Trump’s Victory Shouldn’t Cause Panicked Liberals to Overcorrect
They need to mount a resurgence based on their core convictions
There’s no sugarcoating it: Donald Trump and his MAGA movement won a convincing victory on election night, and the liberal coalition opposing Trump suffered a setback. But what makes such a result bearable is the certainty that there will be another election in four years. The architecture of liberal democracy means that it is possible to limit the longevity of regressive movements. Trumpism need not be the U.S.’s permanent fate. It can’t be if this nation is to remain true to who it is.
In the aftermath of electoral defeat, political movements are incentivized to self-correct, knowing another contest is right around the corner. When a party loses an election, it can reassess, recalibrate, and reemerge victorious the next time. That is a healthy impulse. But we must beware an overcorrection.
During the “reassess and recalibrate” phase, there is a temptation for the defeated party to overhaul its politics well beyond the point of reasonable adjustment. It is possible to forfeit too much in the hopes of rediscovering an electorally successful formula—because winning becomes everything. Trump is an enemy of the liberal order—he’s contemptuous of checks and balances, limits to his power, the freedom of the press, the free movement of individuals, international institutions. It is to this nation’s great shame that an electorally sufficient number of Americans did not find all those illiberal impulses a disqualifying trait. But that’s precisely what makes Trumpism such a dangerous ideology to “learn from” in defeat.
A portion of the anti-Trump coalition might be tempted to call for a political reconfiguration in a Trumpian key to win the next election. True liberals should refrain from joining them. We cannot lose sight of the fact that Trumpism—with its ethnonationalism and populism—cannot be reconciled with our core beliefs. Any attempt to do so would mean not winning against Trumpism, but forfeiting.
A correction that embraces the illiberal elements of MAGAism would therefore be fatal. Thankfully, if recent history is any guide, it’s also completely unnecessary.
Incumbency Disadvantage
There were six presidential terms from 1993 to 2016—but only three presidents occupied them: Bill Clinton (1993-2000), George W. Bush (2001-2008), and Barack Obama (2009-2016). Those three consecutive two-term stretches, following a 12-year Republican stranglehold on the presidency from 1981-1992, gave us the impression that American politics proceeds in presidential eras rather than moments—lengthy spells in which one party was dominant. Not anymore—if we’re in an era today, we’re in the anti-era era. From 2016 to 2024, the incumbent party has lost every presidential election. Three straight two-term wins by one party have been followed by three straight defeats for the party in power.
Trump’s victory on Tuesday night was not monocausal—the story of the 2024 election could never be reduced to one and only one factor. But one can make a strong case that the main reason Trump won the 2024 election had less to do with him and more to do with the administration he’ll be replacing. As CNN’s Harry Enten pointed out, “No incumbent party has won another term with so few voters saying the country is on the right track (28%) or when the president’s net approval rating is so low (Biden’s at -15 pts).”
concurred: “The American public has not embraced Trump. ... Trump didn’t win by making people love or even accept him. He won because the electorate rejected the Biden-Harris administration.”And this anti-incumbency assessment is only bolstered by zooming out and looking at global electoral trends. As Financial Times’ chief data reporter
discovered, every incumbent party facing election in a developed country lost vote share in 2024—the first time it’s ever happened. This was the case even in places like Narendra Modi’s India, where the prime minister’s cult following is off the charts. The economic reverberations of the pandemic have hit every single party in power. Given that Americans had a rather negative assessment of the economy under the current administration—67% of voters said it’s in bad shape, versus 32% who said it isn’t, per ABC News exit polls—there is no reason to expect the U.S. to be an outlier to this global trend.A good case can therefore be made that the 2024 election was not an affirmation of Trump so much as a backlash to the party in power—and that the 2016 and 2020 elections were part of this same anti-incumbent-party dynamic. After all, Trump represented the opposition party in two of the last three electoral cycles, and it’s hardly a coincidence that those are his two victories. Trump won because he was the instrument by which voters could punish the sitting party.
All of this is an important part of the story of the 2024 election. But the agonizing reality is that Trump also increased his appeal. That, too, is part of the 2024 election story.
