“The Democratic Party has emerged from this election struggling over what it stands for, anxious about its political future and baffled about how to compete with a Republican Party that some Democrats say may be headed for a period of electoral dominance,” he wrote just now. 20 years old reporter New York Times Adam Nagourney.
“Democrats say President Bush’s defeat of Sen. John Kerry by three million votes has left the party facing its toughest moment in at least 20 years. Some believe that the situation is particularly worrying due to the absence of a convincing Democratic leader prepared to lead the party back to power or carry its flag in 2008,” said this report from November 7, 2004 in which there was no mention of the newly elected Democratic senator from Illinois, one Barack Obama.
In those 2004 presidential elections, George W. Bush won clearly after an almost accidental victory in 2000, when he lost the popular vote and won the majority of the Electoral College – the one that matters to reach the White House – thanks to the fact that the Court Supreme Court decided by one vote to suspend the recount in Florida. The 2004 elections were the last so far in which a Republican presidential candidate had won the popular vote: in Bush’s case by 2.4%. In those elections, furthermore, the Republican Party consolidated the majority it already had in both chambers: it gained 55 senators and 232 members of the House of Representatives.
Less overwhelming majority
The victory of Donald Trump and his party now comes after a first term in which he lost the popular vote by a record of almost three million votes against Hillary Clinton, but achieved the majority by a few tens of thousands of votes in three key states. of the Electoral College, the sum of the votes distributed by the states to whoever wins the majority in that territory and given by the White House. Now his victory is more resounding than eight years ago, but less bulky than Bush’s in 2004 (or Obama’s in 2008 and 2012 and Biden’s in 2020). There are still millions of votes to be counted, especially in California and other states in the western part of the country, but it is estimated that Trump will win the popular vote by one and a half points with a participation slightly lower than that of 2020.
The Republicans will now have a majority of 52 seats in the Senate and are close to maintaining it in the House of Representatives, although the result is unclear as the scrutiny continues. In any case, the majority in the House will be tight, slightly above the 218 congressmen necessary to take control.
In the United States, furthermore, there is no party discipline and in the current legislature the division within the Republican Party was already clear in the fight over its leader, after the dismissal of Kevin McCarthy in 2023 and the election of his successor, the ultra Mike Johnson, after 15 votes. The battle over who will be the leader now and the rules for electing him has already begun within the Republican Party.
Iraq, lattes and gays
The Democrats’ 2024 defeat also feels similar to that of 2004 because of the level of mobilization before the elections against Bush and the invasion of Iraq. The abuses of the so-called war on terror had already been portrayed with the revelations by the New York Timeshe New YorkerCBS and other media about the torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons or the systematic accusations without evidence by Attorney General John Ashcroft, with a long history of violating civil liberties. Mass protests about the war and women’s rights then rivaled those of the Vietnam War, there were organized readings of the Constitution and food markets sold cookies with the word Bush crossed out. As now, the argument that demoralized the Democrats after the electoral defeat was that the Republican president was well known when the majority re-elected him.
The context was very different due to Biden’s late withdrawal this year and his unpopularity, but the elections were expected to be close, with polls close to a tie, as now. The elections also played on the charisma of Bush, a millionaire who connected with the ordinary voter in the face of the supposed inability of the Democrats portrayed as elitist because they lived in cities, read the New York Times and they drank Starbucks lattes.
In reality, Bush’s economic plans had focused on lowering taxes on the rich and had left some of his own proposals for the population more broadly on education and Social Security unfunded.
The debate about what has happened now is also similar to that then in social issues: in 2004, Republicans exploited the rejection of same-sex marriage, stood against positive discrimination for minorities and limited even research with stem cells that upset anti-abortion activists.
In 2024, one of the most common readings of the results among Democrats is that their support for trans rights and again the defense of minorities has harmed them with a key part of the electorate. Politicians, including Senator Bernie Sanders, and other voices inside and outside the party now say that Democrats have to abandon “identity politics,” that is, inclusive language, trans rights in competitions and schools, or the promotion of minorities in universities and jobs. The argument is that these issues have distracted the party from other economic issues that affect more people.
