The 2024 presidential election result might have shown Democrats to be on the wrong side of history with President Donald Trump’s historic reelection, but there remains a sense of denial that led to getting run over by the proverbial train.
Six months after Trump’s landslide Electoral College victory that also handed a rare popular vote victory to a Republican president, Democrat strategists were testing Americans on how the parties are viewed by asking for a comparison to their spirit animals, The New York Times reported.
While Republicans are generally viewed as “apex predators” lions, tigers, and bears, oh my, Democrats got a shockingly poignant comparison from one of their voters in Georgia, pollster Anat Shenker-Osorio told the Times: “A deer in headlights.”
“You stand there and you see the car coming, but you’re going to stand there and get hit with it anyway,” the Georgia Democrat told the political researcher.
That response aligns with the polling, too: The Democratic Party received just 27% approval in an NBC News poll this spring.
Long reliable voting blocs of Blacks, Latinos, and youth have all trended away from Democrats and toward Trump and the GOP – despite massive liberal campaigns and media attempting to pin him as a “threat to democracy.”
Instead, popular vote democracy – and the Electoral College of the U.S.’s constitutional republic – sided with Trump in what the Times lamented as a “defeat that felt like both a political and cultural rejection.”
“There is fear, there is anxiety, and there are very real questions about the path forward — all of which I share,” Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., told the Times.
“We are losing support in vast swaths of the country, in rural America, in the Midwest, the places where I’m from: People that I grew up with who now support Donald Trump, who used to be Democrats.
“There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have the support of these folks, other than we have pushed, in so many ways, these people away from our party.”
In one of the most significant of data points outlined by the Times: the once deep-blue state of New Jersey went for former Vice President Kamala Harris at just 52%, the same margin Trump won all of the seven key battleground states, according to the Times.
That is because Republicans in the Trump era have been expanding their voter registration base for nearly a decade on the strength of the popularity of Trump’s messaging, while Democrats are getting more and more pigeon-holed as “the party of college-educated elites,” according to the Times.
“Over a long period of time, our party overdrew our trust account with the American people,” Harris’ deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty told the Times.
Long dominating the American map with its blowout leads in large blue states and cities, allowing Democrats to home in on the battlegrounds with focused campaigns and spending, migration out of blue cities and states is now giving Republican-led states larger populations and congressional representation, too, the Times noted.
Republicans have forced Democrats back to having to compete in more areas than ever before, stripping them of their de facto advantages.
“The party has to find ways to compete in states where it’s not,” former Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison told the Times.
The silver lining is the decade-long vilification of Trump just might work to restore power to Democrats, liberal experts hope.
“Trump’s numbers seem to be getting worse and worse, and I’m pretty optimistic Democrats will have some real opportunities in 2026,” Democrat pollster Zac McCrary told the Times, saying his party “lost credibility by being seen as alien on cultural issues.”
“The 2022 midterms masked the Biden problem. A good 2026 midterm — we should not let that mask a deeper problem.”
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