In the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, Democratic political leaders are no doubt thinking about how to recover and regroup for the upcoming elections of 2026 and 2028. Republican leaders should be thinking about how best to use and build on their historic victory. Herewith are a few thoughts: The Democratic Party should become more democratic. The Republican Party needs to become more restrained.
Victory for any Democratic presidential nominee in 2024 would have been problematical at best. Historically, whenever the public is dissatisfied with the state of the economy a president running for re-election loses, as does the presidential nominee of the incumbent President’s party if the incumbent President, for whatever reason, is not on the ballot. So perhaps Vice President Harris’s campaign was doomed from the start, and perhaps President Biden would have been rejected by the public if Democratic leaders had not rejected him first. But Harris and her approach to the campaign had other weaknesses which may have contributed to her defeat as well.
First, it should be noted that within the Democratic Party she was uniquely unpopular. Seeking the 2020 presidential nomination, she dropped out of the race after polls of Democrats showed she commanded no support within the party. Indeed, she won not a single vote or a single delegate in a single primary. Moreover, public opinion polls conducted earlier this year before Biden got the boot showed that while a majority of the public disapproved of him, Harris was even less popular. Yet party leaders chose to make her the standard barrier anyway without so much as a token primary to test her vote-getting talents or give other potential candidates the chance to show their potential. By the way, the last time either party nominated a presidential candidate who had not run in the primaries was in 1968, when Hubert Humphrey became the Democrats’ standard barrier. Like Harris, he was the Vice-President to an unpopular President, and also like Harris, he lost as well.
Furthermore, Harris failed to address effectively the issues which were uppermost in the voters’ minds: The economy, inflation, immigration, border security, and crime. To the extent she addressed issues at all, she harped on abortion. While the public supports unlimited abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy, it cares less for this issue than it does for the ones Harris ignored. Besides, since the GOP is no longer the pro-life party—Trump having said each state should decide its own abortion policy—the Democratic advantage on abortion is probably diminishing anyway.
It should also be noted that Harris may have paid too much attention to celebrities and what they thought of her. Of course, Oprah Winfrey, Lady Gaga, Julia Roberts, Beyonce, and Bruce Springsteen were well within their rights to support Harris, and she was well within her rights to cultivate, exploit, publicize, and pay for that support as well. Yet one must wonder whether being more accessible to the voters, and less to celebrities might have been more helpful. Donald Trump, whatever his true opinion of the public, had far less celebrity support, but evinced far more accessibility, or at least the appearance of accessibility.
To be sure, Harris had some good points. She refused to play the gender card or the race card, and she avoided the sort of stupid and arrogant comments which helped sink the campaigns of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Mitt Romney in 2012—No idiocy about any “basket of deplorables” or “the 47%.” But she must do more than continuing to avoid race-baiting and insulting the public. Should she want to seek future electoral success, she must win power democratically, emphasize issues about which the people truly care, and pay more attention to the voters than to the entertainment elite.
As far as the GOP is concerned, there’s an old saying applicable here: “Nothing succeeds like success.” And Republicans in general, and Trump in particular, have every right to be proud of a victory of historic proportions. Trump is the first GOP presidential candidate in 20 years to win more votes than the Democratic presidential nominee. This will allow him to return to the White House without the cloud that hung over his first administration.
But did he truly win a mandate as well? Trump won 49.9% of the popular vote to Harris’s 48.4%. That’s a decisive victory for Trump and the GOP but not the landslide his supporters have been claiming for him. Indeed, given that Trump was on the “right” or at least the popular side of the issues the voters cared about the most, and given Harris’s ineptitude as a campaigner, one can wonder why Trump’s victory margin isn’t greater. While his rhetorical excesses and the criminal and civil cases brought against him no doubt made him more popular within the GOP, they may also have limited the extent to which he could expand his support beyond his hard-core MAGA followers.
At any rate, the greatest challenges for the GOP are not to overestimate the magnitude of Trump’s otherwise undeniable victory, and to exercise restraint in the implementation of the policies Trump has promised—or threatened—to implement, and in the appointment of those whom he wants to carry out his policies. Specifically, Trump should show restraint with:
- Tariffs: One hopes his threat to impose greater tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico, and China will not be implemented if they cooperate on immigration and the drug trade. Otherwise, he may start a trade war in which other countries levy tariffs on American goods, thereby reducing if not destroying American companies’ efforts to engage in international trade;
- Immigration: America cannot rid itself quickly enough of gangbangers, drug dealers, terrorists, and other assorted criminals taking advantage of heretofore excessively lax efforts to control the border, and one should wish our new Immigration Czar all the best in his efforts to incarcerate or deport them. Yet caution must be exercised in choosing who else to deport and when to deport them lest our economy be hurt by the removal of essential workers.
- Public finance: We have long had a bipartisan tradition of stupidity, mendacity, incompetence, and corruption in the “management” of our public finances, resulting in record levels of deficits and debt. All the tax cuts Trump promised will, if implemented, increase the deficit and debt even further unless ways and means can be found to restrain federal spending as well.
- Personnel: Trump’s appointments vary greatly in quality. Sending Marco Rubio to the State and Doug Bergum to the Interior are at least rational and defensible, and Rubio and Bergum may prove to be quite good. But making Pete Hegseth Secretary of Defense, Tulsi Gabbard Director of National Intelligence, and Cash Patel FBI Director are at the very least highly questionable, and require thorough scrutiny by the Senate exercising its constitutionally mandated duty to “advise and consent.”
- The Constitution: Trump’s initial suggestion that the Senate go into recess and thereby allow him to make his appointments without its approval (or disapproval) showed at best a misunderstanding of the function and meaning of the Constitution as a protection against dictatorial government. Whatever Trump and his minions attempt must always be within the guardrails our Constitution has created for balancing order with liberty and securing both.
Whether the Democratic Party and its candidates for office can become more democratic in their attention to the issues the public cares about the most and in how candidates are selected its candidates will determine if and when Democrats can begin making a comeback. Whether Donald Trump and his Republican allies can implement their policies with restraint, reason, and a due regard for Constitutional principles will determine whether Trump’s 2024 election victory is merely a flash in the pan or the beginning of long-term Republican success in elections and governance.
Malcolm L. Cross has lived in Stephenville since 1987 and taught politics and government at Tarleton for 36 years, retiring in 2023. His political and civic activities include service on the Stephenville City Council (2000-2014) and on the Erath County Republican Executive Committee (1990-2024). He was Mayor pro-tem of Stephenville from 2008 to 2014. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Stephenville
Economic Development Authority since 2018 and as chair of the Erath County Appraisal District’s Appraisal Review Board since 2015. He is also a member of the Stephenville Rotary Club, the Board of Vestry of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, and the Executive Committee of the Boy Scouts’ Pecan Valley District. Views expressed in this column are his and do not reflect those of The Flash as a whole.
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