If we bracket away wins and losses, Trump has now expanded and even diversified his MAGA coalition across three successive electoral cycles. Biden outperformed Trump in 2020, that’s true—but Trump’s losing effort in 2020 significantly outperformed his winning effort in 2016. And in 2024 he made appreciable gains across nearly every single voting demographic. As
points out for Slow Boring: “Trump did better in 2024 than in 2020 in all types of communities, with larger swings in some places than others.”Still, he had the undeniable fortune of going up against the sitting vice president of an unpopular administration, led by a commander-in-chief whose favorables on Election Day were a remarkable 15 points underwater. Any postmortem that fails to take that into account will leave itself vulnerable to overestimating the public’s ongoing appetite for Trumpism.
There Is No Liberal Version of Trumpism
Wherever the postmortem leads liberals, whatever the recalibration ends up looking like, here’s what it must not involve.
The liberal, anti-MAGA coalition cannot allow itself to conclude that it needs:
its own version of a populist demagogue
to make overtures to nationalist politics
to go along with Trumpism’s animus toward immigrants
to adopt anything resembling an America First foreign policy that views engagement with the world in zero-sum terms
to impose an exclusionary social vision through statist intervention
to embrace a Schmittian frame for politics that divides Americans into friends and enemies
to indulge conspiracy theories and bigotry and all the rest of the toxic mix of Trump’s politics.
The day after the election, I joked that the moment you see Gavin Newsom sporting a Don’t Tread On Me face tattoo, or catch Pete Buttigieg streaming himself doing donuts on a Pride flag in a Cybertruck, we’ll know the postmortem has gone haywire. The anti-Trump coalition needs to do a lot of things differently in the future—but there are things it must not do lest it become MAGA lite. The lesson from the 2024 election cannot be: Trump’s opponents need to adopt his aesthetics, practices, or policies in order to win. We liberals need to course correct in a way that fully preserves our ideals; otherwise why oppose Trump in the first place?
Winning the Narrative War
In a podcast appearance on The UnPopulist earlier this year, political economist Tim Ganser partly attributed the rise of the far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), over the past decade on the inability of liberals to tell compelling stories about their governing successes. On the one side are far-right forces constructing simple but effective narratives of civilizational decline due to liberal governance; on the other are technocrats patting themselves on the back for incrementalist gains. In the first few days after the election, something like this point seems to be congealing on the liberal side as a key vulnerability that needs addressing moving forward.
I agree that liberals need better storytellers that appeal to the heart, not just the mind. Texas Democratic operative
put the point more concretely: “The only way to fix this problem is huge investments in our digital apparatus. … Until that happens, we will be fighting a losing battle. Politics is a messaging war; we will only win if our message is stronger and hits more people than theirs.” There is something to what Erfan is saying. But his recommendation that “we need our own Daily Wire, TPUSA, Prager U, equivalents” goes too far. We need popularizers of liberal ideals, not populists who truck in outrage and conspiracy theories. If our solution is to roll out Charlie Kirk—but liberal … it’s just not going to work. Because what makes those operations successful is an intellectual shamelessness that we can’t match without losing our way entirely. The Daily Wire hired Candace Owens, a Hitler-justifying conspiracist, to be a featured voice for many years, an editorial decision wholly incompatible with liberalism’s commitment to truthfulness and fealty to reality. There is no liberal equivalent to this.In a similar vein, The UnPopulist contributor
proffered: “If you’re a Democrat thinking about how to win in 2028, your first thought needs to be ‘What candidate and platform will make Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Lex Fridman, etc. like us?’ You don't have to be happy about it. But that’s where we are. Podcasts > door knocking.” But there’s a reason these podcasters gravitate toward the RFK Jrs and Trumps of the world. Apart from liberals simply embracing anti-establishment belligerence, openness to conspiratorial thinking, and populist rhetoric—all traits that are not very compatible with liberal politics—what’s another pathway to getting these podcasters to “like us”? I think is on surer footing when he advises: “Democrats have to realize that legacy media is preaching to the choir at this point. They need candidates willing and able to go on non-traditional media and do well. They can't keep viewing it as beneath them or as the ‘wrong sorts of people.’” Being willing to go on the Joe Rogan Experience, and even doing well there, are reasonable asks. Winning Rogan’s approval or earning his vote are not.
