There’s a lot about politics that’s hard to predict, but there’s something you can count on every four years: One party loses a presidential election, and the recriminations begin.
Every four years, the post-election fight seems to play out the same way. Every move of the losing campaign is questioned and scrutinized. The party’s center blames the activists for alienating swing voters. The activists blame the center for failing to mobilize the base.
And no matter what, you’ll find each pundit concluding that the party’s way forward is to do exactly what that pundit has been arguing for all along.
While you might not guess it from my tone, these debates do matter. They shape the strategy of the next midterm campaign, they can change the policies supported by elected officials, and they even influence how ordinary voters cast their ballots in future presidential primaries.
Still, there’s a reason you could probably tell my eyes roll at the prospect of most election postmortems. In hindsight, they don’t usually look great.
In fact, many look so bad that there may be more lessons for today’s Democrats in the failure of past postmortems than in any analysis of Kamala Harris’s campaign.
Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane.
After 2004, Democrats believed they had lost because of social issues and national security. George W. Bush had campaigned on a promise to keep America safe and ban same-sex marriage, while John Kerry was attacked as a flip-flopping Massachusetts liberal.
Democrats thought they needed to move to the center and appeal to rural conservatives. Instead, they nominated a liberal Black Democrat from Chicago — and won.
After 2012, Republicans thought they lost because of demographics. According to exit polls, Mitt Romney had fared better among white voters than any Republican since 1988, but he lost decisively anyway. The implication was that Republicans couldn’t win back the White House without reaching out to a new generation of young, Black, Hispanic and Asian voters, including by supporting immigration reform.
Instead, they nominated Donald J. Trump, who opposed immigration reform and alienated many of the same voters during his campaign — and won.
After 2016, Democrats were of two minds about their defeat. Progressives thought Democrats lost because of weak turnout. The party’s center pointed to Hillary Clinton’s personal unpopularity and defections from white working-class voters. In the end, Democrats nominated Joe Biden in hopes of winning them back. He won, but not by winning back white working-class Obama-Trump voters in Ohio or Iowa. Instead, he made his largest gains among white college graduates, a group that had already solidly backed Democrats in the prior election.
After 2020, many Republicans weren’t even willing to concede they lost, but those who did reckon with Mr. Trump’s defeat argued, of course, that the party needed someone very different from the person who lost the last election. Instead, Republicans nominated that person again — and won.
None of these post-election autopsies were necessarily wrong. Perhaps the losing parties really would have done better if they had followed the advice of the postmortems.
Still, they don’t look great in hindsight. They largely overstated the challenges facing the losing parties and failed to anticipate how they would win back power. Worse, the losing parties often won back the White House without following the prescriptions of the postmortems. Indeed, in these four examples, the losing party won back the White House in the very next election.
There are a lot of lessons in this surprisingly poor track record. The most obvious one: It may not be as bad as it looks for the losing party. This can be hard to recognize, as losing a presidential election can feel psychologically crushing. But whatever it felt like at the time, none of these elections were crushing electoral defeats: On average, the winning party prevailed by an average of just 2.2 points in the popular vote and in the key “tipping-point” state in these four close elections (2004, 2012, 2016, 2020).
There’s good news here for Democrats today. It may not feel like it, but this was still a close election: Ms. Harris lost by only 1.5 points in the national popular vote and 1.7 points in the tipping-point state, Pennsylvania, each slightly closer than the aforementioned 2.2-point average margin of defeat in 2004, 2012, 2016 and 2020.
A less obvious lesson: It’s hard to undo recent electoral trends. While the postmortems usually identify why a party lost, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the easiest way back to the White House is simply to win back the voters who seemed to decide the last election. In fact, it’s hard to find a great recent example of a party pulling it off.
Why is it so hard to undo recent shifts? Many electoral trends are driven by powerful forces. After all, it takes a lot for a voter to flip or a region to swing in a deeply polarized country, and as a consequence it may not be easy to lure them back in full. In a sense, it’s a little bit like a political breakup: Just as it’s not easy to get back together with your ex, political parties may find their best opportunities lie elsewhere.
This is probably not a lesson that Democrats want to hear today. They would undoubtedly prefer to win the 2028 election by reclaiming their pre-Trump advantage among working-class, nonwhite and young voters, who are all core to the party’s self-image. While they might do so, recent history suggests it won’t be easy. Instead, many of the forces driving recent trends — like the rise of conservative populism and growing Democratic strength among college graduates — could make it even harder.
Finally, there’s the most important reason the autopsies haven’t panned out: the desire for change. The president’s party has retained the White House only once since 2004, mostly because voters have been unsatisfied with the state of the country for the last 20 years. No president has sustained high approval ratings since Mr. Bush, in the wake of Sept. 11.
As a result, losing parties haven’t needed to make brilliant changes to return to the White House, even though the postmortems almost always imply such changes are necessary. The implication is that the most important factors shaping the next election probably aren’t in the hands of the loser, whether it’s the state of the economy or the conduct of the party in power.
Looking even further back, the president’s party has won only 40 percent of presidential elections from 1968 to today. With that record, perhaps it’s the winning party that really faces the toughest question post-election: How do you build public support during an era of relatively slow growth, low trust in government and low satisfaction with the state of the country?
Here, the ball is in Mr. Trump’s court. If he and his approach are popular in four years, there might be little Democrats can do. Recent history suggests, however, that Democrats might well have an opening.
It’s too soon to say what form the opening will take. It may not be what the Democrats expect today. An economic recession brought by tariffs and deportations, for instance, might nudge Democrats down the road toward a progressive-minded neoliberalism that they would be loath to argue for today.
Whatever the case, a simple desire for change might be all Democrats need to return to the White House. Of course, they would need a theory of what’s wrong with America during their campaign, and one that contrasts with the vision of the party in power.
Whether it’s “Change We Can Believe In,” “Restore the Soul of America” or “Make America Great Again,” it may not be what postmortems have called for in the wake of this election.
But it might still do the trick anyway.
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