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Following a resounding defeat in the 2024 election, the Democratic Party has entered a period of soul-searching. Seeing voters reject the Harris Campaign and her “opportunity agenda,” they find themselves without a coherent message or recognizable leader. Given the opportunity to regroup and redefine the party’s brand, leadership is showing no signs of correction.
The most alarming dynamic of the 2024 election for Democrats was their loss of support among their core constituency: working-class voters. While the Republican policies have been seen as beneficial to wealthy people and corporations, the Republicans won voters making under $50,000 a year. At the same time, Democrats lead with wealthier voters making over $100,000, marking a reversal of decades-long voting dynamics.
The Democrats have long been perceived to be the party of the working class. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s creation of the New Deal policies like social security, support for unions, and implementation of the minimum wage established this perception. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s creation of Medicare, Medicaid and his support for the Civil & Voting Rights Act carried this perception of Democrats into the modern era. They have been rewarded for that history with consistent support from working-class people. Their waning support should act as a fire alarm for the party, pushing them to reflect on their mistakes and restore the trust of their most needed supporters. A series of post-election blunders has kept my expectations low.
Rather than retire the people and policies that lost them the election, the party continues to double-down on their mistakes. After blowing millions of dollars on corporate consultants for focus-grouped, poll-tested, out-of-touch talking points, prominent party voices shared little public ridicule for this financial malpractice. Instead of using his public profile to lambast the corrupting influence of wealthy Wall Street and Silicon Valley donors in the Donald Trump White House, the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, decided to privately grovel for their support, rendering any potential populist & anti-corporate rebrand of the party as hypocritical and insincere.
The party is also not doing itself any favors in deciding who to elevate to leadership positions. When electing the next ranking-member of the House Oversight Committee, an important position in rallying support for the party not holding the majority in Congress, former speaker Nancy Pelosi tilted the race in favor of ailing 74-year-old Gerry Connolly over the young & popular firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This leadership election could have signaled a changing of the guard, in which the dated strategies and ideas of old are replaced by their dynamic, attention- commanding counterparts. Instead, the old guard sidelined Ocasio-Cortez, picking seniority over merit.
Just like their counterparts in the House of Representatives, the Democratic National Committee is continuing the behavior that landed the party out of power. Party elites elected Minnesota Party chair Ken Martin to chair the DNC for the next four years. Rather than win over party delegates by sharing a compelling theory of change, he secured victory by leveraging his connections and relationships with party insiders. He pledged to continue relying on funds from “good billionaires,” the very habit that has estranged them from working-people.
The Democrats used to be associated with labor unions & strong social-safety net programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social-Security; these are the policies that made “working people” and “Democrat” synonymous. The party dominated Congress for decades in the mid- 20th century because they convinced people from all races & regions of the country that Democrats represented workers. After decades of deindustrialization, declining union-rates and stagnant wages, working-people have lost faith that the Democrats are fighting for them.
People remember that it was Democrat Bill Clinton who signed the North American Free Trade Agreement that fast-tracked the outsourcing of industrial jobs to Mexico and Canada. People remember that Obama bailed out Wall-Street and the automotive industry after the 2008 crash, while normal people lost their livelihoods. People remember that Hillary Clinton wrote half of Republicans off as a “basket of deplorables.”
Now, Democrats are associated, fairly or not, with “wokeness,” elitism and fecklessness. To flip this reputation, they must make it clear that they are on the side of the 99%, and not their billionaire donors. They should make themselves unignorable to the public in calling out the corrupting influence of money in politics, perhaps by denouncing Trump’s plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza after receiving $100 million from pro-Israel donors like Miriam Adelson. They can’t do this because they’ve tied their own hands and won’t jeopardize the millions in donations they too receive from AIPAIC and other pro-Israel lobbying groups.
To regain the American people’s trust, and to pass the bold, transformative policies that benefit the everyday lives of Americans, they must shake their addiction to big-money donors. By appealing to a multi-racial, working-class coalition like they did in the New Deal era, the Democrats can once again be the beloved champions of the average American. They cannot do this while also pleasing billionaires like Reid Hoffman, Mark Cuban and George Soros.
Eivin Sandstrom (he/him) is a senior studying political science and Spanish
