Democrats who are in a state of shock and grief over Donald Trump’s (and his party’s) return to power are understandably acting as though the political world has been transformed forever. They’ve lost the Blue Wall! They’ve lost the working class! They’ve lost Latinos! They’ve lost a lot of Black men, young people, and suburban women! They’re hemorrhaging votes in California, New York, and New Jersey! They’re pointing fingers at one another and shifting blame! And they have no acknowledged leader to shepherd them out of the wilderness!
One of Washington’s most enduring traditions, the “Democrats in disarray” narrative, is morphing into “Democrats in despair.” And that’s even before the Trump administration takes office with its unprecedented plans to kick ass, take names, and wreck the “deep state” built up since World War II to do good things.
We are not in an era characterized by much interest in political history (unless there’s a podcast on it that I’ve missed), but you don’t actually have to go back that far to find a moment when Democrats were similarly afflicted. In some ways, Election Night 2004 was even more painful for partisans of presidential nominee John Kerry thanks to faulty early exit polls showing him winning. Kerry-Edwards campaign adviser Bob Shrum famously said to the candidate shortly after the polls closed, “May I be the first to say ‘Mr. President?’”
The ultimate results of the Bush-Kerry contest should look pretty familiar to today’s anguished Democrats. George W. Bush’s national popular-vote margin was 2.4 percent; Trump’s at the moment is 2.2 percent. Though the messed-up exit polls have made a precise understanding of how and where Bush won difficult, there’s very little question he did much better among Latino voters than he had four years earlier (the adjusted final exit polls showed him winning 44 percent of this group’s vote). He also did quite well among under-30 voters (around 45 percent) and hit double digits among Black voters after winning some visible if limited support from Black clergy worried about same-sex marriage. In terms of the electoral map, Bush won 31 states, as did Trump this year; he didn’t match Trump’s 312 electoral votes (he had 286), but some of the difference is explained by the relatively smaller population of the Sun Belt states in 2004 (Texas had 34 EVs then; now it has 40; Florida has added three EVs since 2004, and New York has lost three). Those who think the bicoastal strength of the Democratic Party as a birthright now in danger should be aware that in 2004 Bush won 44 percent of the vote in California (Trump is winning 38 percent in partial returns right now), 46 percent in New Jersey (exactly Trump’s percentage in 2024), and 40 percent in New York (Trump has improved that showing a bit with 44 percent).
As for the shock value of Bush’s reelection, it can credibly be argued that in retrospect the 41st president was a paragon of civility and moderation compared to the 45th and 47th. But that’s not the way it looked to Democrats at the time. Bush was widely regarded on the left as a warmongering simpleton who had sold his party’s soul to rich people, defense contractors, and Christian fundamentalists. He very much represented the conservative extremist wing of his party, having crushed John McCain to secure the 2000 nomination and then become president with egregious assists from his brother the governor of Florida and the conservative majority of the Supreme Court. The word most commonly applied by Democrats to Bush’s vice-president, Dick Cheney, was evil.
The state of mind of Democrats after the 2004 election was not good. The party remained divided between those who had supported and opposed Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Beyond that, Democrats were on the defensive after 9/11, fearful of perceptions they were weak on terrorism specifically and national security generally. Arguably, Kamala Harris’s defeat owes a lot to the lingering effects of the pandemic, an equally traumatic event that seemed to wrong-foot the Donkey Party. As my colleague Gabriel Debenedetti recently recalled, “Many Democrats sank into desperation about whether their party would ever again be nationally viable.”
As we now know, the sense of Republican strength and Democratic weakness that was so pervasive on Election Night 2004 was ephemeral. Within months, Bush gave Democrats a unifying issue with his clumsy, immediately unsuccessful efforts to “reform” Social Security. His Iraq war became an increasingly unpopular quagmire. His administration’s feckless handling of the Katrina catastrophe on the Gulf Coast became a symbol of an administration that seemed inept and heartless both at home and abroad. Democrats flipped both congressional chambers in 2006. And then, in the crucible of a highly competitive nomination contest, Democrats found the leader they needed in a young senator named Barack Obama, who almost instantly united the party, then won the presidential election (after a financial-system implosion that further exposed the GOP’s fecklessness) with the highest percentage of the national popular vote any Democrat had won since Lyndon B. Johnson.
None of this, of course, is to say Democrats can count on anything like their post-2004 comeback in the days ahead. For all his malign plans, Trump may manage not to attack Social Security, start any major wars, mishandle any major natural disasters, or blow up the economy. But there are plenty of things that could go wrong in a second Trump administration, ranging from a tariff scheme that could reignite the very inflation that most damaged Biden and Harris, to a mass-deportation program that could alienate Latinos, to civil-liberties abuses that will vindicate Democratic charges that the MAGA movement is a threat to democracy. And the further we get from the pandemic and the inflation that followed it, the less Democrats will be held responsible for the chronic unhappiness of the American people. So while Democrats really should conduct a thorough self-examination of what went wrong since 2020, despair is premature and probably unwarranted.
