In January of 2025, a few days after Trump’s second inauguration, New York Magazine ran a cover story with the headline “The Cruel Kids’ Table,” featuring a photograph of young right-wingers partying to ring in the new administration. This was an observation on what people called the “vibe shift” – the sense that after years of culture being predominately ‘woke’, the right was in the driver’s seat of political culture, and the public had shifted.
Of course, we all know what happened next: Republicans embraced the hubris of the moment, dined out on it, and stopped listening to the public that had elected them. Now some of them are out on the street, and many new Democrats are headed to Congress, filled with confidence. I’m not going to tell people not to celebrate (I would only admonish people not to gloat, not to be mean), and I certainly don’t want to undermine the confidence necessary for success. I just hope that Democrats don’t make the same mistake Republicans made in 2025, a mistake Democrats have also made in the recent past. At the beginning of this brief blog I posted the map everyone is waving about, showing the miracle of Blue Texas like some ancient prophecy at long last fulfilled. But on the same New York Times election page, there’s another map that I hope you all toggled: how much voters moved.
I share this second map not because of the direction they moved – but to remind everyone that voters move. If Democrats mistake a swing in thermostatic public opinion in reaction to current circumstances as an embrace of all the less popular parts of their ideology, and they neglect to fight for practical policy, the voters will bolt right again in a couple years, just like they did in 2024:
It’s going to be very difficult to try to satisfy the public, especially with only enough control to check Trump, not to actively govern. Democrats need to take seriously the project of building their big tent in more moderate states, of fixing their issues with pragmatic governance in deep blue cities they’ve long controlled, and they need to articulate a clear and consistent message of why they are fighting Trump when they fight him, and what they are fighting for – and that message should be honest about what they can’t achieve for the public, but it has to be a message for the public that exists, and not the one Democratic staffers imagine in their fantasies.
