Electorally, All Hope Is Not Lost for Liberals

After Trump’s stunning and overwhelming victory, I want to echo all the “keep fighting” encouragement you are seeing in excellent pieces like this one from Jack Mirkinson in Discourse Blog, and I want to expand it to something more tangible than the eternal search for justice in this world: the electoral map.

Yes, this was an ass kicking.

The Obama coalition that led the Democrats back to electoral prominence has cracked.

But it is not gone.

Trump is a unique force in American politics, and we are at a unique time in history. This was the first election after a pandemic, and whether a lot of these seismic shifts in the electorate are lasting is still very much TBD until we can get some more elections in the dataset in this new Trumpy world. There’s plenty of reason to believe that this was simply an inflation election.

For the first time since WWII, every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, via @jburnmurdoch

2024 Democrats are the red dot.

Absolutely critical context to any postmortem. pic.twitter.com/N6a6L0Pou8

— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) November 7, 2024

How much of Harris’s loss in Michigan depended on the defection of Arab American voters horrified by the Biden administration’s genocide of Gaza is still to be determined, but when Trump is winning fucking Dearborn and the Democrats are running neck and neck with the Green Party, we know it’s not nothing. There is plenty of reason to believe that Michigan, while obviously part of a broader national trend that wholly rebuked the national Democratic Party as an institution, was heavily influenced by a genocide fueled by a man who won’t be anywhere near their 2028 campaign if the party knows what’s good for it.

Looking at the political realignment plotted out here by The Washington Post, while it is largely a sea of red, there are encouraging blue shifts in key areas, like the Atlanta suburbs and a little further north around Charlotte. The bulk of this rightward shift in the electorate lies east of the Mississippi, as once you get into Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, the Dakotas and the hardest shift left, Colorado, there are more blue arrows that emerge. Turnout was high, this was not a 2016-esque collapse in Democratic enthusiasm. There is still a 2020 coalition in this year’s electoral map, the Democrats just have to send everyone at the DNC to my proposed moon exile colony forever so we can get some people who actually understand politics in the national offices.

Not only do Democrats have the traditional first midterm counterwave that most presidents experience to look forward to, but the Senate map from hell that just kicked their ass is going to move on to the Republicans in 2026. This is going to be a really tough election for the GOP. There is plenty of reason to hope that the Democrats can repeat their dominant 2018 midterm performance in two years (red states are GOP Senate incumbents up for reelection, blue states are Democratic incumbents).

Photo via Wikipedia

And while the Democrats have to do some serious soul searching after proving that they are out of touch elitists chasing the ghosts of the past at the expense of the future, there are still plenty of hopeful signs that this may have just been a Biden-Harris administration-centric rebuke. Jackie Rosen won the Nevada Senate race today, which now makes five swing states splitting their votes between Trump and their Democratic Senator. Reproductive rights won majorities of votes across the country when placed directly on the ballot. Hell, Missouri voted to raise the minimum wage. A lot of liberal policy did well.

It’s the people who spent the final months of the election parading Dick Cheney around who got out-foxed by a meat-filled bottle of spray tanner that are the problem. The national Democratic Party proved this election that it is one of the biggest obstacles America must overcome in its search to become the country we believe ourselves to be, but people across the nation demonstrated that they are willing to listen to liberal politicians and advocacy groups when the message wasn’t coming from a group of hack Beltway elitists who specialize in alienating everyone who doesn’t watch MSNBC every day.

Not all hope is lost for liberals, and today is a great day to start building a coalition to take back Congress in 2026 and the White House in 2028. We can do it, for as bleak as this election was, it still gave us plenty of signs of hope that a better world still is possible.