It's now one week since Election Day. Mark Leibovich in "The Atlantic" goes all the way back to Hillary Clinton's close loss to Donald Trump in 2016 to explain the source of the Democrats' defeats in 2024.
Leibovich: "Democrats engaged in no real reckoning after 2016. Essentially they became a party that defined itself in opposition to Trump, just as Republicans have been defined in submission to him."
During the 2024 campaign I've found myself asking the same question over and over: What are the Democrats' solutions? According to Pew Research, "among Trump supporters, the economy (93%), immigration (82%) and violent crime (76%) are the leading issues."
Trump offered solutions to all three: tariffs; a wall and deportation; and more brutal policing. How did Democrats respond? By pointing out reasonably and rationally, with data and logic, why tariffs won't work; why deporting 21 million people is not practical and could very well make the economy worse; and why violent crime is no longer the problem conservatives think it is, how New York City today is a lot safer than Small-Town America.
Notice that those responses are not solutions. They are criticisms of Trump's proposed solutions. The Democrats need to spend more time crafting and then campaigning on solutions of their own. Trump did, and won. Democrats spent their time criticizing Trump, and lost.
There's an old saying in politics: "You can’t beat somebody with nobody". That goes for platforms as well as candidates. We've now seen, in two out of the last three elections, that "Orange Man Bad", true as it might be, is not a reliably winning message. Democrats need to get to work building a platform for 2026, a platform with solutions for people's problems. Because when the Republican prescriptions fail, and they inevitably will, the Democrats need to be ready with their own prescriptions to offer voters.
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