At the same time, in reality, the Democratic Party’s economic program defended by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris of more public investment, defense of unions and raising the minimum wage is further to the left than the party has been in decades. and closer to the interests of the majority of workers.
The elite?
The most prominent gap now is by education: the more college education a voter has, the more likely they are to support the Democratic Party. It can be seen that this year’s data among Trump and Harris voters without university studies are very similar to those of Bush and Kerry voters in 2004, although there is now a distance between those with more education that did not exist 20 years ago .
Even so, the concept of elite by this measure is forced by the Republican message then and now, among other things by the number of educated people in the country: 38% of those over 25 years of age have a university degree in the United States. , and, if we count people in this age group who have some university education either because they are studying or left their studies halfway, the percentage rises to 60%. This is without counting younger people who are starting university or equivalent.
Democratic arguments about who or what was to blame in 2004 inside and outside the party also resemble those now. Many already believed two decades ago that Fox News’ disinformation was the main cause and that the press had not done its job well.
“It’s a failed institution in this country,” Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont and left-wing candidate for the party that had lost in the primary that year, told me in an interview in 2004. So Dean was complaining that the media was dedicated to “entertainment.” He also believed that the media in the United States was going to change and would be more like “the European model, where each party has its newspaper or a newspaper that openly supports it” because in the United States the Democrats did not have a “speaker” like Fox.
Authoritarianism and brakes
The main point of distinction with 2004 and almost any year in recent decades is that never has a president come to power with an overtly authoritarian agenda and such a clear record of inciting violence and persecuting perceived enemies. Nor one convicted of a serious crime, repudiated twice in a trial impeachment and defined by former cabinet members as “fascist.”
The alteration of norms and laws in the functioning of the democratic system is a factor that can alter the future of the elections, although it is difficult to know now how far Trump and his allies will go.
Leaving aside the distance, the erosion of norms already occurred during the years of the Bush Administration. Although the president maintained manners, his government maneuvered to bypass the law and the Constitution to indefinitely imprison terrorist suspects, surveil its own citizens, and increase presidential powers in disregard of Congress and international law. In those years when the Republican Party had the presidency, the two chambers and the Supreme Court (especially after Bush appointed two conservative judges, in 2005 and 2006) other brakes on the system were tested, as will happen now.
The states
Under the country’s federal system, states have broad powers in their territory and both the governors and the legislative chambers of those states can make and undo essential laws on rights and obligations.
The Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter of some of those rules and Congress can pass federal laws that can affect everyone, but so far the trend in some more controversial debates is to let the states make their own decisions.
Thinking about specific Trump measures such as the deportation of millions of people, states may resist cooperating with federal security forces to detain migrants – New York already does so – and defend the protection of places of worship, hospitals and schools . It is also the states that can issue identification documents if the federal Administration creates obstacles.
Democrats now have governors in 23 states, including some of the most populous and richest, such as California and New York, and also others where Trump has now won, such as North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona. California Governor Gavin Newsom has called a special session of the chambers to approve new laws and regulations that strengthen protections for abortion rights and the fight against climate change. New York Governor Katie Hochul has called for a complete review looking for possible legal loopholes that the Trump Administration could exploit to impose its will.
Courts and elections in 2026
Another of the key pieces, as happened in 2016, are the state attorneys general and the courts below the Supreme Court.
In recent hours, Biden has named two more district judges in his 56th round of judge selection. Trump is already encouraging Republicans to bend the rules and band together to block the appointments, but so far it hasn’t happened.
And we must not forget that in November 2026 legislative elections will be held again to renew the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate. These are the mid-term elections of the president in which the party in power traditionally loses ground.
In 2006, two years after the Republican victory from which Democrats believed they could not recover for decades, the Democratic Party achieved a majority in both chambers for the first time since 1992. Those elections also marked another milestone: for the first time a woman was elected to lead the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi.
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