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, some analysts (including yours truly) reflected on how the Democrats had taken the wrong lessons from their earlier electoral wins in 2022 and even 2020, leading them to make fatal missteps and facilitate Trump’s return to the presidency. But there is another era that may be even more helpful in explaining how this happened—the Obama era.

Hard as it may be to believe, Barack Obama and Donald Trump had some things in common, including sharing a very important trait: 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.

Voter discontent with the establishment has persisted to today, and for the most part, Democrats since Obama have struggled to convince voters that they understand their frustrations or offer a different path forward. The party would be wise to reckon with this if they hope to regain ground with those who have abandoned them.

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; plenty of 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 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.” Obama won them in a landslide, capturing 89 percent to McCain’s 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.” Voters also thought he was “more in touch with people” like them than Romney by a ten-point margin. This perception was likely aided by the fact that Obama had passed economic policies designed to help the working class.

The Omens of 2016

Toward the end of Obama’s time in office, however, Americans remained pessimistic overall. Confidence in institutions had essentially flatlined since 2008, and by the summer of 2016, belief that 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 evident in the enthusiasm behind Sanders’ campaign. He stunned many people by winning the primary in 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, and Clinton’s difficulty dispatching him early on were in hindsight an omen about broader changes in the electorate—and in the Democrats’ coalition. In fact, a crucial element of Trump’s 2016 victory was support from voters who had backed Sanders in the primary.

Like McCain before her, Clinton was viewed as 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 Trump won those latter voters by a huge margin, 82 to 14.

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

When Trump lost four years later, many Democrats chalked it up to 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 may have gotten it but for a global pandemic that few could have anticipated.

At a moment of global instability and insecurity, a majority of voters decided to give the reins to Biden in the hope that he could help the country “return to normalcy.” He won voters by large margins who said the most important candidate quality to them was either good judgment or the ability to unite the country.

Before long, though, many Americans had lost confidence in Biden’s leadership. Trust in major institutions also continued to fall. And though the gap between “right track” and “wrong track” had narrowed from overwhelmingly “wrong track” 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 greatly. 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 her, 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. In one post-election survey, four of the five top reasons swing voters gave for not supporting Harris related to her ties to the Biden administration. A whopping 83 percent of voters said in the AP VoteCast survey that 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 Michigan to ask Trump voters how they viewed his tariff policy. Reflecting on those conversations, and about what kind of message the Democratic Party might use try to win back some of the working-class voters they lost to Trump, 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 and DOGE. No one would or should expect the party to turn on them or gut them the way Trump has tried to do.

But as recent elections have shown, being reflexive defenders of institutions that Americans have lost trust in also carries significant risk. The party needs somebody—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 reforming them so that American can trust them again.