Ezra Klein is surely right that “Democrats should have been going on Rogan regularly” and that they “should have been prioritizing it—and other podcasts like it—this year.” But when Klein prefaced his critique of liberal dismissiveness toward heterodox media venues by pointing to Bernie Sanders’ willingness to go on Rogan’s show years ago, what he failed to appreciate is that part of the reason Sanders had such a successful sojourn on Rogan’s show, even to the point of earning the host’s endorsement, was because Sanders, a populist with a discernibly anti-establishment streak, bears enough of a resemblance to Trump, despite being on the left, to make him palatable to Rogan and his audience in the first place.
Course Correction Not Capitulation
The solution to liberalism’s current electoral malaise is for a revitalized version of liberalism that speaks directly to the concerns of the moment to emerge, not for it to become something else entirely. Time will tell what that better version will look like (that is the project of this publication and its liberalism conference). In addition to addressing weaknesses that Republicans exploited during the 2024 election season, the anti-Trump side needs to study liberal success stories from this cycle.
Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, presided over a state that fared better than just about everywhere else in repelling Trump’s gains. “What’s the secret?,” he was asked. Polis’s response is worth quoting in full:
Prosperity and abundance agenda. We have focused on saving people money through three income tax rate reductions (two at the ballot box and one through the legislature: 4.63% > 4.5% > 4.4% > 4.25%), cutting property taxes, free preschool and kindergarten for every child, eliminating sales tax on necessities like diapers and feminine hygiene products, and we are in the process of delivering on pro-housing supply solutions, investing in transit and transit-enhanced living opportunities ... all while protecting and expanding personal freedom and respect for everyone.
Institute for Humane Studies President (and board member of ISMA, this publication’s parent organization)
described liberalism as “a system that learns and course corrects”—indeed, that’s one of its unique advantages over counterpart illiberal systems in which adjustments to the will of the despot are avoided at all costs. Liberalism is intrinsically hospitable to self-correction and reform. Liberals ought to welcome a recalibration while resisting a capitulation on core principles—individual liberty, the equal worth and dignity of all, limited government, the rule of law. These ought to remain non-negotiable. Any prescription that involves becoming more like the populist-nationalist demagogue liberals have been assiduously opposing ought to be flatly rejected.© The UnPopulist, 2024
Berny--
I like your perspective here. We don't need a "liberal MAGA" movement. We don't want Gavin Newsom to be the Democratic Ron DeSantis.
However, I do think Democrats need to acknowledge that messaging in the internet age is endless trench warfare. You have to show up every day. You have to be punchy and entertaining. You have to be "authentic" and not overly-polished. You have to use a wide variety of media to saturate coverage with messages that the median individual in different demographic groups can appreciate and understand. You have to be relentless and willing to run up the score whenever you can. You can't assume that any media organizations are going to call balls and strikes fairly. Again, this doesn't mean that Democrats should lie or bullshit the public, but they can't afford to tout their policy achievements on legacy new outlets and assume that this will be enough.
I don't disagree with this, but I'm not sure it actually gets to the central issues of addressing the need to identify and reexamine those aspects of liberal political culture that unnecessarily alienate many voters who seem happy to vote R against what would seem to be their interest. The MAGA cult is as much an anti-Commie-groomer-woke cult as a pro-Trump cult, and while liberals, progressives, and Never Trumpers aren't in control of Trump they are in control of their uneasy coalition.
I think Polis is absolutely on target (after having thought about this since . . . Tuesday night)--the strategy should not be "resistance," which is largely about political theater (I don't mean the term dismissively), it should be competence: demonstrating in Blue states what government can do for people. For example, I think every Democratic governor should be working asap to develop a plan to deliver a Romney-care proposal to the state legislature the day after Trump signs a repeal of the ACA. If Democrats can produce constructive results in the midst of federal chaos, I think 2026 will start the Blue wave that can check the momentum of federal damage and begin repairing the damage in January 2029. (And I do expect the damage to be enormous, systemic, and global.)