What's Wrong With The Democrats?

Barack Obama's victories obscured failure at every level. The Party's choices have been about disastrous. If Democrats care about winning, they need to learn how to appeal to the white working class.

- Franklin Foer

The strategy was simple. A demographic wave—long-building, still-building—would carry the party to victory, and liberalism to generational advantage. The wave was inevitable, unstoppable. It would not crest for many years, and in the meantime, there would be losses—losses in the midterms and in special elections; in statehouses and in districts and counties and municipalities outside major cities. Losses in places and elections where the white vote was especially strong.

But the presidency could offset these losses. Every four years the wave would swell, receding again thereafter but coming back in the next presidential cycle, higher, higher. The strategy was simple. The presidency was everything.

Anyone who examined the strategy that the Democratic Party has embraced ever more tightly in recent years could see its essential precariousness. And anyone could see that investing such grave hopes in the person of Hillary Clinton—who had lost the party’s nomination to a little-known senator in 2008; who had struggled to win it against a little-known socialist eight years later—was particularly risky.

But liberals’ fears were softened in 2016 by a widely shared belief: that the candidacy of Donald Trump would shatter the Republican Party, at least in the form in which we had long known it. His trail of wreckage would force a painful reckoning with the party’s shortcomings—the narrowness of its coalition, the cloistered cluelessness of its elites, its intramural disagreements about the future of the nation. After a season of Trump’s destruction, the party would lie in rubble.

On November 8, that prophecy was realized, true in every regard, except that it described the Democrats. On Inauguration Day, the party’s power ebbed to its lowest level since the 1920s.