It is personally and professionally obligatory to reflect on the elections. Nobody needs my opinion, but it is my responsibility to give it nonetheless.
Let me preface my remarks by emphasizing that I do not think we need to draw any single overarching conclusion from the Democrats’ failures. In my mind, election results are a combination of contingent factors specific to this election and larger structural factors. To the extent that the election results hinged on the former — e.g. the unpopularity of Biden and/or Harris, post-pandemic inflation — there are not too many lessons to draw for the future. With a different candidate and a different environment, the Democrats may be able to win elections without doing too much differently. The oscillations of American politics suggest that the Democrats are likely to do better next election purely because voters dislike single-party rule and will vote against whoever is in charge.
On the other hand, insofar the Democrats’ issues are structural, they will continue to struggle. The promised Democratic coalition that relied on ever-expanding numbers of youth and minorities seems to be faltering. If the Democrats cannot find ways to expand their voter base, win back disillusioned former partisans, and attract new voters, they are likely to be stuck as the minority party for the foreseeable future.
Another way to frame this is about the range of possible Democratic coalitions. Since 1988, the widest margin of any winning presidential candidate has been 53% to 46%. When Barack Obama trounced John McCain in 2008, he won only 53% of the vote. In the ensuing elections, the largest margin was 51% to 47%. In other words, it seems likely that elections will be competitive and margins close no matter what happens. Yet those marginal gaps matter: if Democrats’ maximal victory is around 53% of the electorate, they have the possibility of consistently winning the Presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, and doing so with large majorities. If their best efforts cannot exceed 50-51%, they may end up barely capturing the Senate or House in good years and being stuck deep in the minority in bad ones.
Was This Just an Enthusi-Chasm for Harris? (Yes, I Invented that Word)
Some commentators have suggested that the issue was primarily one of low Democratic turnout: As of this writing, Trump has exceeded his 2020 vote total by 2 million votes, while Harris lags nearly 8 million votes behind Biden — although much of that drop occurred in noncompetitive states. Anecdotally, this conclusion seems accurate: in Pennsylvania, where I vote, the lack of enthusiasm for Harris-Walz in Philadelphia was palpable in the weeks leading up to the election. (I texted numerous friends in the lead-up to the election with pessimistic messages about how things were looking grim because there seemed to be so little enthusiasm in Philadelphia for the Democrats. I have screenshots of the texts, because you always want to print your receipts.)
In reality, though, the lack of enthusiasm is only part of the story. I ran the numbers for the state of Pennsylvania. Harris earned more than 50,000 fewer votes in Pennsylvania than Biden did in 2020. The majority of this was in Philadelphia, where Harris ran short of Biden by more than 34,000 votes. Yet, at the same time, Trump improved on his 2020 totals in all but 2 of the state’s 67 counties. In total, Trump had more than 155,000 more votes in 2024 than in 2020. Whether this increase in votes is from new voters or voters who switched from Biden to Trump is unclear: total registration in Pennsylvania increased by 177,000 voters from 2020 to 2024, according to official state data. In other words, either Trump captured nearly the entirety of newly registered voters, or Pennsylvania saw significant vote shifting from Biden voters to Trump voters.
While some of this may be attributed to particular dissatisfaction with the incumbent administration, the across-the-board losses suggest that some of these issues are structural. If the Democrats want to be viable as a majority party, they are going to have to address some of these deep structural issues that have made them unpopular. While I do not have any clear answers, I want to reflect on some of my own experiences this election and the bigger questions they raise about American party politics.
On Culture and Cosmopolitanism
My first and most general reflection is on the cultural dimensions of contemporary American politics, which struck me viscerally throughout this election. I was appointed a Judge of Elections for the City of Philadelphia, which means I was in charge of one of the polling divisions in the city. It sounds more impressive than it actually is; nonetheless, you can refer to me as the Honorable Judge Doctor from here on out. Thank you.
