As Democrats navigate the wreckage of their 2024 catastrophe, they would do well to take some time to reflect on the way forward rather than jumping to unpalatable conclusions, especially as high-quality polling data on the magnitude of losses with groups such as Black. and Latino voters will soon come from researchers, including gold studies from pew and catalyst which usually have some numbers that differ from the exit polls. Democrats should course correct where necessary, but they must also be careful not to overcorrect and, in doing so, divide their own coalition against itself. And to properly assess what worked and what didn’t work, both in government and in the campaign, three facts should be taken into account.

First, where Democrats have poured the most resources into the campaign — in the seven consensus battleground states — loss were about half of the uniform six-point national swing to the right since 2020. While votes are still being counted, the shakeup was sharpest compared to national shifts in deep blue and deep red states like New Jersey and Florida where Kamala Harristhe campaign invested zero resources. This suggests that the campaign was able to successfully hold back losses by getting the message straight to voters. The message, logically, could not have been bad at all.

Second, the party brand is not in tatters. After a stinging defeat like this, there will inevitably be exaggerated claims that the party needs a complete overhaul. “This is a realignment. Our country has moved to the right. It’s not center left,” said Rep. Nikki Budzinski (D-IL) NBC News. But the one result from Budzinksi’s own race — which she won by double digits in a Democratic-leaning swing district — suggests that may not be the case. Yes, Democrats lost ground in 2020 partisan identification, but that almost always happens when your party is in power and takes the heat, rightly or wrongly, for everything that goes wrong.

When all the votes are counted for the House of Representatives, Democrats are likely to have done as well as they did in 2022 and may even pick up a seat or two. And Senate candidates across the country with the same (D) next to their names significantly outperformed Harris, including in Arizona, where the future Ruben Gallego ran about six points ahead of the top of the ticket. All of which suggests that the Democrats’ “branding” issue is more about the President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, their key mistakes and their bad luck in coming to power just as an inflationary crisis was about to hit the world than it is about a total rejection of the party.

Critics blame “wokism” for the outcome of this election, but that’s a criticism that’s hard to sustain seriously. For example, where republicans spent the most money on wall-to-wall attacks on trans-Americans, mostly with worse results. If this was a revolt against “DEI” and the language police, it certainly never showed up in any polling research, which has consistently shown the economy and immigration topping voters’ lists of concerns for more than two years. According to polls, Americans are not filled with resentment against their employers. DEI policies or their friends pronoun choices.

Democrats did not experience substantial losses among Latino voters, as some activists insisted on using the term “Latinx.” They lost because inflation particularly hit households earning less than $100,000 and because Democrats have long mistakenly assumed that liberal immigration policies were a core interest of the Latino vote. The outcome of this election should put an end to this mythology.

Some of my friends on the left also need to understand that there has indeed been a strong pushback in working-class black and Latino communities against the perception that the Biden administration has rolled out the red carpet for new arrivals from Venezuela without addressing the issues kitchen tables in their own communities. you had Republican governors like Texas Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis deliberately exploiting this problem by busing and ferrying migrants to the big cities and their suburbs, and neither the Biden administration nor the beleaguered governors and mayors on the receiving end have been able to do much about it except raise shrug and say “what can you do? “

To the extent that these policies are indelibly associated with Biden and Harris, the damage is unlikely to be lasting, and the solution is pretty easy: stop doing it. Public opinion is likely to turn sharply against cruelty to immigrants as the scale of the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans settles with the electorate. Voters wanted someone to address a homelessness crisis, not uproot and cavalierly deport much of the country’s agricultural, childcare and construction workforce, a process that will be extraordinarily ugly and , if he will be prosecuted on a scale similar to the president- Elege Donald Trump promised during the campaign, both extremely expensive and economically ruinous.

Please don’t think I’m absolving the Democrats of their sins and attributing the entire outcome to the international post-pandemic. reaction against incumbent governments. The Harris campaign’s decision to turn off its economic messaging in favor of existential democracy rhetoric that voters are tired of hearing didn’t help. Americans in 2024 wanted presidential candidates to explain how they would improve their lives. Harris couldn’t do that and Trump was. If there is any structural lesson to be gleaned today, it is that it is extremely important to be responsive to how voters react to your policies and governance. and adjust accordingly. It’s something our future president will have to internalize quickly if he and his party are to avoid the same fate.

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author It’s time to fight Dirty: How Democrats It can build a lasting majority in American politics. His writing appeared in Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer.