It’s been a grim near-month for Democrats since the election results poured in. President-elect Donald Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, and Republicans are set to have full control of Congress for the next two years. Democrats will need multiple election cycles to repair their political brand, many pundits argue.
But Democrats have a chance at bouncing back reasonably quickly — if they learn their lessons on the importance of promoting economic populism and centrist approaches to immigration while finding a backbone and willingness to challenge the hard Left’s loudest culture war crusades.
The immediate 2024 campaign aftermath also offers a cautionary political tale to Republicans. The Trump team, confident after Republicans’ big 2024 wins, has already shown some signs of overreach — such as Trump’s choice of former Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, for attorney general. On Nov. 21, Gaetz pulled his nomination under pressure from Trump amid mounting news reports of his alleged past sexual dalliances and indiscretions.
The Gaetz episode is a reminder to Republicans against letting overconfidence blindside them ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
A big but limited GOP win
Trump was the first Republican White House candidate to win the popular vote since President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection. Yet Trump’s win of a second, nonconsecutive term had limited political coattails. The already-slim House Republican majority will stay about the same — with a 220-215 edge over Democrats. Or perhaps one seat higher, depending on the outcome of a couple of uncalled races.
Senate Republicans had bigger successes, winning the majority for the first time in four years, with what will be a 53-47 edge over Democrats. Three Democratic senators lost their reelection bids and Republicans netted four seats.
Yet Republicans could have made the Democratic political body count even higher. They lost Senate races that, in hindsight, look winnable, considering Trump came out ahead in those states amid his 312-226 Electoral College win over Vice President Kamala Harris.
The defeats of Republican Senate candidates Mike Rogers in Michigan and Nevada’s Sam Brown come to mind. Rogers, a former 14-year congressman who chaired the House Intelligence Committee, and Brown, a decorated military veteran, both came on strong toward the campaign’s end as Trump surged in their states.
Yet the formula that protected Democratic candidates in the game involved keeping mum, to the extent possible, on divisive social issues such as transgender surgeries. Instead, winning Democrats such as Sen.-elect Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), a six-year congresswoman from a swing district around the state capital of Lansing, and Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV), who won reelection, emphasized economic bread-and-butter issues — “woke is broke,” many X wags quipped on Nov. 6 and after. Moreover, it was more a matter of how they discussed the economy, rather than just doing so.
“It’s not rocket science, but talking about those issues plainly, not from the faculty lounge, but from the assembly line, is, I think, a very important message,” Slotkin said during a post-Election Day briefing by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Authenticity, knowing constituents’ interests and needs, proved a winning Democratic formula in spots. It’s something that seemed sorely lacking from the losing presidential campaign of Harris, who parachuted in as the Democratic nominee 107 days before Election Day when President Joe Biden bowed out after his weak June 27 debate performance against Trump.
One Democrat who did come across to voters as authentic, particularly regarding the porous U.S.-Mexico border, was Rep.-elect Lauren Gillen (D-NY). The attorney and former Hempstead town supervisor unseated freshman Rep. Anthony Esposito (R-NY) in New York’s 4th Congressional District, based in southern Nassau County on Long Island. Gillen didn’t deflect or obfuscate on the border issue. Instead, she said in a campaign commercial, “We’re 2,000 miles from Mexico, but we are feeling the migrant crisis every day.” Gillen beat the incumbent Republican by about 2.4 percentage points.
A continent away, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) put on a masterclass of sorts about economic populism campaigning, successfully, it turned out, during her first reelection in Washington’s southwestern 3rd Congressional District. Trump won more votes than Harris in the district, as he did over Biden four years earlier. Yet Gluesenkamp Perez railed against what she called the problems of corporate money getting funneled into campaigns and government, even listing it as a top priority on her campaign website. She won reelection with about 52% of the vote.
Another House Democrat willing to distance himself from his party was Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME), first elected in 2018 and seeking reelection in Maine’s sprawling, rural 2nd Congressional District. Trump won easily in the northern Maine district, the largest east of the Mississippi River and where, in many parts, moose outnumber people. Still, Golden held on in a 50.3%-47% win by emphasizing to constituents that he was working for them “and not to be part of some effort to further the interests of the Democratic Party.”
Winning Democratic candidates also took a page out of Trump’s populist playbook. Instead of Steve Bannon’s tear-it-down approach to government, Golden, Gluesenkamp Perez, and Rep.-elect Josh Riley (D-NY) in New York’s 22nd Congressional District, among others, preached a form of progressive populism. They argued that the system is broken but that, in select cases and when applied the right way, government programs have a role in fixing it.
Gillen, for instance, spoke often about the price of insulin, for which co-pays are capped at $35 under a federal law enacted by Biden and congressional Democrats. Sen.-elect Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) touted bringing $12 million for affordable housing funding to Arizona during his nearly 10-year House career representing the state’s downtown and western Phoenix 3rd Congressional District.
Culture wars sank Democrats in many places
Democrats who lost or saw their districts swing toward Republicans weren’t able to convincingly tap into these priorities. The attempt to cover their inability to talk about the economy by redirecting the conversation to cultural issues, which came across as party-written talking points, did not help.
Republican candidates are not all one-size-fits-all when it comes to social issues — some call for a ban on affirmative action in schools, others sit on DEI boards. Meanwhile, Democratic Party leaders insist on eating their own when someone deviates from the party line. Take Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), who said after the election that he didn’t want his daughters getting hurt by biological male athletes. Massachusetts’s Democratic governor, the state Democratic Party chairman, and Tufts University denounced his comments. One city councilor in the state’s North Shore 6th Congressional District even demanded Moulton resign over the transgender sports comment.
Their response alienated voters and once again made Democrats look out of touch. Meanwhile, allowing members to disagree without being canceled, such as Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), who refuses to pander to the party platform on the Israel-Gaza conflict, signals to voters that they can disagree with them but still support the party. Though some may not agree with Fetterman’s staunchly pro-Israel platform, Democrats can’t deny that Pennsylvania voters think he’s being authentically himself.
Democrats who cater their tone to their audience — not that Republicans don’t, they’re all politicians, after all — lose big among voters, and Harris was the biggest loser this cycle. Everything she said was crafted to avoid alienating anybody, and voters could tell. She flipped on issues and wasn’t convincing enough in doing so.
Meanwhile, Gallego, who was known and trusted by his constituents, was able to shed the progressive label in the middle of a campaign and not come off as a sell-out. Gallego ended up outperforming Harris by 8 points in his Senate win.
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“People got to know who I was and what my values were, and so that they got to know me as Ruben the Marine veteran, Ruben the dad, Ruben the working-class kid,” Gallego told the Associated Press. “And I think when things started going bad we were able to resist the tide because people knew me and they had a perspective of me, they knew I was fighting for them.”
It’s a lesson both parties can heed ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. It’s one that Republicans will have to be on the watch for to counter, and Democrats to replicate, from their limited 2024 electoral successes in a few pockets of the country.
Keely Bastow is an associate editor of breaking news with the Washington Examiner.
