Forging Paths to Democratic Success
Plus: Dumping the Filibuster
Why can’t Democrats just take the win?
The Democratic Party pulled off what amounts to a blow-out on Election Day — achieving stunning victories across the nation: In Blue States (New York City’s mayoral race and California’s redistricting referendum), Swing States (Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court justice retention) and Red States (Georgia’s statewide policy offices).
Yet, the news, post- and pre-election, has been awash with tales of a Democratic civil war — the classic “Dems in Disarray” hed (journalize for “headline). Though arguments about woes of the “Democratic” brand get some attention, the ferocious battle royale between Democratic centrists and the progressive left remains the primary focus. Consider the hed atop The New York Times front page today: “How the Elections Intensified the Fight Over the Democratic Party.”
Josh Marshall, founder and Grand Pooh-Bah of Talking Points Memo, for one, declares he has had more than enough of this in his post, “A Few Day-After-the-Election Thoughts”:
A number of morning-after reviews I’ve seen say that the Democrats had had a great night but still hadn’t addressed their “civil war” — the battle over whether to run “moderates” or “progressives.” Is it a future of [Abigail] Spanbergers or [Zohran] Mamdanis?
That doesn’t seem quite right to me. They have a pretty good model: find candidates suited to their constituencies and focus on cost-of-living issues and opposition to Donald Trump’s autocracy. Full stop. It’s not more complicated than that. That’s your opposition message. To the extent there are big operative questions, they turn on how to use political power to battle encroaching autocracy. At least in the near term that’s separate from the hot-button policy questions that ordinarily divide centrists, liberals and progressive Democrats. … [T]hat simple program outlined above is more than adequate now and for the next year.
The week of the election, New York magazine devoted essentially its entire issue to its cover story “The Fight for the Future of the Democratic Party.” The pieces are smart, by talented writers and presented as an astute package: “Abundance Bros vs Bernie Bros” and “The Olds Who Won’t Quit” are two components.
Reading it, however, you would have had no inkling of the remarkable wins in the offing.
Even after the Democratic wins, many political analysts saw only looming problems. As Atlantic Assistant Editor Marc Novicoff wrote in “Democratic Momentum Could Be a Mirage”:
In the Trump era, Democrats have routinely dominated low-turnout elections. … Getting the highly engaged to vote blue has never been the problem. Democrats’ weakness manifests in presidential elections, in which more people vote …. Persuading an ever more engaged slice of the electorate to vote for you by an ever-higher margin is better than nothing, but it does very little to help rebuild a party at the national level….
Since Trump was first elected, the Democratic base has gotten older, whiter, richer, more female, and more highly educated. For decades, those have been the voters that most consistently head to the polls. Early data do suggest that a small but meaningful portion of Democratic voters on Tuesday were Trump voters in 2024. That’s an encouraging sign for Democrats if true. But it is also consistent with the possibility that the party has increased its lead only with highly engaged voters, without having fixed its irregular-voter problem.
The thing is, however, that the voters who turned out for Democrats on Tuesday were not primarily “older, whiter, richer.” Bill Schneider, the savvy former CNN political analyst who wrote for me regularly at The Los Angeles Times Sunday “Opinion” section as well as at Politico and Reuters, dissected Tuesday’s turnout in his new Substack post, “Trump Trounced”:
Just half of New York City voters were white. … Mamdani got his margin from minority voters (56 percent for Mamdani) and from young voters (voters under 45 years old were 70 percent for Mamdani, those 45 and older voted 51 to 40 percent for Andrew Cuomo). … The Nov. 4 voters looked like a new New York – young, heavily non-white, mostly born outside the city and only 16 percent Jewish. …
The biggest danger to President Donald Trump is the prospect of a coalition between two sources of discontent: working-class voters angry over lack of “affordability” and educated upper-middle-class voters angry over threats to democracy (the “No Kings” marchers). Put those two groups together and you have the prospect of a fierce anti-Trump backlash. Just like we saw on Nov. 4.
Ron Brownstein, who displays his deep understanding of the U.S. political landscape with every article, also sees the possible emergence of a robust coalition in his Bloomberg “Opinion” column, “Election Day Sent an Unmistakable Warning to Republicans”:
With resounding wins in Tuesday’s Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, Democrats substantially repaired the most important cracks that President Donald Trump made in their coalition in the 2024 election. That gives Democrats reason for optimism — though not yet certainty — that they are on track for a solid recovery in the 2026 midterm election.
