The Psychology of Party Decline

Negligence, indifference, and groupthink among Democrats.

It’s taken a while, but Democrats are finally confronting the empirical reality of their second loss to Trump. The evidence is impossible to ignore.

For example, recent analysis of county-level voting trends in the past three elections by Shane Goldmacher in The New York Times shows that Trump improved his standing in “1,433 of the nation's 3,100+ counties, even as he lost in 2020. Democrats have expanded their vote share continuously in only 57 counties.” Likewise, TLP’s own analysis of the gold-star Catalist data from 2024 shows how the party lost significant ground with major demographic groups from 2012 to 2024, including: black voters (22-point decline), Latinos (27-point decline), working-class voters overall (12-point decline), men (11-point decline), and young people (14-point decline).

The bigger question is why Democrats did nothing about these trends as they were emerging. It wasn’t a state secret.

TLP alone published hundreds of pieces over the past five years outlining in detail Democrats’ setbacks and travails with working-class voters of all races and how the party’s economic and cultural agenda was falling flat with Americans across the country. TLP co-founder Ruy Teixeira and contributor John Judis wrote a crystal-clear, deeply researched, highly engaging book about the decline of the historical party of America’s working class—Where Have All the Democrats Gone?—that was published an entire year before the 2024 election. As they explained at the time:

For all this, over the last decades, Democrats have steadily lost the allegiance of “everyday Americans”—the working- and middle-class voters that were at the core of the older New Deal coalition. Initially, most of these lost voters were white, but in the last elections, Democrats have also begun to lose support among Latino and Asian working-class voters.

How did this happen? There is an original reason, for which the Democrats were hardly to blame. Democrats were the principal supporters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—measures that went a long way toward ending racial segregation and Jim Crow, but that angered many southern whites and, to a lesser extent, some whites in the North.

With the exception of a few far-right groups, however, Americans have reconciled themselves to those bills. Democrats regularly win elections in Virginia, the seat of the southern Confederacy, and many of the northern and southern suburbs formed by white flight now vote for Democratic candidates. And Americans elected an African American president in 2008 and reelected him in 2012.

Today, there are a multitude of factors that have driven working-class voters out of the Democratic Party. They include:

• Democrats’ support for trade deals that led to factory closings in many small towns and midsize cities in states that were once Democratic strongholds.

• Democrats’ support for spending bills that the working and middle classes paid for but that were primarily of benefit to poor Americans, many of whom were minorities.

• Democrats’ enthusiasm for immigration of unskilled workers and the party’s opposition to measures that might reduce illegal immigration.

• Democrats’ support for strict gun control.

• Democrats’ insistence on eliminating fossil fuels.

• Democrats’ use of the courts and regulations to enforce their moral and cultural agenda, whether on the sale of wedding cakes or the use of public men’s and women’s bathrooms.

Not all Democrats are in line with these actions or beliefs. But overall, they came to characterize the party. Some of these stances have to do directly with economics; others with culture. The differences over them are often taken to distinguish the college-educated professional from those who do not have college degrees, but they equally, if not more accurately, arise from the differences in economic geography—what we call the “Great Divide” in American politics.

On one side of the divide are the great postindustrial metro centers like the Bay Area, Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, New York, and Seattle. These are areas that benefited from the boom in computer technology and high finance. These areas are heavily populated by college-educated professionals, but also by low-skilled immigrants who clean the buildings, mow the lawns, and take care of the children and the aged. The professionals, who set the political agenda for these areas, welcome legal and illegal immigrants; they want guns off the street; they see trade not as a threat to jobs but as a source of less expensive goods; they worry that climate change will destroy the planet; and, among the young, they are engaged in a quest for new identities and sexual lifestyles. A majority of them are Democrats.

