Dwelling on the 2024 Defeat Is a Waste of Time for Democrats

Look, I get it: There are many reasons Democrats feel the need to look back at the electoral calamity of 2024. The Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, has books to sell. Joe Biden loyalists feel they must rehabilitate his tarnished image. Operatives and donors who were knee-deep in the Biden or Harris campaigns naturally have scores to settle and grudges to air. And above all, the ideological warriors of the Democratic left and center want to blame each other for the debacle, just as they’ve blamed every Democratic defeat large or small on each other since about 1968.

In wallowing in the 2024 defeat, Democrats are avidly assisted by Republicans experiencing intense Schadenfreude at their misery. The GOP is deeply invested in spinning the close 2024 results into an irreversible realignment that will make Donald Trump and his heirs masters of the universe until the end of time.

So I’m not under the illusion that Democrats will be able to eschew 2024 reminiscences altogether. But they should give it a try. The Washington Post reported earlier this week that the Democratic National Committee was slow-walking its official “autopsy report” on 2024 until 2025 elections are over, out of concern that negative discussion of the party (and, for that matter, of the accuracy or inaccuracy of the “autopsy” itself) might affect organizers’ morale or even voter turnout. Here’s a better idea: Democrats should put off any official 2024 “autopsy” until late November 2026, when the midterms are done.

This recommendation does not stem from a preoccupation with vibes or a belief that Democrats can’t handle bad news or division over what happened in 2024. The more basic truth is that much of what happened in 2024 is probably irrelevant to what will happen in 2026, and revisiting it all is just a big, fat waste of time, at least until the next presidential election cycle arrives. Here’s why.

Different elections, different electorates

Midterm elections are fundamentally different than presidential elections in multiple ways. Basically, different electorates show up for each. Presidential election turnout is invariably higher (it was 67 percent in 2020 and 64 percent in 2024). Voters who participate in presidential but not midterm elections are often referred to as “low-propensity voters.”

Until very recently, Republicans had an advantage among the “high-propensity voters” most likely to show up for midterms. But in the Trump era, that advantage has shifted to Democrats. So a lot of the endless debate over Trump’s gains among low-propensity voters in 2024 might not even be relevant to the 2026 electorate.

Comparative versus referendum elections

Presidential elections are mostly comparative, i.e., a choice between two candidates representing the two major parties (although perceptions of the party controlling the White House have a significant effect on that choice). Midterm elections are mostly referenda on the party in power, particularly when that party has trifecta control in D.C., as Republicans do today. So polls showing that voters favor one party or the other on certain issues can be a bit misleading; their perceptions of the president’s performance on those issues is more germane.

This is why at least some of the fretting about the supposed weakness of the “Democratic brand” coming out of 2024 is probably excessive. In a first-past-the-post system dominated by two major parties, the “out” party will benefit from any and all misgivings about the “in” party. Trump’s persistently underwater job-approval numbers help explain why he’s trying to rig the midterms through gerrymandering and voter suppression.

There is also a tendency, which is real but hard to quantify, for voters who are aligned with or even support the agenda of the president’s party to vote against it as a “check against presidential power.” This helps explain why the party controlling the White House almost always loses congressional seats (and often governorships and state legislatures) in midterms.

The 2024 election was extremely unusual

The situation facing voters next year isn’t going to resemble the one that existed in the very strange 2024 election. Whether their “brand” is weak or strong, Democrats are not going to be led by 81-year-old Joe Biden and then by a relatively untested Kamala Harris. Yes, some Democrats believe they have too many old politicians in office or running for office, but it’s a different problem from a historically old man being the accepted head of the party and the most powerful person in the world.

Similarly, it makes a world of difference that Democrats will not control the White House and Congress in 2026. There is an ineradicable group of voters (growing larger with younger cohorts) who are profoundly unhappy with the status quo and will swing between the two parties based on who controls the country. This “I hate everything” vote was a millstone for Democrats in 2024. It won’t be in 2026.

The midterm battlegrounds are different

The 2024 election was fought over seven battleground states that were seriously contested by both parties: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump carried all of them, which created the mirage of a landslide (as though all those 75 million Democratic votes didn’t actually count). In the 2026 midterms, the big battle will be over competitive Senate and especially House races. Of the nine Senate races deemed competitive by Cook Political Report, just three are in 2024 battleground states. Thirty-nine House races are rated as competitive by Cook. Eleven are in 2024 battleground states. Different strokes (and messages) may be appropriate for different folks.

Some political lessons are timeless

Without a deep dive into the particulars of 2024, Democrats clearly made some mistakes that you don’t need an “autopsy” to identify. It’s been obvious at least since the swiftboating of John Kerry in 2004 that falling silent in the face of relentless opposition attacks is almost always a very bad idea — see the Harris-Walz campaign’s decision to look the other way or change the subject as the Trump-Vance campaign relentlessly pounded her using clips from the bizarre 2019 interview in which Harris appeared enthusiastic about spending taxpayer dollars on gender-assignment surgery for prisoners who were also illegal immigrants. I’m reasonably sure future candidates won’t make that mistake.

The threat posed by Trump is no longer hypothetical

The single biggest reason 2024 is relatively useless as a model for 2026 is that Trump won in no small part because a significant slice of voters simply did not buy Democratic claims that he was dangerously authoritarian, cruel, and indifferent to the suffering he wanted to inflict on noncriminal immigrants and people dependent on government help to make ends meet. Some remembered his first term as relatively benign (aside from a pandemic for which he was not blamed), while others, particularly younger voters, thought all politicians were pretty much the same.

We’ve now had more than nine months of dramatic proof that Democratic warnings about Trump 2.0 were, if anything, understated. That won’t matter to Trump’s MAGA base; indeed, their own anger and hostility to democracy seem stronger than ever. But it will matter to many of the same swing voters who opened the door to Trump’s return to power.