without some sort of supermajority that was never going to happen. The main driver of this decision was the belief that making a simple argument involving one or two numbers, such as the actual rate of inflation or unemployment, would inevitably be too complex for voters to understand.
The problem isn’t just “immediately write off anyone who has any problems with the Democratic platform as irredeemably stupid and racist and stop trying to win their votes” (though that is a huge problem). There are lots of second-order consequences of the “let’s assume all the voters are morons” premise, including reasoning yourself out of campaigning on economic achievements that people care about, and the nonstop, currently ongoing game of “how do we find someone with a good hairline to swindle voters into voting for policies they don’t like.” Fundamentally, Democratic strategists believe that elections are about something called “charisma” or about finding their version of the Trumpian “cult of personality.” They cannot accept that most voters are making rational decisions as to who to vote for based on which candidates reflect their policy preferences, and the only information gap is in communicating when candidates do not actually do that. E.g., people voting for Trump because they think “immigrants are taking my job” are voting for a chain of policy preferences, and if your position is that “actually immigration boosts the economy and doesn’t crowd out your job” you need to say that and convince people of it, not assume they aren’t actually voting that way and decree you need Gavin Newsom to tweet the word “fuck” every 15 minutes because you’ve decided that’s what Republicans actually like about Trump and if a Democrat just does it they would switch to him
The way I would look at it is that the Democrats are so unpopular that they lost to a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, and a bald faced liar. Given the low bar of the other candidates, I actually it is pretty simple problem. Become more popular as a party (or at least not actively detested by much of the country) and you will elections comfortably.
“Become more popular.” Yes that’s (tautologically) what’s needed; but it’s easier said than done. Many voters get their news almost exclusively from the Trump-Putin Bullshit Machine.
The emphasis MUST be placed on free healthcare and jobs, and NOT “wokeism”. Ridiculing DEI is a favorite pastime of MAGA; folks embracing it will vote Democratic no matter what.
Do the Democrats even have a candidate ready to win in 2028? I liked Tim Walz. Any better choices?
There’s aspects of “DEI” broadly defined that matter, and aspects that don’t.
A lot of people really, really hate the “stolen land”/general America-bashing type bullshit. It is a huge problem with getting votes from immigrant groups. Trump is virulently anti-immigrant to the point of jailing and killing them; that is a group that should be voting 100% Democratic. But instead, 51% of naturalized citizen voters went for Trump in 2024, as did around 40% of second-generation-plus Hispanics. Why? Because
Democrats are pathologically incapable of getting on a lectern and saying “we love the American dream, we are here to support people who legally immigrate and want to start a business or earn a living” without adding “you’re doing it on stolen land and capitalism is wrong!”
Many people are not identity politics voters, and even if they do prefer the Democratic approach to immigration and racial tolerance, will still vote Republican because their bigger concerns are tax rates, small business regulation, crime, etc. Biden was pushing the PRO Act, which is basically a “put ten million people out of work now” bill that would make things like working as a contractor for Uber or Doordash illegal as well as eliminate similar 1099 jobs such as writers and artists. Do you think “eliminating gig work” might impact nonwhite/immigrant communities? Apparently Kamala Harris did not take her thought process that far.
The almost total hiring freeze on white males in professional positions since 2020, which is deeply tied to certain Democratic politicians, is going to be probably the biggest barrier to making headway with that demographic group. Like the pro-crime DAs in Chicago, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia, the sort of nonsense that California gets up to is too easily ignored as “those are always going to be blue places anyway,” as if voters in the rest of the country don’t see it and go “let’s make sure that never happens here.” Again, a consequence of assuming everyone is stupid.