On the other side of the divide are the small towns and midsize cities that have depended on manufacturing, mining, and farming. Some of these places have prospered from newly discovered oil and gas deposits, but many are towns and cities like Muncie, Indiana; Mansfield, Ohio; and Dundalk, Maryland that have lost jobs when firms moved abroad or closed up shop in the face of foreign competition. The workers and small businesspeople in these towns and cities want the border closed to illegal immigrants, whom they see as a burden to their taxes and a threat to their jobs; they want to keep their guns as a way to protect their homes and family; they fly the American flag in front of their house; they go to or went to church; they oppose abortion; some may be leery of gay marriage, although that is changing; many of them or members of their family served in the military; they have no idea what most of the initials in LGBTQIA+ stand for. A majority of them are now Republicans and many are former working-class Democrats.

Why was all this political, demographic, and cultural change ignored at the time—when something could have been done about it?

As Ruy and John explain in their book, and I outlined in a recent TLP piece, part of it has to do with the sociology of the party itself and its capture by highly educated, culturally-left activists, policy institutions, candidates, campaign staffers, and consultants. If your party is controlled by strategists, policy wonks, and candidates who are mostly not from working-class backgrounds and don’t represent these communities, it’s not surprising that they can’t see straight about the party’s emerging troubles with these voters.

This raises another issue about the psychology of the ruling strata of Democrats. By early 2022, for example, there was strong evidence that Biden’s economic agenda—particularly as it related to trillions of dollars in new spending and promises for even more—plus the party’s sharp turn to the left on cultural matters was alienating key working-class voting blocs. Any clear-eyed reading of public opinion data at the time showed serious concerns among voters about inflation and a host of Democratic policies on immigration, transgender ideology, crime, and climate change.

Were key Democrats just negligent about all of this, meaning they didn’t bother to examine the evidence in the first place? Or were they more indifferent about it, meaning they knew what was going on with voters but downplayed it and decided not to do anything about it in terms of their policies, values, outreach, and campaigning? Most likely, leading Democrats and party staffers were engaged in a common form of groupthink, combining both negligence and indifference into a potent stew of denial about the party’s decline with black voters, Latinos, young people, and the working class—groups they had always taken for granted as bedrock supporters of the party.

“There’s no way ‘people of color,’ nonvoters, and blue-collar Americans will shift to Trump!” Or so they thought.

A key aspect of groupthink is the suppression of dissenting voices and rejection of information that doesn’t fit the group’s consensus. Members of both parties and people in a multitude of different institutions are susceptible to this particular psychological malady. After 2020, Democrats didn’t want to hear about the effects of their party’s screwy cultural program on working-class voters, so they didn’t look for it or attacked people who made these arguments as insufficiently committed to the partisan cause. Democrats also didn’t want to hear about reams of polling data and qualitative studies showing that their core campaign themes around “Bidenomics” and threats to abortion rights and democracy didn’t resonate with key voting groups that would ultimately decide the election. So, the leading party members said decline wasn’t happening or told people to yell louder about how good the economy was doing and how much of a threat Trump was to reproductive choice and democracy. Both of these approaches proved to be losing strategies, as was predicted by many party dissidents and neutral analysts at the time.

In addition, stunning (but perhaps not surprising) new evidence of negligence, indifference, and groupthink has emerged from recently published books and other journalistic accounts of how senior Democrats and the media missed, ignored, or shrugged off President Biden’s declining mental state in office even as his top campaign people made off with millions in fees and hid negative polling data from him.

People in a rut usually proclaim, “Oh the past is past, let’s move on.”

But if a party can’t or won’t confront its own debilitating psychological deficiencies, it will never improve. The road to recovery starts with Democrats learning how to accept and analyze the mounds of data and election results showing that large numbers of Americans no longer trust the party, don’t like many of its candidates, and disagree with much of the party’s recent economic and cultural agenda. Donald Trump figured out how to exploit these weaknesses, even with his own manifest problems accepting reality.

Democratic Party elites and candidates made crucial mistakes and failed to change course as these negative trends among voters were solidifying over the past decade. Going forward, they cannot afford to continue putting their heads in the sand about the party’s predicament—or else Democrats should prepare themselves for at least eight years of Trump-then-Vance presidencies and continued rejection at the polls.