Figuring Out the Democratic Party’s Problems
By 
There’s some sentiment at this site that what Democrats need to do is quit the infighting and focus on fighting Republicans. I’d agree except that the Democratic brand is a total disaster right now and while people like me and you and the other readers and writers of this site are aghast with horror, for the voters we actually need to turn in order to win elections in the future, Donald Trump is the first politican in their lives who is doing exactly what he say he’d do. Eventually, maybe the leopards eat enough faces that people realize that they’ve been duped, but there’s most certainly no guarantee of that. Moreover, Democrats have to figure out a coherent message. And the messages that you and I find coherent, such as fascism sucks and vaccines are good and government is good show absolutely no evidence of resonating with the kind of swing voters who might be idiots, but who we have to win back.
Thus, I still find these postmortems useful up to an extent. I don’t agree with everything Ruben Gallego has done as the new senator from Arizona (though compared to Sinema he’s already Ted Kennedy) but I do absolutely think that Democrats have to openly embrace aspects of traditional masculinity in order to win back voters who have voted for Democrats in the past.
I want to talk through some demographic groups that Democrats really need to win back if they want to be competitive. Everybody?
Men, for example. Yep.
You’ve been described to me as a bro. And not in a bad way. [Laughs.]
You won Latino men by 30 points in an election in which Trump dominated that group. I know men are a very broad group, but what do you think Democrats have misunderstood about them? That we could be working to make the status of men better without diminishing the status of women. A lot of times we forget that we still need men to vote for us. That’s how we still win elections. But we don’t really talk about making the lives of men better, working to make sure that they have wages so they can support their families. I also think some of this is purely psychological — like we just can’t put our finger on it. During my campaign, I noticed when I was talking to men, especially Latino men, about the feeling of pride, bringing money home, being able to support your family, the feeling of bringing security — they wanted to hear that someone understood that need. And a lot of times we are so afraid of communicating that to men, because we think somehow we’re going to also diminish the status of women. That’s going to end up being a problem. The fact that we don’t talk this way to them makes them think we don’t really care about them, when in fact the Democrats on par are actually very good about the status of working-class men. It was a joke, but I said a lot when I was talking to Latino men: “I’m going to make sure you get out of your mom’s house, get your troquita.” For English speakers, that means your truck. Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck, which, nothing wrong with that. “And you’re gonna go start your own job, and you’re gonna become rich, right?” These are the conversations that we should be having. We’re afraid of saying, like, “Hey, let’s help you get a job so you can become rich.” We use terms like “bring more economic stability.” These guys don’t want that. They don’t want “economic stability.” They want to really live the American dream.
One of the difficulties for Democrats is that what you’re describing are more traditional values. But people vote on values!
Are you saying that Democrats should recognize that people want more traditional gender roles? Be less afraid of that? No, I think Democrats should recognize that people want to understand that they matter. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to say the single mom is less important than the father. That’s not what we’re saying. But just saying, “Yes, you matter too.” Because as Democrats, we’re supposed to be fighting for everybody.
I have trouble disagreeing with much of this. I’ve said this before but one of the core tenets of organizing is that you have to meet people where they are at, not where you are at, and as Democrats have embraced ever more baroque forms of personal identity markers, especially around language issues, for a lot of voters, it feels like elite cultural figures are forcing their ways of life to change. And let’s face it, the “Kamala is for they/them and Donald Trump is for us” ad was probably one of the most powerful in American political history. Regardless of the transphobia at the core of it, these are the voters. You don’t have to embrace transphobia to appeal to these voters. You do need to gather the largest political coalition possible and Democrats seem to have forgotten that.
Reading (which is pronounced “RED-ing”) had a net shift of 16 points in Trump’s direction relative to his 2020 showing against Joe Biden, according to precinct data from the election board in Berks County, where Reading is located. Harris did win Reading handily (by 65–35 percent), but Trump’s success in moving the electorate incrementally his way relative to 2020 (when Biden bested him by 72–27) helped him win the crucial Rust Belt swing state of Pennsylvania after losing it last time around.
To the dismay of local Democrats, the Reading results ended up illuminating the success of Trump’s larger winning formula, which entailed assembling an unexpectedly diverse coalition by merely shaving Democrats’ historic margins among core voter groups (without winning them outright). That includes working-class nonwhites, a demographic heavily represented in the region around Reading, which is dominated by tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs in industries like automotive batteries and food production.
“Harris won this city overwhelmingly,” Reading Mayor Eddie Morán, a Democrat who is the first Latino elected to that office in this city, told me. “But we didn’t get the percent that we needed.” As he noted, Trump operatives never expected to win the Latino vote here. Instead, they aimed to “neutralize it a little bit.”
“And that’s exactly what happened,” Morán said.
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Though more data is needed to figure out what really happened here, it’s already clear that none of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric or actions weighed sufficiently on the Latino voters who shifted toward him—because inflation mattered a lot more. Preelection polling by the Times showed that, for Latinos, the economy was far and away the most important issue, with immigration a distant third. A staggering 81 percent of Latino voters saw economic conditions as “poor” or “only fair.” Meanwhile, a whopping 63 percent simply did not believe that Trump’s menacing rhetoric about immigrants was aimed at them.
Indeed, in some cases, immigration might have played in Trump’s favor among Latino voters. In South Texas, for instance, many majority-Hispanic counties shifted hard toward Trump, including a number of them along the border. This suggests that, for some Latinos, border security is as important (if not more so) as how welcoming our country is toward legal immigrants, and that they blamed Harris and Biden for being overly lax on the issue while crediting Trump as “strong” on it. These claims are absurdly unfair, but they seemed to resonate, and now we need to do the work of figuring out what it all means.
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Again and again, Morán said, he heard from residents of the development, who told him that people campaigning for Trump had engaged with them at their doors, asking: “Do you want to live better? Do you want a better economy?” For Morán, the egg-carton incident was anything but funny: What it really captured was how vigorously Trump’s campaign worked Latino neighborhoods that might typically be hostile political territory but lately were filled with people struggling with the cost of living.
Further underscoring the point, Morán recounted that Democrats did a double take when the Trump campaign opened an office right in the heart of downtown Reading, many months before Election Day. As we drove through the downtown, a mix of offices and small shops and restaurants, many Latino-owned, Morán said the Trump campaign’s bold tactics were “a huge surprise to everybody.”
Driving around Reading with Morán underscored another big takeaway: The Latino electorate is extremely diverse, even though it’s often treated in our political discourse as a monolith. Not only are many heritages represented in this small city alone—Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Colombians—but the variety of life experiences is also striking and should be factored into understanding the challenges Democrats face.
Going back to the Gallego interview, one more point:
Why do you think Democrats are afraid to talk to Trump voters? I don’t know. Why aren’t they going into the reddest areas of the country? Donald Trump goes to Harlem. Do we go to the equivalent of Harlem for the red voter? No, we don’t.
Absolutely. Why aren’t we going to South Dakota? Simply put, we have to. Democrats are an absolute disaster right now, with no useful leadership at the top. Ignoring this because it’s difficult is just whistling past the graveyard. Unless we want to get our ass kicked again in 2028, we have to figure this out now. That includes having tough conversations, not just saying “we need to focus on the evils of the Republicans.” Especially if the swing voter type doesn’t see what Trump is doing as evil.