I did not realize I was going to be sent to the most Republican area of Philadelphia to work as a Judge of Elections. The area of Port Richmond is a Polish neighborhood, with successive generations of Polish and other Eastern European immigrant families. It is heavily white and working class; the particular division that I oversaw is one of the most consistently Republican sections of the neighborhood and, therefore, the entire city.
Our polling place hosted three divisions, and the overall cohort of poll workers were predominantly middle-aged or elderly local residents from the neighborhood. The core of my team was an American high school student who had grown up mostly in China and a local EMT and community college student. They turned out to be extremely competent and made my job infinitely easier. Seriously, they rocked. They also enjoyed making fun of me for being overly neurotic. I have hope for the future.
In the hour preceding the opening of the polls, I scrambled to figure out how to get everything in order. (A combination of limited training and an obsessive fear of making mistakes slowed the process for me.) By the time the polls opened at 7am, there was a line snaking out the door and well into the street. Turnout was extremely high in the morning: the first hour was packed with no letup in the stream of voters coming to our division. I handled all scenarios that fell outside of the normal scope of operations, from provisional ballots to stuck ballots to voters who could not remember whether they were registered to vote. The high turnout in a Republican area was a fairly ominous sign for the Democrats.
For the rest of the day, there was a slow but steady trickle of voters until about 6:30pm. The voters coming early and around 5pm tended to be younger and more pre-professional; the rest were what I might refer to as “stereotypical” Trump voters. I could tell they were likely Trump voters because they were very explicitly the type of white, blue-collar, local Philly-accented (or Polish-accented) voters who dress and talk similar to those who are often seen at Trump rallies; or, more obviously, they were sometimes wearing MAGA gear. Many of the younger folks gave off strong Jersey Shore vibes. I could also tell who someone was likely to vote for based on which set of flyers they took from the canvassers outside. Far more voters entered holding Trump-Vance bumper stickers and the approved Republican list of candidates than the equivalent list of Democrats. The final tally for our polling place reflected this divide. The vote totals were at least two-thirds in favor of Trump and Republican candidates down the ballot.
A neighborhood polling place is not just a polling place; it is also a place where people see their friends. Many of the workers had known each other, and some of the voters, for decades. I was the clear outsider. The other workers did not judge me as an outsider right away. However, when they found out I lived in Center City—the wealthy, liberal part of the city—their eyes narrowed. Had I come to make trouble? To rig the election for the Democrats? One of the poll workers I was chatting with told me that it would take a couple of decades before I would come to be trusted by locals. But not before that—and certainly not on my first visit from Center City.
The lack of trust in me extended to their thoughts on the voting process itself. Some voters expressed a lack of confidence in the process, berating my team of poll workers for not checking everyone’s ID (we have to check signatures for all voters, and ID only for newly registered voters; we followed the prescribed process exactly.) Even some poll workers made comments suggesting that they felt parts of the process might be rigged in various subtle ways. They were doubtful about the provisional ballot process, claiming things like “that’s how they scam you.” When voters were told they had been inactivated and needed to fill out a form to be reactivated — usually following an address change — their immediate reaction was often to question whether the voting was rigged, a sentiment that lessened once it became clear that we were just following the rules and they could still vote.
The neighborhood was gentrifying, as evidenced by new pre-fab condos around the corner from our polling station (dismissed as overpriced crap by the other poll workers, who, frankly, were probably correct), but it was still a world away from Center City. The other poll workers told me how expensive Philadelphia had become, how they were struggling with health problems, and how it was on the verge of being too unaffordable for them—which was news to me, having previously lived in three nearby cities that were more expensive by multiples (median rent in Boston is at least double, if not higher, let alone New York).
