Where Do We Go From Here?

It is tempting, and perhaps correct, to be fatalistic about Donald Trump's catastrophic reelection. The simplest, clearest explanation is that he did not win the presidency so much as Democrats lost it, and perhaps a long time ago.

Across the globe, incumbent parties have been defeated thanks to outrage over high inflation. The Biden administration not only delivered rising wages and full employment; it was more successful at fighting rising prices than any other G-7 nation and perhaps any government in the world. It didn't matter. Voters hated rising prices more than they liked President Joe Biden's successful economic policies and responded the same way people have pretty much everywhere: by voting out the sitting party.

At the same time, it is increasingly clear that Biden's decision to run for reelection was disastrous. Had he announced he was stepping aside after the Democrats, energized by female voters turning out post-Dobbs, overperformed in the 2022 midterm elections—and when it was already clear that voters thought he would be too old for a second term—it is possible that the party could have nominated a candidate who might have created more distance between themselves and his increasingly unpopular administration. By the time Biden dropped out on July 21, however, his vice president was the only plausible choice to succeed him. Voters hated Biden, and they punished Kamala Harris for her closeness to him.

Ironically, the benefits of the Biden economy, so slow to manifest, are starting to appear. Inflation has cooled, interest rates have come down, and the cost of prescription drugs has been dramatically reduced. It was all too late. The 2024 election was a stunning rebuke to Democratic governance. Donald Trump won every swing state and the popular vote; his party will hold the presidency and, it appears, both houses of Congress. That victory reflected the most troubling conclusion from the 2024 election: This was a widespread, though not quite total, rejection of the Democratic Party and its approach to politics.

For nearly a decade, the Democratic Party's approach to Trump has been to continuously remind voters of his character (racist, misogynistic, unhinged), his policies (extreme and punitive), and his approach to governance (chaotic and revenge-driven). From 2018 to 2022, Democrats won by centering Trump—and by arguing that they would make the government more effective and responsive and less, well, Trumpian. But over the Trump era, the Democratic Party's own policies have always come second in their messaging: They only have to be better than the hideous Trump. On November 5, it was clear that a majority of voters rejected both the Democrats' Trump-heavy focus and their political program.

Inflation and a truncated campaign were formidable headwinds for Harris. But it's also clear that she—and her party—failed to answer a simple question. Voters wanted to know what she would do to make their life better, and she never really answered it. At the same time, Democrats had grown too comfortable in their assumption that Trump's myriad, obvious defects were disqualifying to a majority of voters. The election showed something terrifying: Trump and his increasingly fascistic rhetoric have become normalized, even embraced, by huge swaths of the populace.

Will there be a reckoning? Based on early signals from Democratic Party power brokers, it seems that a shift rightward is inevitable. Never mind that Kamala Harris's key surrogates were Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban; or that she ran on the party's most restrictive immigration platform in a century; or that she embraced fracking, crypto, and a smaller increase in the capital gains tax—none of this seemed to measurably gain her votes. Nevertheless, party leaders, surveying the devastation, appear poised to conclude that an even tougher immigration message is the answer—and better jettison all that progressive economics and "identity politics" stuff, while we're at it.

Even assuming the country has moved to the right, following voters there does not solve the biggest problem facing the Democratic Party. Voters want to know what the Democrats stand for, and if the answer is "Donald Trump policies, but less so," it is highly unlikely to succeed. And this approach still elides the most important question: How can Democrats convince voters that they will make their lives better?

In October 2020, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned that "if these people's lives don't actually feel different, we're done. You know how many Trumps there are in waiting?" Four years later, it's become clear that it only takes one.

A Deportation Wave—and a Backlash Shock and awe. That's what lies ahead for our immigration system: President Trump and his allies will attempt to create the impression that they are acting with lightning speed to seal the border and rid the country of undesirables. Expect splashy displays like ramped-up workplace raids, dramatic deportation operations, and a big escalation in state-sponsored anti-immigrant propaganda.

The reality will be more complicated than the superficial displays suggest: Trump and his allies will encounter serious resistance and many obstacles. Still, the results will make our immigration system more legally chaotic, more violent, more wantonly cruel, less hospitable to those who have built lives here and are meaningfully contributing to American life, and generally much less conducive to the rule of law and the national interest.

That may sound surprising. Isn't Trump just planning to enforce our immigration laws, keep out undocumented immigrants, and restore order to the border? Well, no. Actually, he plans to dramatically limit legal migration, in a way that could redefine our national identity.

