After an election, politicians, citizens and journalists look for the lessons: What groups and ideas prevailed? What messages and issues resonated with the electorate, and which ones tanked? What does the result tell us about the priorities and values of the nation? After a surprising election result like we saw in 2016, these questions seemed especially pressing. Political analysts wondered what they’d missed before Trump’s unexpected victory and got to work trying to understand the forces behind it. As a result, we got lots of pieces about “forgotten Americans,” Midwestern diners and Democrats supposedly losing their way.
Collectively, we have massively overlearned those lessons. For one thing, Trump didn’t actually win the popular vote in 2016. There’s at least as much to be gained from speaking to voters who voted for someone else as from those who cast a ballot for Trump. But that’s not how things have unfolded, and a few lessons from 2016 have been deeply absorbed by the political world, driving decisions in 2024 based on ideas that may or may not have even been true nearly a decade ago. Let’s go through some of those main lessons and the problems with continuing to believe them.
Lesson 1: ‘Identity politics is a loser’
After Trump’s 2016 victory, pundits, journalists and experienced politicians were convinced that Hillary Clinton lost because she championed the needs of women, people of color, LGBTQ voters and others, but never specifically spoke to the needs of working class whites. The evidence for this argument was never very strong, but it exerted an outsize impact on Democrats going into the 2020 contest, persuading many that they needed to nominate a moderate, white, male candidate. President Joe Biden’s narrow victory only reinforced this belief among many Democrats.
It’s not entirely clear that “identity politics” is even the liability that it was made out to be after 2016.
Arguably, this has made it harder for Democrats…
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