Democrats Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia regained significant ground among two groups where Trump made noteworthy advances last year: working-class people of color and young people, according to both media exit polls and county-by-county election results. The two Democrats also improved among college-educated voters, essentially matching the party’s 2024 showing with White voters and improving among non-White voters with a four-year degree…
Even the most optimistic Democrats don’t contend that Tuesday’s results prove the party has solved its problems with those voting blocs. … But the Democratic wins do signal that exuberant Republican predictions after 2024 — that Trump had engineered a durable realignment, particularly among working-class Hispanic, Black and Asian American voters — were premature. … Moreover, the same economic frustrations that boosted Trump among those groups last year are buffeting him, and other Republicans, now.
TPM’s Josh Marshall has been lamenting for a while now that some news reporting sounds too close to GOP talking points. Here’s how he reworked that idea after the election in his post, “The Insider Politics Sheets Are Scurrying for New Conventional Wisdom” :
This morning’s Punchbowl newsletter runs with the headline “Political winds whip the MAGA movement.” The movement is rocked by an argument about anti-semitism, good or bad? Trump’s tariffs, his central policy, are on the rocks. Trump’s out of sync with the congressional Republicans on the shutdown. Republicans are losing the shutdown. He’s unpopular. Their policies are unpopular. Costs continue to rise. It all sounds pretty bad, and the Punchbowl editors add in the bad election night too. What’s notable though is how much of this was the case before Wednesday morning, before which they were generally saying that things were going great for Trump and the GOP.
That overstates it a bit. But not much. It’s no surprise that political observers’ sense of what’s happening, the big picture, would shift after an election night in which Democrats are widely perceived having exceeded expectations. What’s notable is that this new sense of the big picture is explained by things that were already the case before Election Day!
Dumping the Filibuster
We know President Donald Trump has a twisted relationship with dogs – Phil Rucker, while on The Washington Post, wrote a memorable 2018 piece, “‘Like a dog’: Trump has a long history of using canine insults to dehumanize enemies.” Yet, on certain topics, Trump himself acts like a terrier with a bone: He just can’t let it go.
You might think he’s forgotten all about something and moved on. But certain things — his fascination with military parades, for example, or his thirst for revenge against former FBI Director James Comey and New York State Atty. Gen. Letitia James, or his desire for Greenland — just keep coming back. If the Democrats get lucky, Trump’s call to abolish the Senate filibuster, which he has now cited several times, will be added to this list.
Political scientists acknowledge that the filibuster is a key contributor to Senate dysfunction. As former Rep. Chris Shays wrote in The Hill, “If you believe in democracy, we must get rid of the Senate filibuster.”
Some have talked about tinkering with it. Tim Miller, a Bulwark standout, wrote back in 2022, Bring Back the Talking Filibuster. Miller understands the problems this parliamentary tactic creates: we now have more filibusters in a year than they did in the entire 1800s. And Congress is stuck in a permanent L.A.-rush-hour-level gridlock.
The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait lays out what disappearing the filibuster would mean in his new piece, “How Trump Wants to Help Democrats.” He presents an astute argument:
Support for the filibuster used to be thoroughly bipartisan. In recent years, Democrats have mostly abandoned it, even as it retains its Republican backing. The reason for this is simple: Republicans have fewer ambitions for government, and most of the things they want the Senate to do — confirm judges and appointees; cut taxes and spending — can already be done with 51 votes.
Of course, the filibuster is not completely useless for Democrats in the minority. They are using it right now to shut down the government in order to force Republicans to extend health-insurance subsidies. But over the long run, the filibuster does more to impair Democrats, the party of expansive government, than Republicans.
The reason Trump has turned so vociferously against the filibuster is that he doesn’t care about the long run. Right now, with his party in control of the Senate but lacking 60 votes, the filibuster does nothing to help him.
So, two questions: 1) Will Trump keep up his anti-filibuster trash talk? and 2) If he does, will Republicans give in to him on this — as they have on so much else?
We’ll see how it all plays out…
Another great substack. Thank you and I completely agree with Josh Marshall, so thank you for his comments. Dems do not need to be just one thing, they should accommodate their constituents - this is a big country. One size does not fit all.