The Doomsday Scenario for Democrats Isn't What You Think

The actual danger for the Democrats moving forward

Photo by Nils Huenerfuerst on Unsplash

In response to handwringing from Democrats, plenty of thoughtful commentators have pointed out how much things can shift quickly in American politics.

On one level, these analysts are 100% correct. Democrats absolutely can bounce back quickly, especially if Donald Trump overreaches or otherwise has a rocky tenure (and let’s be honest, that seems likely). Call it the 2004 scenario that I chronicled a few weeks ago. But the truth is the danger looming in Trump’s stunning gains in 2024 isn’t that Democrats won’t win again soon. It’s that they can win the House in 2026 and gain governorships, win the White House and Senate in 2028 — and still be in trouble.

American politics usually has a dominant party at the presidential level. Between 1860 and 1932, Republicans won 14 of 18 (77.78%) presidential elections. Then between 1932 and 1968, Democrats won the presidency 7 out of 9 times (the same 77.78%). Beginning in 1968, however, Republicans rebounded. They won 5 of 6 presidential contests (83.3%) until 1992, when Bill Clinton helped resurrect Democratic fortunes.

And while few have considered the last three decades a period of Democratic dominance, it has been to some extent. The party won the popular vote in 7 out of 8 elections through 2020.

The period isn’t commonly considered a Democratic era for two reasons: competitiveness at the congressional level and Republicans managing to win the presidency twice despite losing the popular vote (2000 and 2016). Those victories meant that Democrats only captured the electoral college and the White House in 5 of 8 (62.5%) elections. Yet, without the fluke caused by a confusing ballot in Palm Beach County, Fla. in 2000 — which resulted in scores of liberal Democrats accidentally voting for Pat Buchanan, pretty much their nightmare politician — Democrats would have won the presidency in 6-8 elections (75%), right around the historical norm for the dominant party.

This history exposes the real worry for Democrats: that 2024 marked an inflection point in American politics, one of those moments when the dominant party flips. Trump captured the popular vote (making him only the second Republican to do so in 36 years) because non-white, non-college educated voters began a migration to the GOP. That will make the Republicans the party in the driver’s seat for the next period in American politics.

Now, crucially, that doesn’t mean they’ll win 100% of the time. The history indicates that even a dominant party only wins between 60-80% of the time, depending on how geographically efficient their coalition is in the Electoral College. Further, as Democrats proved between 1968 and 1992, and as Republicans have shown since 1992, being the dominant party at the presidential level doesn’t guarantee congressional control. While the Democrats have a Senate math problem, as I chronicled a few weeks ago, they could do well in the battle for the House, even if we enter into an era in which Republicans dominate presidential elections.

That’s especially true because when a demographic population or a place starts tipping toward one party at the presidential level, it often takes time to trickle down.

Consider West Virginia. The Mountaineer State voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election from 1932 to 2000 except for 1956, 1972, and 1984 — all years in which incumbent Republican presidents won overwhelmingly. As late as 2000, all five members of the state’s congressional delegation were Democrats. Additionally, the party had controlled the state legislature for 70 years and outnumbered Republicans among registered voters by more than a two-to-one margin. In short, Democrats dominated West Virginia politics.

But then a stunning shift began as working class white voters — many of them lifelong Democrats — started migrating toward the GOP. George W. Bush narrowly captured the Mountaineer State in 2000. That year, Republicans also picked up one of the state’s House seats for the first time in 20 years.

Ten years later in a GOP wave, a veteran incumbent Democratic representative lost reelection narrowly. Even then, the congressional delegation still leaned Democratic 3 to 2. But then in 2014, Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller retired, and Republican Shelley Moore Capito won the open seat. Additionally, Republicans finally defeated Nick Rahall, who had been in Congress for 38 years. All of a sudden the delegation had four Republicans and one Democrat.

Now, finally, in 2024, Senator Joe Manchin, the last Democrat representing West Virginia in Congress is retiring, to be replaced by a Republican. It took 24 years, but Democrats went from the dominant party in the Mountaineer State to being a tiny minority party with dim prospects for the foreseeable future.

All of which is a longwinded (look, I’m a scholar, what would you expect?) way of saying that the early warning signs can come long before a party falls apart with a demographic group or in a place.

What does this history tell us about what will come next in American politics? It means that two things can both be true. First, if Trump stumbles and bumbles, it’s entirely possible that Democrats rebound quickly. That’s what happened after their last popular vote loss in 2004.

Yet, what the “stuff changes quickly in American politics” chorus misses is that Democrats can win in 2026 and 2028, and still have a brewing problem beneath the hood.

The West Virginia case actually offers a great historical example of that. Nationally, Democrats experienced exactly the kind of rebound after 2004 that the stop predicting doom people argue is possible today. Yet, their comeback didn’t include the Mountaineer State.

In 2008, even as Barack Obama was winning 365 electoral votes, he still lost by West Virginia by 13 points. In fact, his margin of defeat was ever so slightly larger than John Kerry’s had been four years earlier, even as the nation as a whole shifted almost 10 points leftward. It was far worse than Al Gore’s 6.33% loss, which had seemed so bad only eight years earlier. Four years later, the bottom would truly drop out as Obama lost West Virginia by almost 27%.

No Democrat would’ve looked at the West Virginia presidential results on Election Night in 2008 and said the party still has a problem. Such a claim would’ve seemed insane amid Obama’s blowout victory (and I say that as a Philadelphia sports fan, where pessimism is our specialty).

Nonetheless, the fact that the Mountaineer State didn’t bounce back in the 2008 wave indicated that Democrats still had a problem with working class white voters — one that would intensify and spread in the years to come, leading to Republican wave elections in 2010 and 2014, and eventually the election of Trump in 2016 and 2024. It’s a large reason once competitive states like Ohio and Iowa are now seemingly out of reach for Democrats.

This history doesn’t guarantee that the doomsday scenario will happen for Democrats, or even that a comeback in 2026 or 2028 won’t be a sign that Democrats are in great shape moving forward. Anyone who thinks they know for sure what will happen next in American politics is a fool. After all, how much money could you have taken from people by betting them in December 2012 that Donald Trump would be inaugurated president in January 2017?

But it does mean that people arguing that Democrats have a big, long-term problem aren’t blind to the potential for American politics to swing quickly. Further, it suggests that if Democrats do bounce back quickly, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re out of the woods long term.