Five days after last month’s election, Senator Chris Murphy rendered a damning verdict on his party’s performance. “That was a cataclysm,” the Connecticut Democrat wrote on X. “Electoral map wipeout.” Donald Trump had won both the popular vote and the biggest Electoral College victory—312 to 226—for any Republican since 1988; Democrats had lost their Senate majority and appeared unlikely to retake the House. The Democratic Party had lost touch with far too many American voters, Murphy concluded: “We are beyond small fixes.”
Other prominent Democrats saw a similarly sweeping repudiation of the party’s brand. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Senator Bernie Sanders wrote in a statement issued less than 24 hours after the polls closed. At the time of those reactions, millions of votes had yet to be counted, and several of the nation’s closest House races remained uncalled. Now a clearer picture of the election has emerged, complicating the debate over whether Democrats need to reinvent themselves—and whether voters really abandoned them at all.
Trump’s popular-vote margin has shrunk to about 1.5 percent—one of the tightest in the past half century—and because some votes went to third-party and independent candidates, he’ll fall just short of winning a majority of the vote nationwide. Compared with incumbent governments elsewhere in the world, Democrats’ losses were modest. And in the House, they gained a seat, leaving the GOP with the second-smallest majority in history. A trio of Republican vacancies expected early next year will make passing Trump’s agenda even more difficult, and Democrats are in a strong position to recapture the chamber in the midterm elections, when the incumbent party typically struggles.
The final results are prompting some in the party to push back against the doom-and-gloom diagnoses of Murphy, Sanders, and others who say the Democratic brand is in tatters and needs an overhaul. “If the Democratic brand was fundamentally broken and needed to be thrown out, this election would have been a complete blowout. And it was not. It was way too close,” Yasmin Radjy, the executive director of Swing Left, a Democratic organizing group, told me. Another Democrat, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly, put it this way: “We lost an election. We didn’t lose the country.”
In some areas, the election looked like a red wave; compared with four years ago, the presidential vote swung to the right by about 10 points in some of the most populous blue states, such as New York, California, and New Jersey. But down-ballot races offer a solid case for Democratic optimism. The party label appeared to be far less of an albatross for Democratic congressional candidates than it was in strong Republican years such as 2010 and 2014. In the Senate this year, although Republicans flipped four seats, Democratic candidates prevailed in four battleground states that Kamala Harris lost to Trump. And according to the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, Democrats could have retaken the House majority with only 7,309 more votes across three congressional districts.
Democrats also held their own in state-legislative races. They made gains in Wisconsin and broke a Republican supermajority in North Carolina, although they lost ground elsewhere. Overall, the party retains significantly more power in state capitols than it did when Trump first took office in 2017. “There could have been a red wave in the states, and there wasn’t,” Heather Williams, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told me. “I genuinely see this election as defying odds.”
The Democrats I spoke with over the past week were cautious in defending their party’s down-ballot performance, lest they be accused of minimizing Harris’s loss to a convicted felon in a race many of them had characterized as an existential referendum on American democracy. “The stakes were so high that even getting it wrong by a few points is cataclysmic,” Radjy acknowledged, “and the implications for our country, for our democracy, for people’s lives, are really serious.” The party’s House gains were enough to earn Representative Suzan DelBene of Washington State a second term as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. But she was careful not to declare any sort of victory. “We did a lot of things right,” DelBene told me, “but we want to be in the majority, so there’s more that we can do.”
After seeing the full results, Murphy told me that he still considered the election a cataclysm for Democrats. His alarm stems from the party’s deepening losses among working-class voters—long the backbone of the Democratic Party. That trend continued this year, and the party also lost significant ground with nonwhite voters in major cities. Murphy contends that the Democratic coalition has shrunk to the point where the party simply isn’t competitive in enough places to win a majority. The outlook is particularly grim in the Senate, he said, where Democrats no longer hold any seats in a solidly red state, thanks to losses in Montana, West Virginia, and Ohio. “Morally and intellectually, how do you continue as the party of the working class and poor when every single election, fewer of them are voting for you?” Murphy told me. “There becomes a real dishonesty and inauthenticity within our party if we look at this last election as too close to call or good spots and bad spots.”
Murphy believes that Democrats should respond by embracing economic populism and welcoming people who have conservative views on cultural issues such as guns, immigration, and the environment. Some of the party’s successes from last month agree with him.
Representative Pat Ryan won a competitive reelection bid in New York’s Hudson Valley by 14 points, outperforming Harris by double digits. He attributed his victory to both focusing on the affordability crisis in his district and breaking with Democrats on issues such as the border. The Democratic brand has become “toxic,” Ryan told me. “I certainly felt a pretty resounding message from voters that in many places, and with many candidates, we’re just out of touch and in a bubble and not connected to the daily pressure, pain, struggle, challenges that the majority of people are facing.”
Not all Democrats who won tough races did so by criticizing their party. Kristen McDonald Rivet, a Michigan Democrat who outperformed Harris by nine points, said voters in her Trump-supporting district seemed to hate both parties equally. “They are sick of politics,” McDonald Rivet told me. “If this election was supposed to be a message to the Democratic Party, I would have lost,” she said.
The party is still combing through election data in search of clues as to why its candidates performed better down the ballot than at the top of the ticket, and in certain places more than others. The answers will likely determine whether the reboot that Murphy and Ryan are advocating gains momentum. “We should not jump to conclusions,” Radjy said. However devastating last month’s defeat was for Democrats, they did not fall as far from power as many first thought.
