Democrats: Left in the Lurch

The curious decline and uncertain future of the Democratic Party.

When President-elect Donald Trump replaces Barack Obama on January 20, the Democratic Party will find itself more removed from power than at almost any point since the party’s creation.

Scorned by the same voters who once embraced the New Deal, built the Great Society, and put their hope in the nation’s first black president, Democrats are now locked out of power in Washington and out of two-thirds of state legislative chambers across the country.

Simply put, Democrats’ once vaunted coalition of the ascendant — younger, multiethnic, educated, and urban — failed them in 2016, and in 2014 and 2010 before that. That coalition proved to have major handicaps, part demographic and part geographic, that have been hollowing out the party for years.

Democrats may find cold comfort in Hillary Clinton’s nearly 3 million popular vote lead and the fact that more people call themselves “liberal” than ever polled. And they can, and do, fairly protest a system of representative government that allows the government to be so unrepresentative of the popular vote. But it will be up to Democrats to solve their own problem within the current rules.

“You can’t say that the Democrats are at their absolute historical nadir because you can’t be at your absolute historical nadir when you win a popular vote majority,” said Tom Schaller, the political scientist and author of the book “Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South.” “But you have a knife’s edge balance between the two parties and the knife is tilted towards one party for various structural reasons.”

Future demographic changes should eventually put Democrats back in the White House, but that will do nothing to solve their problems down ballot and could take more time than they can afford. To win again now, Democrats will have to beat their geographic disadvantage by holding together a diverse coalition that has already shown major signs of crackup.

Countless autopsies will be written of the 2016 election. Most will focus on the strategy and tactics of the Clinton campaign. But to understand how Democrats arrived in this mess to begin with, it helps to go back to the party’s founding over 150 years ago.

See How Democrats Got Here or jump to What Lies Ahead.

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