DAMN!! How will HISTORY look back on Trump, Fox News & all his supporters during Coronavirus & AFTER he leaves office? UPDATE: Trump WON
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Why Democrats Need Their Own Trump
June 23, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET
Credit...Igor Bastidas
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Mr. Druke is the host of the “GD Politics” podcast.
We are more than 1,200 days away from the 2028 presidential election, but the Democratic presidential primary is already well underway. The likely candidates are fund-raising, hosting campaign rallies, starting podcasts and staking out ideological lanes.
Candidates will try to carve out distinct political identities, but one challenge unites them all: Their party is historically unpopular. The Democratic Party’s favorability rating is 22 percentage points underwater — 60 percent of respondents view it unfavorably, 38 favorably. Apart from the waning days of Joe Biden’s presidency, that is by far the lowest it’s been during the more than 30 years Pew Research has collected data.
The presidential hopefuls are likely to divide into two camps, moderates and progressives. But these paths misunderstand Democrats’ predicament and will fail to win over a meaningful majority in the long term. If the next Democratic nominee wants to build a majority coalition — one that doesn’t rely on Republicans running poor-quality candidates to eke out presidential wins and that doesn’t write off the Senate as a lost cause — the candidate should attack the Democratic Party itself and offer positions that outflank it from both the right and the left.
It may seem like an audacious gambit, but a successful candidate has provided them a blueprint: Donald Trump.
To be clear, the blueprint I refer to is not the one Mr. Trump has used to violate democratic norms and destabilize American institutions, but rather the one for resetting how Americans view a party and its leaders.
In January 2013, at the time of Barack Obama’s second inauguration, Republicans were deeply unpopular. Conservative thought leaders like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Karl Rove advocated comprehensive immigration reform as a pathway back to a majority. By the summer, the base’s backlash to the idea was itself so comprehensive that many of them were forced to retreat.
If Everyone Had Voted, Harris Still Would Have Lost
New data, based on authoritative voter records, suggests that Donald Trump would have done even better in 2024 with higher turnout.
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By Nate Cohn
June 26, 2025Updated 11:59 a.m. ET
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A voting line in Phoenix in November. Credit...Jon Cherry for The New York Times
In the wake of last November’s election, many Democrats blamed low turnout for Kamala Harris’s defeat.
It wasn’t entirely without reason, as turnout dropped in Democratic areas, but many months later it is clear the blame was misplaced. Newly available data, based on authoritative voter turnout records, suggests that if anything, President Trump would have done even better if everyone had voted.
The new data, including a new study from Pew Research released Thursday, instead offers a more dispiriting explanation for Democrats: Young, nonwhite and irregular voters defected by the millions to Mr. Trump, costing Ms. Harris both the Electoral College and the popular vote.
The findings suggest that Mr. Trump’s brand of conservative populism once again turned politics-as-usual upside down, as his gains among disengaged voters deprived Democrats of their traditional advantage with this group, who are disproportionately young and nonwhite.
For a generation, the assumption that Democrats benefit from high turnout has underpinned the hopes and machinations of both parties, from Republican support for restrictive voting laws to Democratic hopes of mobilizing a new progressive coalition of young and nonwhite voters. It’s not clear whether Democrats will struggle with irregular voters in the future, but the data nonetheless essentially ends the debate about whether Ms. Harris lost because she alienated swing voters or because she failed to energize her base. In the end, Democrats alienated voters whose longtime support they might have taken for granted.
The 2024 election may feel like old news, especially in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory in New York City on Tuesday, but the best data on the outcome has only recently become available. Over the last two months, the last few states updated their official records of who did or did not vote in the election. These records unlock the most authoritative studies of the electorate, which link voter turnout records to high-quality surveys.
The post-election studies aren’t perfect, but they all tell the same story: Nonvoters preferred Mr. Trump, even if only narrowly. None show Ms. Harris winning nonvoters by the wide margin she would have needed to overcome her deficit among those who turned out.
Six estimates of whom 2024 nonvoters preferred
| Trump +2043 - 23 |
| Trump +647 - 41 |
| Trump +1156 - 44 |
| Trump <137 - 37 |
| Trump +653 - 47 |
| Trump +444 - 40 |
Figures from Blue Rose Research and The New York Times represent major party vote share. Figures from all studies except Pew Research’s are limited to registered voters. Figures from Blue Rose Research, The New York Times and Pew Research are based on matched data from voter records; the rest use self-reported voter status.
