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What Republicans now know

In the wake of the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee commissioned an “autopsy” of the Romney-Ryan campaign, assessing where things went wrong and what they could do to improve their electoral odds in 2016 and beyond. Among the key findings were that:

• The Republican Party had become ideologically constrained, failing to effectively message to voters who didn’t already agree with the RNC platform, and that the party should take on more of a populist economic message and a more inclusive message on social issues.

• The GOP’s rhetoric on immigration and similar cultural topics limited its appeal to voters outside the straight white middle class, and that the party should moderate on its anti-immigration stance.

• The use of TV advertising was rapidly becoming less valuable in winning votes, and the party should rapidly transition toward adopting social media and alternative forms of advertising to win previously under-targeted voters.

The report, created by a who’s who of late-2000s political professionals, was welcomed by party leadership as a brutally honest, refreshing call to change course. The College Republican National Committee released a similarly well-received report, citing views of young voters that Republicans were “closed-minded, racist, rigid, old-fashioned.”

One man, however, loudly opposed the findings of the report: Donald Trump.

Indeed, in 2016, Trump’s nomination and election win was viewed by many as a repudiation of the 2012 autopsy. Immigration reform? Nah. An inclusive social message? Absolutely not.

At first glance, this assessment makes sense. Many of the report’s authors, from Ari Fleischer to Glenn McCall have ditched their recommendations in favor donning a profoundly Trumpian style. On his National Committeeman campaign website, McCall writes:

In 2016, I was among the many who viewed Trump’s election as the party ditching the recommendations made in the RNC autopsy. But I think I—alongside many in the media—was wrong. Take a look back at the the recommendations above. While Trump’s GOP flips the finger to the autopsy on policy, its increasingly populist tone and rapid adoption of alternative media show that the party has indeed implemented some of the report’s recommendations on advertising and media strategy.

The party that refused to learn may actually have taken some lessons from 2012. Of course, none of this happens in a vacuum. It’s also entirely possible that the GOP has learned very little, and that the Democratic party has learned even less in the last 12 years.

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What Democrats should know

Unlike the GOP, the Democratic Party kept its post-mortems after 2016 confidential. In the absence of an official campaign/party autopsy, approximately 20 different interest groups and caucuses released their own. One group, Third Way, appears to have hit the nail on the head more than most. Their February 2017 report states:

This report highlights the dynamic voting patterns of various coalitions. While some groups view the electorate as a static agglomeration of demographic interest groups to be courted with niche issues and deployed by “Get Out the Vote” tactics, Third Way highlights that voting blocs are not set in stone. The assumptions by many that demographic change combined with an increasingly younger electorate would create lasting Democratic majorities simply did not pan out. The report further states:

Simply put, the voting blocs that make up the American electorate need to be courted and treated as dynamic groups of people that are more than their demographic. Latino voters cannot be gained simply by being for improving the immigration system. Black voters cannot be consistently won by promising to appoint Black cabinet secretaries and judges. And young voters can’t be dominated by promises of student loan forgiveness.

The voters in these groups need to be treated as human beings with human needs, such as affordable goods, safety, stability, etc.

This is where the Democratic Party failed.

By striving to push the needle on domestic policy, the Democratic Party and the media that voters view as “liberal” have increasingly focused on issues that aren’t relevant to many of these voters. And because of this, they have taken their votes elsewhere in droves.

Harris lost Latino men to Trump and performed worse among Latina women & Black men than Clinton or Biden did:

And younger voters skewed toward Trump in a significant shift from previous years.

In response to these outcomes, some progressives like Bernie Sanders have come out and claimed that the party lost because it wasn’t progressive enough, economically populist enough, or anti-Israel/anti-war enough.

That’s hogwash.

If that were the case, Michigan wouldn’t have gone for Trump while electing a Jewish, Zionist, former CIA agent:

If that were the case, the anti-trade, economically populist policies that the Biden administration pursued to re-shore jobs in the Midwest would have been rewarded rather than punished:

If that were the case, deep blue California wouldn’t vote for a tough-on-crime ballot measure that Harris was too scared to endorse likely in greater numbers than they voted for Harris herself:

If that were the case, Bernie Sanders wouldn’t have performed worse in his home state than Kamala Harris:

The facts on the ground aren’t the issue here. It’s the messaging around them. The Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg’s tweet here shows the problem quite clearly:

The Democratic Party focused over the last eight years on the wrong problems. They focused on equity over opportunity. They focused on “Latinx” over actually talking to Latino voters (who refuse to use the term!). They focused on defunding the police over understanding why Walgreens having to lock up deodorant might piss off urban voters. They focused on progressive shibboleths over Sister Souljah moments.

And that failure to reject the progressive talking points of 2014 has led the Democratic Party of 2024 to be seen as more extreme than the Republican Party by many in the middle:

This chart by Echelon Insights paints a clearer picture:

The Democratic Party has spent the last decade celebrating the fact that the “Liberal” share of the electorate is larger than any other group without recognizing that they as a group only make up 41% of the electorate. The “strong liberals,” all of those populist progressives that the Sanders wing of the party is babbling about, only make up 11% of the electorate:

Rather than reaching out to capture some of the populist coalition, some of the disaffected conservatives who can’t support Trump, and even some of those Libertarians, the party doubled down on liberal messaging targeted at that 11% of the electorate with preachy messaging on social issues. And the other 89% didn’t buy it.

The lesson to be learned

The Democratic Party did not make the investments necessary to win over parts of these coalitions. Trotting out Liz Cheney at the last minute isn’t enough to win over these groups; just like racial voting blocs, you have to make investments in what they care about rather than treating them as a monolith.

While trying to paint itself as the party of joy, it held onto the 2016 Democratic Party’s judgement of those outside of its coalition. Rather than joyful, Democratic candidates once again came across as snooty and holier-than-thou.

Democratic Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who significantly outperformed Harris in her rural Washington district, said this:

Gluesenkamp Perez is right. As much as Democrats tried to make Tim Walz’s “Weird” attack stick (rightly so), the DNC is still viewed as the party of weird—the party of preening HOA presidents and hall monitors out to police language instead of truly meeting people where they are.

Like the Republican Party of 2012, the Democratic Party has become ideologically constrained, and now struggles existentially to convince voters outside of its ideological Venn-Diagram to support its candidates.

The party needs to take the hint from Gluesenkamp Perez, Elissa Slotkin, and Abigail Spanberger, who was quoted in 2022 saying:

That’s it. Shut up about socialism. Talk to regular people. And focus on solving the problems of different voter blocs rather than preaching at them.

I’ve got a lot more to say about how to actually do that, but that’s for next week.