How Democrats Misread the Environment

A look at the misleading narratives that emerged after 2020 and 2022.

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(Photo: Peter Zay/Getty Images)

In the weeks since Donald Trump won a second term, Democrats have been busily working to understand the factors that drove their loss. Some have pointed to tactical errors; others said the national headwinds were simply too much to overcome. We at TLP have highlighted more structural problems we see facing Democrats—the unpopularity of some of their cultural attitudes and the creeping erosion of support among working-class and non-white voters, for example—and how this put the party at risk heading into this election.

But there is another, more understated force that likely contributed to Democrats’ woes this year: they misread the results of the previous two national elections, neither of which went as well for them as they believed.

Let’s start with the 2020 presidential election. At first glance, things went quite well for the Democrats that year. Joe Biden defeated Trump, achieving something rarely seen in American political history: the ouster of an incumbent president seeking re-election. Biden’s Electoral College victory, 306–232, was also fairly decisive. At the same time, his party retained control of the House and flipped the Senate, giving them a governing trifecta.

Democrats appeared to interpret these results as a mandate for change, as they immediately pursued one of the most ambitious legislative agendas in recent history. However, that election was actually very close, and it wasn’t at all clear that the American people were hungry for the type of ambitious change that Democrats were offering. First, let’s dig under the hood of the results:

• Biden actually won the Electoral College by just 42,918 votes across the three closest states: Arizona (10,457), Georgia (11,779), and Wisconsin (20,682). If Trump had won even half (or 50.01 percent) of those additional Biden votes in each state, he would have been elected to a second consecutive term.

• Jon Ossoff’s 55,232-vote win in the Georgia Senate runoff gave the party a 50–50 working majority in the upper chamber, with Vice President Harris casting tie-breaking votes.

• In the House, Democrats actually experienced a net loss of seats and kept their majority by just 31,751 votes across five districts.

• Further down the ballot, their successes were even more limited, as they failed to flip several key state house chambers on which they had spent hundreds of millions of dollars.

A reasonable read of those results might have been that voters were exhausted with Trump’s antics and simply wanted to return some stability to the government, but that they did not fully trust the Democrats enough to give them convincing majorities. But Democrats instead sought to be a transformative party, passing several sweeping policies on party-line votes, often with more care given to the size and price tag of various bills than the actual programs or substance within them.

To be sure, many of these policies, which Democrats had in some cases been working for years to achieve, were popular. But while the party was focused on securing these wins, they were doing little to address two key issues that became voters’ biggest concerns over the past few years: inflation and immigration. In fact, President Biden’s actions in office likely exacerbated those concerns. Two of his signature achievements—the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act—were negatively associated with inflation. And his early moves to overturn Trump-era immigration policies likely precipitated subsequently record-high levels of border crossings.

So, unlike past Democratic presidents who won power with a broad mandate—Roosevelt (1932), Johnson (1964), and Obama (2008)—Biden came into office with some of the thinnest margins possible for a governing majority. And yet, he took his win as a sign that Americans were clamoring for an agenda that mirrored the size of what his predecessors had delivered on.

Then came the 2022 midterms, which took place on the heels of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. The issue of abortion suddenly became a top priority for many Democrats. A Pew Research poll found that the share of Democratic voters saying abortion was “very important” to their midterm vote skyrocketed from 46 percent before Dobbs to 75 percent just before the election. Additionally, in the months leading up to Election Day, states all across the country—including some that were deeply Republican—had passed ballot measures to protect abortion access.

Democrats hoped that the salience of the abortion issue along with the presence of several extreme Republican candidates in pivotal contests would be enough to stave off the electoral defeat that almost always befalls the party of the incumbent president in midterm years. Ultimately, the party had a good midterm by historical standards, limiting losses in the House, gaining a seat in the Senate, netting one new governorship, and flipping a handful of state-legislative chambers. They did this even as Biden’s personal approval rating was mired in the low-40s.

All this convinced Democrats of a new theory: so long as abortion rights were threatened and Trump or MAGA candidates were on the ballot, an “anti-MAGA majority” would show up to defeat Republicans, regardless of how those voters felt about Biden or the Democrats. As one progressive strategist put it, “When elections are clearly about Trump and MAGA, MAGA will lose.”

However, this reading of the midterm results muddied the picture of the national political landscape:

• Despite Democrats’ success in a handful of swing races and the popularity of abortion rights, the national environment that year very much tilted in favor of Republicans. The House popular vote ended up leaning nearly three points to the right. In non-swing states, Republicans basically experienced a typical wave election, even in some places where voters also backed pro-choice measures.

• Nearly half (48 percent) of voters said the top issue facing the country was not abortion but the economy, and these voters broke Republican by a two-to-one margin, 65–32. Abortion was a distant second at just 10 percent.

• There was also significant crossover support for abortion from voters who backed Republican candidates, a sign that the issue might not necessarily give Democrats a boost in every race.

• The midterm electorate was overwhelmingly sour on Biden: 57 percent disapproved of his job performance, including 44 percent who “strongly” disapproved.

As NBC’s Chuck Todd noted recently, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama experienced typical midterm drubbings during their first terms. In response, both men were forced to re-tool their messaging and change some things about how they governed. Biden, however, did not face the same outcome, which led to a cascade of ill-fated decisions.

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Democrats thus marched into 2024 with a flawed candidate, a flawed theory of what was going on in the country, and a misreading of the issues that mattered most to people.

The results of the midterms had quashed any discussion of replacing Biden on the ticket and were surely a deciding factor behind his own decision to seek re-election, as he believed they validated the work of his first term. And the 2020 election served as a reminder that Biden was the only person who had proven he could defeat Trump.

The stories the party told themselves about the previous two elections also likely influenced Biden’s decision to put “democracy protection” at the center of his re-election campaign, as well as Harris’s decision late in the race to pivot away from a positive message detailing her agenda for working- and middle-class Americans toward one centered on threats to abortion and Trump’s “fascist” tendencies.¹

In the end, none of it worked. A consensus is now forming that the results were a referendum on Biden’s presidency. The top two issues on voters’ minds were the ones that had festered during his term—inflation and immigration—and voters who prioritized them overwhelmingly broke for Trump. In several states, voters even passed measures securing access to abortion while breaking for Trump by double digits. And while some MAGA candidates running in swing states did lose, the ultimate MAGA candidate did not.

Herein lies the danger of creating narratives of convenience rather than of truth. For Democrats, the path of least resistance heading into 2024 was sticking with an incumbent president who was decently popular among the party’s voters and running on abortion and democracy—strong issues for them. They pointed to the results of 2020 and 2022 as evidence to justify these decisions. However, this ultimately led them to ignore the warning signs suggesting voters were unhappy with Biden and cared most about inflation and the border. Democrats’ inability to recognize this may very well have delivered the presidency to Trump once more.

1. What was remarkable about these moves is that Hillary Clinton memorably employed the exact same strategy against Trump in 2016—to no avail.