This type of neighborhood is not new to me; like many Americans, I have family that fall into what might be called “white working class” America. We get along fine, but we clearly have different tastes in what we eat, the entertainment we consume, and the relative value we put on types of work and education. Even if my family is anti-Trump (for quirky contingent reasons, including the fact that they worked in Trump’s casinos for much of their careers), the driveways of their neighbors are festooned from top to bottom with Trump flags, Make America Great Again flags, and other anti-Democrat symbols. The neighborhood of my polling station in Philly felt similar, from culture to food to how people interpret the world.
It is clearly tangible that I—a hyper-educated, globe-trotting, tea-drinking, multilingual American—am an outsider in these places. In the wake of the election, I have been reflecting on the appropriate language to use to describe these divides. I think the appropriate word is cosmopolitanism.
What the Democrats represent—and what I represent, whether intentionally or not—is cosmopolitanism. I do not feel a particular attachment to feelings of home; in fact, I have zero attachment to my actual childhood home. (Sorry, New Jersey.) My family doesn’t live there anymore, nor do any of my friends’ families. I have not lived in the same city for more than five years since high school—and I will probably move again in the next year or two. My community is scattered all over the United States and the world. I communicate as often with people on the other side of the globe than I do with my neighbors—in fact, I don’t know any of my neighbors, and they don’t know me. I am American, and I have a weirdly specific attachment to America in moments of international soccer competition, but besides that I have very little connection to a deeply rooted sense of place.
I use the word cosmopolitan in a morally neutral sense: I do not want to imply that being cosmopolitan is better or worse. But it is different, and this difference matters.
Framing the cultural divides in America in terms of cosmopolitanism clarifies their roots and the political challenges they bring. Cosmopolitanism means being deeply connected to the wider world, with boundaries of concern and care that stretch far beyond the limits of local streets or neighborhoods hemmed in by parks or railroad tracks. It means a world of unfamiliarity and newness. It means novel challenges and, in most cases, discomfort: worlds that look, feel, and operate very differently than what we are used to, whatever that may be. A cosmopolitan outlook reflects decades of global interconnection, for better and for worse: cosmopolitanism can go too far—such as in the neoliberal consensus of globalization that creates a class of globe-trotting elites—but it can also be something that opens up new perspectives on the world and introduces us to new experiences. It is also somewhat inevitable at this point: decades of interconnection have made the world more globalized, and only some parts of this integration can be undone.
I learned long ago from Mike Lind that cosmopolitanism might not be all it is cracked up to be. I find his critiques quite compelling. I am skeptical of my own rootlessness and worry about the lack of stability that cosmopolitanism can bring. I accept the importance of nationalism in contemporary politics; I agree with George Orwell that patriotic sentiment and love of one’s nation can be a sign of moral decency, not moral decay. I embrace the critique of cosmopolitanism and think it is accurate in terms of electoral politics.
But my personal feelings are irrelevant in the case of national politics. The last few elections have proven that majorities of Americans do not seem to like cosmopolitanism. When people look skeptically on an overeducated elite from Center City traipsing into their neighborhood, it’s not personal—it’s a fear that I have come bearing a new set of values, tastes, and priorities that will exclude them. My vision of the world is unsettling, unrooted, and unfamiliar. Even if it is not intentional, my version of the world is foreign to them.
The problem for Democrats is that they exude this cosmopolitanism—and many leading Democrats insist that cosmopolitanism is morally superior and refuse to brook any suggestion to the contrary. The problem for me personally is that I happen to like many elements of cosmopolitanism. It is one thing to say I am willing to reject cosmopolitanism; it is another to actually reject it. I like living in Center City! I would much rather eat pho ga than Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup. I feel more comfortable traveling around Asia than I do around the Midwest. Even Democrats who burnish sparkling non-cosmopolitan credentials can no longer outrun the aura of Democrats as cosmopolitans, as John Tester and Sherrod Brown found out this election.