Some of these planned restrictions on legal immigration will be high-profile: Trump will reinstate a version of his ban on migration from some Muslim countries. Other moves will get less attention, such as slashing the number of refugees admitted each year. Trump will also almost certainly cancel Biden's parole program, which allows 30,000 migrants to apply for entry from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela each month.

That last one will be an abomination. It will undo one of President Biden's genuinely innovative , pro-immigrant accomplishments—one that has received very little credit—which has been to broaden legal avenues to create ways to migrate, offsetting his draconian restrictions on asylum-seeking (which Trump, needless to say, will make even worse). All this is only a partial list: Expect Trump loyalists to scour the bureaucracy for methods to weaken due process for legal migrants in any way possible.

What about mass deportations, which Trump and his allies have vowed to ramp up on day one of his presidency? Trump will likely be able to increase deportations, but the question is by how much. He will run into serious resource constraints, because massively expanded expulsions will require new detention facilities and law enforcement hires, among many other things.

As it is, our country regularly deports up to 100,000 per year from the interior (as opposed to removals at the border). As the American Immigration Council recently calculated , increasing this to one million annual deportations—which wouldn't even get us that close to removing all 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country, as Trump vows to do—would cost an additional $88 billion each year. It seems doubtful congressional Republicans would appropriate that. What's more, though Trump would probably be able to deport more people than we do now—in part by weakening due process for the undocumented—he'd likely encounter other logistical and legal obstacles. His vow to enlist National Guard troops could run into resistance from blue state governors.

The MAGA base is expecting spectacular, high-profile mass deportations, so we will likely see footage of deportations leaked to Fox News and other far-right outlets. These MAGA bread-and-circuses displays will be designed to lather up the faithful with evidence showing that mass removals have been supercharged.

But workplace raids and mass deportations risk persuading the broader public to see removal victims as sympathetic. And here's where propaganda enters the picture. We'll see a marked escalation in the manipulation of data about migrants by MAGA loyalists at federal agencies. Crimes committed by migrants will be highlighted much more aggressively by agency officials and perhaps even by the White House press operation . All this will have the added benefit of spreading anti-immigrant hysteria, in hopes of destabilizing the lives of immigrants and their communities even further. As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, put it: "The goal will be a culture of fear—and a culture of, 'who's next.'"

The deeper point of all these efforts will be nothing less than to change how Americans view immigration as a component of national identity. The aim: inculcating a kind of illiberal expulsive nationalism, which valorizes purging the nation of assorted impurities and enemies within, in hopes that it supplants the inclusive, pluralistic patriotism that so many Americans still have faith in—the worldview that holds that immigration, properly managed, is an affirmative good for the country. Trump and Stephen Miller, his choice for deputy chief of staff, despise that worldview to their core, and they will stop at nothing in their use of state power to undermine it. We are entering a period in which our national adherence to those ideals will be sorely tested.

Winning Back the Working Class After the 2024 election, do the Democrats remain the party of the working class? Yes and no.

Despite Republican gains with working-class voters, the Democrats remain the only mainstream party that cares about working-class issues. Even granting the party's reorientation in recent decades toward centrist suburbanites and cosmopolitan city-dwellers—what Thomas Piketty calls the "Brahmin Left"—Democratic administrations still promote union rights, a living wage, and worker safety. Republican administrations, including Trump's earlier one, oppose all three.

The working class only sometimes rewards this Democratic Party with actual votes. The 2024 presidential election was the third in a row in which Democrats failed to win a majority of the working class, which is defined conventionally as those lacking a bachelor's degree. That matters because, over the past century, no Democrat except Joe Biden has won the White House without a working-class majority.

In 2024, the problem got a lot worse. Hillary Clinton lost working-class voters by 3 percentage points yet won the popular vote; Biden lost them by 4 yet won the presidency and the popular vote; preliminary estimates show Kamala Harris losing working-class voters by 14 points and losing the popular vote.

That isn't unprecedented for Democrats: Working-class voters have always been somewhat fickle. Even during the heyday of the New Deal coalition, Democrat Adlai Stevenson lost the working class by 14 points in 1952 and nearly 18 points in 1956. Democrat George McGovern lost it by 30 points in 1972, and Walter Mondale lost it by 16 in 1984. But those were all routs. A new era may be dawning when Democrats lose big with working-class voters even when they lose the popular vote by a mere 3 or 4 points.

Democrats once thought an increasingly diverse working class would secure the party a permanent electoral majority. Then nonwhite proles started defecting to the GOP. Harris didn't do significantly worse than Biden with white working-class voters, and she won nonwhite working-class voters by 30 percentage points (again, this number is preliminary). That all sounds great until you remember Biden won nonwhite working-class voters by 46 points and Hillary Clinton by 56 points.

