Democrats Face 3 Existential Questions As They Grapple With Their Loss To Trump
Huff PostLOADING ERROR LOADING In the month-and-change following Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump, Democrats have begun a difficult conversation over what exactly went wrong and how the party should move forward. The current debate over the progressive groups in the Democratic coalition traces their power to the 2010s, when they began a shift decidedly to the left amid what Vox’s Andrew Prokop calls “the rise of new protest movements and social media” and the discrediting of “establishment Democrats’ approach” following Trump’s first win. “Democrats’ losses among working-class voters were not distributed equally across demographic groups,” Jared Abbott, director of the Center for Working-Class Politics, a research group studying working-class voters, wrote following the 2024 election. “Indeed, though Harris suffered a small loss of working-class white support, dropping from Biden’s 37% to 34%, her support among non-white working-class voters fell by nearly three times as much.” Since nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population does not have a college or graduate degree, according to the Census Bureau, a party that can only reliably depend on college-educated voters can’t build a sustainable majority.