“No Kings” Is Not Enough

The Democrats’ latest mirage.

The Democrats have Trump right where they want him! Anti-racism didn’t work….anti-fascism didn’t work….so now it’s time for anti-feudalism. No kings! The Democrats are certainly right that anti-feudalism is popular. The June 14 “No Kings” demonstrations were very successful in turning out protestors with nationwide estimates in the 4-6 million range, compared to 3-5 million for the April 5 “Hands Off” protests.

Cue the rapturous “turning the corner” pronouncements from the usual suspects. The honest workers and peasants of America, led by their vanguard party, the (professionals-dominated) Democrats, are rising up to throw off the shackles of oppression! The #Resistance has been reawakened and a wave is gathering to sweep the hated Trump and his MAGA movement into the ashbin of history!

Well…maybe. But why should we believe this isn’t just the latest iteration of a failed strategy? For ten years, since Trump descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, Democrats have tried over and over to turn a political strategy centered around Trump and his terribleness into a successful exorcism of Trump/right populism. It hasn’t worked.

But this time it will, we are assured. This time is different. This time, he’s gone too far. This time, voters will be roused from their stupor and massively reject the Bad Orange Man. If only it were that simple. Here are some reasons why it’s not.

Start with Trump’s and the GOP’s popularity. They’re not popular but then again neither are the Democrats. Trump’s approval has gone down since the beginning of his second term, now sitting at 46.5 percent in the RCP running average (a point lower in Nate Silver’s average). But Trump is still running ahead of his approval rating at this point in his first term. And at this point in his second term, he’s actually running slightly ahead of Obama and Bush at this point in their second terms.

In terms of favorability, Republican Party favorability still significantly outruns Democratic favorability (42 percent vs. 35 percent). The Democrats are a dreadful 24 points underwater (favorable minus unfavorable) while Republicans are net negative by a more modest 11 points. And Trump’s favorability is higher than that of his party and of course way higher than the Democrats’.

That’s a problem. To truly vanquish Trump and his movement, it won’t be enough to rely on their unpopularity; Democrats must work on making themselves much more popular and attractive than they are.

That won’t be easy given the scale of the challenge Democrats face in the current era. David Brooks put it well in a recent column:

For nearly a century, the Democrats have ridden on the grand narratives of previous eras. First, the welfare state narrative...Second, the liberation narrative…Those are noble narratives. They are not sufficient in the age of global populism.

The Democrats’ first core challenge is that we live in an age that is hostile to institutions and Democrats dominate the institutions—the universities, the media, Hollywood, the foundations, the teachers unions, the Civil Service, etc. The second is that we live in an age in which a caste divide has opened up between the educated elite and everybody else, and Democrats are the party of the highly educated.

Democrats recently had an argument about whether they should use the word “oligarchy” to attack Republicans. They are so locked in their old narratives that they are apparently unaware that to many, they are the oligarchy…(emphasis added)

Every society has a recognition order, a diffuse system for doling out attention and respect. When millions of people feel that they and their values are invisible to that order, they rightly feel furious and alienated. Of course they’ll go with the guy—Trump—who says: I see you. I respect you. If Democrats, and the educated class generally, can’t change their values and cultural posture, I doubt any set of economic policies will do them any good. It is just a fact that parties on the left can’t get a hearing until they get the big moral questions right: faith, family, flag, respect for people in all social classes.

It's also just a fact that Democrats have done little or nothing to address this problem. To do so would be painful. That would annoy much of the educated class Brooks alludes to, not to mention “the Groups” who exert so much influence over the party. Much easier to just focus on Trump. No kings!

Let’s look at a concrete example: immigration. There’s no doubt Trump’s approach to deportation (as opposed to his program to deport illegal immigrants) has been unpopular. Many of the specific actions his administration has taken on deportations have landed poorly with voters and given them a sense that many of the deportations are unfair and arbitrary. As a result, while immigration remains Trump’s best issue, he is now underwater in polling averages on the issue.

Voters clearly feel Trump has overreached on the issue and is not doing deportation right. But what about the Democrats? Do Democrats want to deport anyone? Do they have an immigration policy that goes beyond just opposing everything Trump does? Voters can be forgiven for not thinking so. That’s why Democrats have an incredibly abysmal rating on the issue. Trump may be slightly underwater on immigration (4 points in the Nate Silver average) but Democrats are an astonishing 58 points net negative (19 percent positive vs. 77 percent negative) on the issue in a recent poll of battleground districts from Impact Research.

The same could be said for a number of other issues—from DEI and transgender issues to energy policy and government bureaucracy—where Democrats are much more animated by opposing everything Trump and the Republicans stand for than by articulating what they stand for in a way that meets voters, especially working-class voters, where they are. In a profound way, too many voters just aren’t buying what they’re selling. Democrats need to sell voters something new; just yelling at (or in preferred Democratic jargon, “fighting”) Trump all the time and changing little else won’t cut it.

The scale of the challenge is well-illustrated by new data from Nate Silver. Silver took the Catalist data and did something I did a lot in the aftermath of the 2020 election. He calls it using the “net contribution to popular vote margin” or NCPVM to measure election-to-election change; in my earlier analyses I called it the CDM for “contribution to Democratic margin”. But it’s exactly the same concept and math.

The idea is very simple. To calculate the NCPVM/CDM for a given demographic in a given election, multiply the election’s proportion of voters in that demographic group (which reflects both that group’s underlying size and its election-specific turnout rate) by the group’s Democratic margin in that election. These results can then be compared across elections to see how demographic groups change in their contribution to the overall Democratic margin and therefore drive election-to-election margin change.

Silver has helpfully done this for a number of key demographic groups. His aim was to show “how the electoral math flipped against Democrats” and turned a winning coalition into a losing one. I think his results are quite illuminating and do indeed illustrate the startling change in electoral math and the scale of the Democrats’ challenge. (Frankly, I stopped using CDM because I worried it was a bit too arcane for most readers but I am hopeful that Silver’s analysis will help popularize this very useful metric.)

Here are some of Silver’s tables:

And finally:

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The final column in Silver’s tables shows the net swing by demographic group 2012-2024. But of course you can use Silver’s data to compare any two elections (e.g., 2020-2024) to enrich the story. But generally the following is true, as Silver says:

[O]verall, Democrats look like a party that took for too much for granted: that Black voters would continue to vote for them at near-unanimous rates, that Hispanics and Asian American voters were solidly in their coalition rather than often being swing voters, that Gen Z voters (particularly Gen Z men) would be as liberal as the Millennials that came of age under Obama, and that the rising share of college-educated voters would offset any other problems. Democrats simply don’t have a coalition that adds up to 50 percent—plus whatever additional margin they need in the Electoral College—any longer. To the extent they see elections as a demographic numbers game, they need to go back to the drawing board.

Back to the drawing board indeed. “No Kings” is not enough; it’s just another Democratic mirage fooling them into thinking a new slogan and more anti-Trump demonstrations will get them to the promised land. It won’t so that land will continue to shimmer tantalizingly in the distance. But wake up Democrats, it’s just a mirage.