Think of 2024 as a good news/bad news joke. The good news is that the racial and ethnic divisions that have long plagued the working class are starting to evaporate. The bad news is that this joyous kumbaya moment helped put Trump back in the White House. History has a bleak sense of humor.

A Fight for Trans Rights The night before Donald Trump won, at a rally in Reading, Pennsylvania, the now president-elect vowed to "keep men out of women's sports"—less a policy than an anti-trans dog whistle—and claimed, in a characteristically weird meander, "I've never once been said, sir, we have to do something about keeping men in women's sports." Trump gave the game all away. He didn't actually care about protecting the sanctity of sports. He was just saying the words because they were the next up in the litany of promises, after "launch the largest deportation program," before "defend religious liberty."

It's almost not worth offering a response on a policy level, but we know this is how Trump makes law, via riffs and grievances. There's the real-world situation to which he's referring: the handful of student athletes, cultivated by a far-right Christian nationalist legal organization, who claim that trans girls are threatening the achievements of cis girls in sports. This was not an issue for the right until one group, the Alliance Defending Freedom, made it an issue. But there it was, in tens of millions of dollars' worth of Trump campaign ads. "Save women's sports" is nothing but scapegoating, another volley in the manufactured war on trans people in the United States. But defenders of trans rights and Democrats cannot win this by merely pointing out that it's fake. Nor can they simply dodge the issue, as many in the party have.

Pressed on her position on trans rights, for instance, Kamala Harris said that she would merely "follow the law," without saying what she thought the law should be. Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown's ads arguably went further, saying that "these decisions should be made by local sports leagues, not politicians." Texas Senate candidate Colin Allred's response was even worse: He reacted to attack ads by saying, "I don't want boys playing girls' sports, or any of this ridiculous stuff that [my opponent] Ted Cruz is saying"—which only led some to wonder if he shared Cruz's position that trans girls were in fact boys. At no point did any of these candidates call out the onslaught of ads as what they were: an attack on trans people.

The lesson here is not that all three of those Democrats lost because they didn't go anti-trans enough. Rather, it likely would have cost them nothing to stand up for trans kids and trans athletes who were being dehumanized by craven Republicans. It would also have been the right thing to do.

No one, least of all trans people, expects elected Democratic officials to lead the way on trans rights. But they could do more than stand back. They could commit to naming the attacks for what they are. When ­anti-trans laws are proposed in their home states, they can loudly fight them. If nothing else, when the right comes for trans people, they don't have to help.

Courtroom Drama If you are reading this and are over the age of 50, you will likely not see a Supreme Court with a liberal majority in your lifetime. President Donald Trump's reelection, combined with the firm Republican grip on the Senate for the next two years, means that liberals missed their last best chance to alter the court's ideological balance of power for the next few decades.

For at least the last 30 years, Supreme Court justices carefully timed their retirements to ensure an ideologically similar successor. At the same time, presidents from both parties opted for younger and younger nominees. When Barack Obama nominated the 63-year-old Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in 2016, he became the oldest nominee since Richard Nixon tapped 64-year-old Lewis F. Powell Jr. to become an associate justice. Garland never joined the court, however, after his nomination was blocked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Instead, 49-year-old Neil Gorsuch ultimately filled the vacant position.

The trend toward younger justices means that vacancies become less common. During Trump's first term, Republicans caught a few lucky breaks. First, they won the 2016 presidential election after blocking Barack Obama from selecting a liberal justice to replace the recently deceased Antonin Scalia, allowing them to install Gorsuch instead. Then they elevated 48-year-old Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died two months before the 2020 election.

Those selections, along with Anthony Kennedy's retirement and replacement by 53-year-old Brett Kavanaugh, effectively locked in conservative control over one-third of the Supreme Court for the next 30 years. Had Hillary Clinton won in 2016, the Supreme Court would instead have a 5–4 liberal majority for the first time since the late 1960s. Now a 6–3 conservative supermajority that has already overturned Roe v. Wade and established presidential immunity holds sway.

Electing Harris would not have guaranteed an ideological shift on the high court, of course. The two oldest justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, are 76 and 74 years old, respectively. It is possible, and perhaps even likely, that they could have held on until 2028 in hopes that a Republican president would defeat her reelection bid. But electing Harris would have at least denied Thomas and Alito—and, by extension, the GOP—a chance to voluntarily install a younger successor for another four years.

If both retire, the benefits for the conservative legal movement would be incalculable: If they both step down over the next four years, their successors could theoretically serve into the 2070s, and Trump would have effectively locked in a five-justice conservative majority for one-third of the twenty-first century.

