Democrats Are Forgetting an Important Lesson from Obama

Americans are angry and looking for candidates who represent real change—not a defense of the political establishment.

Shortly after the 2024 election, I wrote a piece reflecting on how the Democrats had taken the wrong lessons from the results of the prior two general elections, leading them to make fatal missteps and facilitate Donald Trump’s return to the presidency. This included Joe Biden’s 2020 win and the party’s unexpectedly good midterm in 2022.

However, Democrats seeking explanations for Trump’s success might also do well to go back even further and consider something he had in common with their party’s most popular recent figure, Barack Obama: both men were outsiders running against a political system that Americans have soured on. Despite their myriad other differences, this was a key (though understated) part of their appeal to a meaningful cross-section of voters.

The country’s era of voter discontent has persisted to today, and for the most part, Democrats since Obama have failed to convince voters that they understand their frustrations or offer a different path forward. The party must reckon with this if they hope to regain ground with those who have abandoned them in the Trump era.

Why Obama Succeeded

The most popular narrative for Obama’s first win was that Democrats had secured the support of a “rising demographic majority.” America was becoming more diverse and progressive, the argument went, and the election of Obama was a first glimpse at this new future for the country. It wasn’t just Democrats who believed this; many Republicans did, too.

But this narrative missed a vital reason why many voters, including some who would go on to vote for Trump, had backed Obama in the first place. Though he was a first-term senator when he sought the presidency in 2008, Obama memorably ran against the political class in Washington, tapping into Americans’ anger and frustration with political elites and promising a better way forward. It was a powerful message that resonated with voters beyond just the traditional Democratic base, and it came at a time when confidence in the country’s institutions was at a historic low—and anger at Washington was growing.

By 2008, the war in Iraq had become a quagmire with a rising body toll and no end in sight, and the recklessness of Wall Street had tanked the global economy and precipitated a recession. That year, just 33 percent of Americans had a “great deal or quite a lot of confidence” in major institutions, according to Gallup.

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Obama pledged to be an agent of change. Polling that cycle routinely showed that more voters viewed him as likelier to bring change than his Republican challenger, Senator John McCain, who represented much of what they had come to detest about American politics. McCain was a lifelong politician who had served in Congress for 25 years. He had voted to support the Iraq War, which had become deeply unpopular. He had also strongly supported the agenda of President Bush, whose own popularity was approaching a historic low, almost 90 percent of the time—something Obama’s team pressed to its advantage, even as McCain worked to distance himself from Bush.

Although McCain held some advantages of his own over Obama—voters thought he had better qualifications to be president, for example—the change question ended up being more salient. In exit polls from that year, a plurality of voters said the most important factor informing their vote was whether a candidate could “bring about needed change,” and Obama won them by a landslide over McCain: 89 percent to nine percent. He also bested McCain on the question of which candidate cared more about “people like me.”

Four years later, Obama had become the establishment, and voters were still in a foul mood. He won re-election in spite of this by convincing enough of them that he had their back and that his opponent, Mitt Romney, was an out-of-touch political elite. Exit polling showed that while voters had greater misgivings about Obama the second time around than in his first campaign, they still believed that he had their best interests in mind, as he won fully 81 percent of those who said they prioritized voting for the candidate who most “cared about people.” This perception was likely aided by the fact that he had passed economic policies designed to help the working class.

The Omens of 2016

Toward the end of Obama’s time in office, Americans remained fairly pessimistic overall. Confidence in institutions had essentially flatlined since 2008, and by the summer of 2016, the share that believed the country was on the wrong track was at its second-highest point of the decade. The restlessness in the electorate manifested in the rise of two new “outsider” candidates, one on each side of the political spectrum: Bernie Sanders on the left and Trump on the right. And both of them went head-to-head against a candidate who embodied the DC establishment in Hillary Clinton.

Clinton’s vulnerabilities were first highlighted by Sanders during the Democratic primary, when he attacked her for being too cozy with Wall Street (charges Clinton never really fought to dispel) and too connected to the “establishment.” The signs of discontent around Clinton became clear early on in the enthusiasm behind Sanders’ campaign and later as primary voting was underway. Sanders stunned many observers when he won Michigan, a Democratic-leaning swing state with a large working-class population that he had not been expected to carry over Clinton. Exit polls also showed that he was the favored candidate among independents who had cast a ballot in the Democratic primary.

However, rather than question the reasons for Sanders’ surging support, Clinton dismissed them. And instead of delivering a critique of the establishment that so many voters had come to detest, she aimed her fire at some of them.

As it turned out, Sanders had been onto something about the state of affairs in the country, and Clinton’s struggles to dispatch him early on were in hindsight an omen about where some voters in the Democrats’ coalition had been trending. In fact, a crucial component of Trump’s coalition in 2016 ended up being voters who had backed Sanders in the primary.

