“Democrats are like the Yankees,” said one of the most memorable tweets to come across on X after Election Day. “Spent hundreds of millions of dollars to lose the big series and no one got fired or was held accountable.”
Too sad. But that’s politics. The disappointment behind that tweet was widely shared, but no one with any experience in politics truly believes that no one will be held accountable.
It’s common after a national election to see partisans on the losing side join other operatives and media experts in autopsies of the defeat, pointing fingers or coming up with an abundance of excuses.
This time it’s the Democrats sifting through the wreckage of defeat to determine if Election Day was a circumstantial setback or the unfolding of a potentially long-term disaster.
That fear was only encouraged by the realization that the party was in for a repeat of the stunning disappointment Democrats suffered in their loss to Trump in 2016.
This time, Trump actually outperformed his 2020 margins across the map, winning the popular vote as well as the electoral vote, despite his well-documented negatives, including 34 felony convictions.
History also tells us that the parties have shown impressive resilience in their ability to come back from disaster in recent decades.
But, first, comes a reckoning.
The day after the election, as the Washington Post reported, the Dems were “awash in angst-ridden second-guessing.”
Ah, yes, political junkies in the chattering classes produced ample scenarios to pinpoint where they went wrong.
What if Harris had picked, say, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate? Could that have helped her margins in the “blue wall” states? If Biden had stayed in the race, could he have retained the strong coalition that carried him to victory in 2020?
But the bigger question is, how could the party have so lost touch with the voters that they underestimated the numbers of voters who still wanted to vote for Trump’s mixed message?
The question reminds me of a fundamental principle of political campaigns and voter behavior that I first heard Democratic consultant James Carville express: “Every election is a contest between ‘change’ and ‘more of the same.’ ”
“Change” was the magic word that inspired and propelled the relatively unknown Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s long-shot campaign to victory in 2008, when the war-weary and economically shaken voters looked for change after eight years under Republican George W. Bush’s presidency. A similar desire for change worked in Joe Biden’s favor against Trump in 2020.
Unfortunately for Harris, she was too closely tied to the Biden administration to credibly promote herself as a change agent. Nor did she have enough time to come up with more of a platform of her own.
Things could have worked out better for her and other Democratic candidates if they had followed the advice offered by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira.
Judis is a journalist from the left who has studied and written about American democracy for decades. Teixeira is a nonresident senior fellow at Washington’s conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and before that was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which makes him one of the few researchers I know who has worked at a liberal and a conservative think tank without losing his mind — a commendable achievement in Washington, a town too often hobbled by ideological segregation.
Their latest book, "Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes," offers a wake-up call for Democrats and others who they believe have lost sight of the people in America’s political center who both parties are trying to woo. Or should be.
Both parties are afflicted these days with new challenges, even as they try to figure out changes in the electorate that resulted from old challenges.
For example, the turnout of so many young, disenchanted and underemployed white males in this campaign year came as a surprise, particularly to Democrats, who were expecting the party’s support of abortion rights to carry them closer to victory than it finally did.
That, too, offers an important political lesson. Timing is everything, it is often said. But issues matter, too.
Where have all the Democrats gone? Maybe the party’s leaders need to go find out.
Page is an American journalist, syndicated columnist and senior member of the Chicago Tribune editorial board.
©2024 Tribune Content Agency. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.