This macabre dance has vast implications for U.S. political life. Under Chief Justice John Roberts, who is 69 years old, the high court has often stood athwart progressive policymaking and legislation on climate change, civil rights, labor organization, and more. That stance is now likely to continue until most Americans who voted in the 2024 presidential election are either dead or near retirement age. Control of the Supreme Court is rarely the most discussed issue in a presidential election. In the long run, however, it tends to be the most important one.

Rethinking the Democratic Coalition In 2017, Liz Cheney defended the "usefulness" of "enhanced interrogation" like waterboarding, a torture tactic from which even the CIA had publicly distanced itself. This should've been fundamentally disqualifying, but instead, the long-standing foreign policy hawk became a liberal icon after losing her House seat for aiding Congress's January 6 investigation. Today, however, it's clear her "defending democracy" rebrand didn't convince enough Bush-era nostalgics. While Kamala Harris hemorrhaged Arab Americans, young men, and the working-class voters, the disaffected conservative bloc Cheney courted failed to break Donald Trump's red tide.

Never Trumpers simply aren't reliable, or even sizable, members of the Democratic coalition. The theory that Republicans who feared MAGA's crude isolationism would inevitably expand the Democratic tent has failed twice now—in 2016 and 2024—even as they've maintained considerable influence in Democratic circles.

One could argue Biden won in 2020 by incorporating both Never Trumpers and progressives in his administration, harnessing a lefty upswell within more conservative ambitions. In contrast, Harris wanted a Republican partner to signal to voters she was less left-wing than some feared, but appearing with Cheney, a scion of neoconservatism, only made Harris seem rooted not only to the past, but also to a politics that voters of both parties had long since rejected. At the same time, it ruined her standing with voting blocs who were furious about the Biden administration's support for Israel's war in Gaza and the Middle East. If you were hoping for a different approach—which Harris had made some signals toward earlier in the campaign—that was out of the question now.

For the past four years, each Democratic advance was also a retrenchment. An expanded child tax credit given, then taken away ; an apology to Native Americans for the U.S. ethnic cleansing campaign, on the heels of sending more arms to Israel. When Harris spoke of "turning the page," it became unclear which way that meant. Was it forward, following Biden's unpopular lead? Or back to the 2000s, an era known, outside the Beltway, for two things: soaring inequality and blood. If it was somewhere else, she never really said.

The neocons glomming onto Democrats were politically homeless for a reason. It wasn't only due to Trumpism. Bad as Cheney was, she wasn't uniquely unqualified; would Mitt Romney or Mike Pence really have done better? If we're to learn any lessons from 2024, it's that whatever benefits this cohort offers entail colossal drawbacks. Let this be the partnership's death knell—good riddance.

New Media In 2007, Rupert Murdoch acquired Dow Jones from the Bancroft family. This was, and still is, an instructive moment: The Bancrofts could have been guided by a sense of civic purpose and kept their brand out of Murdoch's hands. Too many of them wanted a big payday instead. And so Murdoch's empire grew. There is a lesson here that Democrats and the people who vote for Democrats need to understand.

For some time now, I've heard some variation on this theme: The press isn't covering the awful things Trump does. This is wrong. They do! Every bad thing you have learned about Trump you learned from the media you may think is actually falling down on the job. In fact, most coverage of Trump is negative. But it's not the quantity or quality of coverage that's missing from the equation, it's the lack of sustained civic commitment to the life of our nation.

At The New Republic, we have not surfaced as many Trump scoops as The New York Times has. What we do have, however, is an abiding sense of civic purpose that compels us to do more with this information than major newspapers and cable news channels are willing to do, like speak with a clear voice: This is bad! This is corrupt! Both sides are not the same! We're in trouble! (This is why you subscribe to us, for which we're very grateful.)

We're not going to "fix the media" in this regard—not unless the workers seize the means of production at the Renzo Piano building, anyway.

Democrats need to come to an understanding about the media they keep trying and failing to court. Most outlets, even ostensibly "liberal" ones, will never be compelled to a civic purpose. You can't spell out your agenda and expect these outlets to start manning the barricades on your behalf. Time and again, I've watched Democrats do things like announce their latest policy proposal in the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal, in the belief that it's the path to getting this agenda set and the media on board. What the Journal does is surround that op-ed with a bunch of vibrantly written drivel from its collection of house cranks.

What Democrats can do is start using the media they have, instead of the one they wish they had but will never get. The media we have loves chaos, failure, conflict, controversy, and people willing to hit below the belt. Pick some enemies, start some fights, and the mainstream media will give you attention. Trump, who is steeped in the milieu of reality television and professional wrestling, gets this.