My takeaway, both personal and political, is that the Democrats’ problem with cosmopolitanism is far deeper and more intractable than it seems. Opposition to cosmopolitanism is as cultural as it is policy-oriented. Democrats are on the minority side of the culture question—not just on hot-button issues like transgender athletes, but on the broader set of cultural tastes and values. It is surely true that the failure to take a more forceful position on immigration hurt the Democrats in this election, but I am not convinced that taking a harder line on immigration would have saved the Democrats. (Although at least pretending it is important might go some way to getting people to feel like they share some values, which is the necessary first step.) At the national level, people are not voting on specific policy proposals; they are voting on general inclinations about who shares their cultural tastes and political values.
This is the paradox: Democrats cannot win a greater share of voters without giving up on some parts of cosmopolitanism, but it is really hard to relinquish this because many of these parts are deeply attractive to the growing core of the Democratic base. If Democrats are going to win, they will have to combine the parts of cosmopolitanism that people like me like with a sense of rootedness, belonging, and trust. Otherwise they will continue to lose, or at least hit a low ceiling of potential voters, no matter what their actual policies are.
A younger version of me would say that the Democrats failed by being too elitist and failing to address the genuine needs of the working class. To some extent this is true. But just adopting more redistributive policies is unlikely to do very much. Many of the facets of the cosmopolitan world are good and valuable. But they need to be integrated with something that gives people a sense of not being adrift in the world. Until that happens, the travelers from Center City will always be viewed with suspicion. And rightly so.
On the Failure of Theories of Minority Rule
Despite being wildly unpopular, Trump is on track to not only win the electoral college; he is also slated to win the popular vote, with room to spare. While I am obviously displeased that Trump won, I hope this can once and for all put to bed the unhelpful theory that what ails Democrats is unfair institutions, not a lack of popularity.
Since 2016, many public intellectuals have latched onto the theory that the problem is institutions, not popularity. What prevents Democrats from winning elections, the argument goes, is the minoritarian bias in our political institutions. Republicans are empowered despite being less popular than Democrats, and the reason for their power is the structural bias built into American political institutions. The main evidence for this view is that majorities consistently support many Democratic policy positions, such as gun control, and Republican candidates only won the popular vote in a presidential election once between 1992 and 2020 (although they won the electoral college three times).
One of the most prominent arguments in favor of this view is Steve Levitsky and Dan Ziblatt’s follow-up to How Democracies Die entitled Tyranny of the Minority. (I think Steve and Dan are excellent scholars and was a TA for Steve’s course on comparative politics, but I disagree with their conclusion on this issue.) The crux of their argument is that American institutions uniquely (and dangerously) empower minority parties that allow them to implement a reactionary agenda despite lacking majority popularity. In this case, the minority party is the Republican party, which stands athwart progress. American political institutions empower conservative white minorities, who use this power to ensure they maintain power over emerging racial minorities.
This theory is appealing because it allows liberals—myself included—to think that it’s not our fault for being powerless. In this story, most people in America agree with us; the problem is that the systems are designed to prevent us from making the change we want to see. It also fits nicely with the zeitgeist: after 2020 and the national reckoning over police violence toward minority communities, arguments that centered on race as the key factor across American institutions fit the prevailing intellectual narratives.
The theory of minority rule assumes that there is this thing called “multiracial democracy” that everyone likes except a small sliver of authoritarian, racist Republicans. While large majorities of Americans support multiracial democracy (which should win because minorities are growing as a share of the population), the Republican Party uses the power of minority institutions to thwart its realization.
In a speech outlining the book in 2022, Levitsky explained the racial resentment at the core of contemporary American politics:
The Republicans are a party of White Christians, but White Christians are a fairly rapidly declining share of the electorate. Just thirty years ago, 1992, White Christians were more than 70 percent of the American electorate. They were an overwhelming majority. Today, they’re about 50 percent and declining. And that decline has triggered a fear among some Republicans that they’re about to lose electoral viability.
The idea of declining white majorities has been central to Democrats’ self-conception since the Obama years. At that time, writers argued that Obama had assembled a “coalition of the ascendant” that included women, minorities, and young people. These groups were all growing in society, while the core of the Republican party—the elderly, white men, and religious Christians—were declining. As a result, the Republican party was going to be condemned to irrelevance, while the Democrats would slowly solidify their power.