Like McCain before her, Clinton was viewed as far more qualified than her general election opponent. Election Day exits showed that voters believed by a 52–47 percent margin that she had the qualifications to be president, while that margin was 38–61 percent for Trump. Indeed, Clinton had an impressive resume for a traditional politician: she was highly educated, spent eight years learning the ropes of the White House as First Lady, served as a U.S. Senator, and held the position of Secretary of State, giving her extensive foreign policy experience. But just as in 2008, voters prioritized the “right experience” (22 percent) less than they did a desire for change (39 percent), and Clinton lost the latter voters big time to Trump, 14 percent to 82 percent.

In the end, Sanders and Trump mirrored Obama by running unapologetically against the country’s political system while Clinton ran as a defender of it. The result was the election of a man few thought ever stood a chance—including himself.

The Fall and Rise of Trump Once More

Democrats may have been tempted to chalk up Trump’s defeat four years later as the country course-correcting: his election had been an experiment, but people realized the error of their ways and ended it. However, Trump was actually quite close to winning a second term, and he likely would have gotten it but for a global pandemic that few could have anticipated.

At a moment of global instability and insecurity, enough voters decided to give the reins to Biden in the hope that he could help steer the country back to normalcy. The 2020 exit polls showed that he carried voters by large margins who said their most important candidate quality was either good judgment (Biden +42) or the ability to unite the country (Biden +51).

Before long, though, many Americans lost confidence in Biden’s leadership. Trust in major institutions had also continued to fall during his tenure. And while the gap between “right track” and “wrong track,” which had consistently favored the latter since at least 2009, narrowed to an even split early in Biden’s first year, it had ballooned to one of its widest points of the past decade by 2022.

Heading into the 2024 election, Americans were once again frustrated with their political leaders—especially Biden—and institutions, and their outlook about the country’s direction had soured immensely. It was in this context that Democrats not only nearly nominated their highly unpopular incumbent president for another term but did the next-riskiest thing: they tapped his second-in-command, Kamala Harris, who was closely tied to him and his administration.

Harris tried her best to fashion herself as the candidate of change, adopting the campaign slogan, “A New Way Forward.” Democrats hoped that she would present more of a fresh face than Biden did. However, like Clinton, much of Harris’s rhetoric about building a better future did not entail thorough or compelling critiques of the political system with which had many voters had become jaded. Rather, it was meant to present a direct contrast to Trump’s vision for change.

A hallmark of Harris’s rallies was the chant, “We’re not going back,” an implicit rebuke of that vision. But this carried a risk, too: it assumed that voters still viewed his first term poorly, despite growing evidence to the contrary. Instead of addressing their sincere gripes with the system, she was essentially arguing that those concerns—voiced by Trump—weren’t a big deal.

Additionally, unlike McCain in 2008, who tried (unsuccessfully) to distance himself from his party’s unpopular incumbent president, Harris refused to do the same. Of course, it may have been harder for Harris, both personally and politically, to detach herself from the man who hand-picked her to be his vice president. But this choice nonetheless served as a notice to voters that her presidency likely wouldn’t represent much of a deviation from Biden’s.

Ultimately, these moves didn’t work out for Harris. One post-election survey found that four of the five top reasons swing voters gave for not supporting Harris related to her ties to the Biden administration. In the AP VoteCast survey, a whopping 83 percent of voters said they wanted either “substantial change” or “complete and total upheaval,” and they broke for Trump by 15 points. Meanwhile, just 17 percent said they wanted either “no change” or “small change,” and Harris won them by 60 points—a telling insight into what voters expected from her.

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Recently, the New York Times’ Astead Herndon went to the swing state of Michigan to ask Trump voters how they viewed his tariff policy. Musing about how the Democratic Party might try to win back some of these working-class voters they had lost to Trump—specifically, what a message to them might sound like—Herndon offered an insightful observation about the party’s defense of institutions:

My experience would say it sounds somewhat like Donald Trump honestly. It sounds like disruption. It sounds like change. It sounds like making political systems work better.

The thing I think Donald Trump challenges, with Democrats specifically, is the disruption of institutions that he is intentionally doing right now have, I think, created an instinct among some Democrats to just protect. But among the people we talked to, those institutions are unpopular. And there’s a sense that they have already failed.

So what I find is the important distinction for Democrats is, are they going to be protector or improver of these things? And protector just means Donald Trump is bad. What he’s doing right here is bad. Improver means independent of him, here’s what we’re going to do to make that better.

Democrats truly believe that many of America’s institutions, even if imperfect, are good overall and worth preserving, a belief that has surely grown stronger as many of those institutions have come under attack from Trump (especially in the form of DOGE). No one would or should expect the party to turn on them or gut them the way Trump has tried to do.

However, as recent elections have shown, being reflexive defenders of institutions that Americans have lost trust in carries significant risk. There is a clear need for someone in the party—possibly their eventual 2028 presidential nominee—to acknowledge voters’ frustrations with these institutions and the political system more broadly, and to offer a vision for how to fix (rather than destroy) them. It might be their best hope for winning back at least some of the voters whom they’ve recently lost.