It’s worth remembering that the actual election results appeared to suggest something very different. Ms. Harris received millions of fewer votes than Joe Biden did, and turnout plunged in many heavily Democratic areas. Similarly, a prominent post-election survey implied that millions of Biden voters stayed home. Together, it suggested that low turnout may have cost Ms. Harris the election, an argument echoed even by Tim Walz, her vice-presidential nominee.
In a sense, the voter turnout records confirm the post-election conventional wisdom: The voters who stayed home really were relatively “Democratic” — or at least they appeared to be Democrats. They were more Democratic by party registration or primary vote history than voters who turned out, with 26 percent Democrats and 17 percent Republicans (most nonvoters don’t participate in primaries or register with a major party). They were disproportionately young and nonwhite. On average, the new studies estimate that the voters who turned out in 2020 but not 2024 backed Mr. Biden over Mr. Trump by a double-digit margin.
The same studies nonetheless find that nonvoters wouldn’t have backed Ms. Harris if they had turned out to vote in 2024. At some point over the last few years, many of them soured on Democrats and stayed home as a result. If they had voted, many would have backed Mr. Trump.
The decline in Democratic support among young and nonwhite voters and the decline in Democratic turnout can be understood as part of a single phenomenon: As traditionally Democratic voters soured on their party, some decided to show up and vote for Mr. Trump and others simply decided to stay home. But if they did show up, polling data suggests they would have voted for Mr. Trump in surprising numbers.
Ms. Harris would have won only 72 percent of the registered Democrats who stayed home, according to estimates based on New York Times/Siena College data, compared with 89 percent of the registered Democrats who showed up. There’s no equivalent pattern of a drop in support for Mr. Trump among Republicans who stayed home.
Another factor helping to reconcile the new studies with the election tallies is that Ms. Harris may have been somewhat stronger among the narrower group of nonvoters who voted in 2020 but stayed home in 2024. On average across the studies, Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump were essentially tied among this group, with several studies showing Ms. Harris with an edge.
Nonetheless, Ms. Harris greatly underperformed how the same studies found Mr. Biden fared with the 2020-but-not-2024 group. She did not fare nearly well enough to prevail, even if these voters had returned to the electorate.
The voters the Democrats lost in 2024 may not be lost for good. Still, their willingness to support Mr. Trump may throw a wrench in Democratic strategies. Until now, Democrats mostly assumed that irregular young and nonwhite voters were so-called mobilization targets — voters who would back Democrats if they voted, but needed to be lured to the polls with more door knocks, more liberal voting laws or a more progressive candidate. At least for now, this assumption can’t be sustained.
This assumption had important implications in a decade-long debate about whether Democrats should win by mobilizing new voters or persuading swing voters. While this debate was seemingly about arcane electoral tactics, it was really a proxy for whether the party should move toward the left or the center, with progressives arguing that a bold agenda could motivate new voters and moderates saying the party needed to pivot toward the center to win swing voters.
This debate still goes on, but it does not make nearly as much sense as it did a few years ago. In the last election, the usual “mobilization” targets — the disengaged, the young, and low-turnout voters or nonvoters — became the swing voters. And they swung to a candidate who stood against everything Democrats imagined that these voters represented.
This badly hurts the case for the usual mobilization argument, but it doesn’t as easily argue for a centrist candidate, either. The usual argument for “persuasion” imagined a very different group — predominantly suburban, moderate, white swing voters — who would more clearly be receptive to a moderate candidate. While the young and nonwhite voters are clearly not doctrinaire progressives, they are still deeply dissatisfied with the status quo and seek fundamental changes to America’s economic and political system. The case for a moderate like Mr. Biden in 2020 took Democratic support among young and nonwhite voters for granted, just as progressives did.
Either way, there isn’t such a clear distinction between persuasion and mobilization, if there ever was. Both wings of the party will need to go back to the drawing board.
Nate Cohn is The Times’s chief political analyst. He covers elections, public opinion, demographics and polling.
See more on: 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, U.S. Politics, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris
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