To avert their impending irrelevance — and despite the multiracial Democratic majority — Republicans have used core American political institutions to stymie Democratic policy priorities and try to entrench the politics of racial resentment.
A pretty solid majority of Americans favors the key components of multiracial democracy. Most Americans embrace immigration. They embrace diversity. They embrace the cause of Black Lives Matter. They support legislation to expand voting rights. And they voted for Democrats in seven of the last eight presidential elections. And yet, America’s new multiracial democratic majority has hurled itself against some of the world’s most powerful counter-majoritarian institutions.
While this is an appealing theory, the main issue is that the facts do not support it. As this election showed, in many cases, most people do not agree with the multiracial Democratic majority! Not only did more people vote for Trump than for Harris, the biggest shifts toward Trump were from racial minorities themselves. In Texas, Trump got 55% of the Latino vote. Many of the most vociferous Trump supporters are ethnic minorities, as seen in large populations of Arab Muslims, Chinese, and Latinos who chafe at Democrats’ cultural liberalism and were ardent Trump supporters.
Moreover, the apparent dominance of Democratic positions has also dissipated. While it is true that most Americans supported Black Lives Matter after 2020, as of 2024, this is no longer true. Most Americans do support immigration broadly in the abstract; yet, in July of this year, Gallup found that a majority of Americans support curbing current immigration levels. Feeling that the Democrats have gone too far, the apparently unbreakable popular majority of Democratic policy positions also disappeared.
The other argument of counter-majoritarianism is that the rural bias of American institutions, especially in the Senate, has entrenched Republican minority power. This is broadly true: as Democrats have cratered in rural areas, small, rural states that are entitled to two Republican senators get outsized representation in the Senate. The problem, however, is that Republicans are not just winning small, rural Western states; they are also winning large, populous states around the country. The second-most populous state (Texas) and third-most (Florida) are now solidly Republican. Of the 10 states with the largest populations, Trump won 7 of them, and their Senate representation is split fairly evenly. Many of the smallest states (Vermont, Delaware) are solidly Democratic. While there are structural biases against Democrats because of their geographic dispersion — for example, it is almost impossible to draw balanced and contiguous House districts in a state like Wisconsin because Democrats are so concentrated in small areas — the bias is far smaller and less determinative than such arguments suggestion.
Rather than multiracial democracy, a more accurate term would be multicultural democracy. But these cultures do not cleanly divide along racial lines. Many minority groups are culturally conservative and have more in common with Republicans than Democrats, while others have more in common with white working-class Americans than other minority groups. Recent immigrants are often the most critical of lax immigration policies because they are in direct labor competition with new arrivals. As we saw in this election, Black and Latino voters voted in record numbers and percentages for Republicans. So are Muslims. And if the Democrats took a more hardline stance against Israel’s war in Gaza, Jews might, too. It is not an issue centered on minority identity, but rather cultural familiarity and economic status—regardless of which identity group one might find themselves in.
The cultural cleavages center on cosmopolitanism and localism. Theories of minority rule assume that majorities of Americans support cosmopolitanism and are prevented from succeeding due to counter-majoritarian institutions. A much more logical explanation is that cosmopolitanism is simply less popular than we want to believe. And even if it might be popular on an issue-by-issue basis, it is not popular as an overall worldview, which is what drives national elections. When it comes to actual policy decisions that aren’t tax cuts, Republicans will almost certainly struggle: nobody wants to reduce healthcare or social security or drink polluted water. But as long as they continue to embody anti-cosmopolitan values, they will be powerful at the national level.
What is at stake is not multiracial democracy but multicultural democracy—especially the cultures of cosmopolitanism and localism. How to make those two cultures coexist is the key to a viable American future. As of now, the Democrats have not come up with any convincing answer.