\n<\/p>\n
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<\/p>\n
Did you hear about the new Democratic Party postmortem on the 2024 election? Perhaps I need to be more specific: There\u2019s this one, that one, and also this one, and probably more that I\u2019m missing.<\/p>\n
Postmortems are a recurring motif among Democrats, who have long \u201cinterpreted every loss as an utter rejection of their party and a signal that they needed to make major changes in the way their party was run, what it stood for, and how it picked candidates,\u201d as the political scientist Seth Masket writes. But Donald Trump\u2019s reelection has prompted an especially frantic round of soul searching.<\/p>\n
Rather than producing a clear consensus, the diagnoses and prescriptions that emerge from these reports tend to bear uncanny similarity to the preexisting political views of the specific authors and the organizations commissioning them. One point of convergence since Trump\u2019s win, though, is how often the reports, and news coverage of them, have invoked Project 2025, the right-wing plan that has become a blueprint for the Trump administration, as a sort of model. One effort to reshape the party has even christened itself \u201cProject 2029.\u201d<\/p>\n
This got my attention because I wrote a book about Project 2025. Democrats didn\u2019t seem to understand the project during the election; their elected officials weren\u2019t ready for Trump\u2019s second-term blitz, even though they had two years to prepare; and now the people citing it as a political model misunderstand the authors\u2019 goals on a basic level. Project 2025 starts with a deeply held ideology, and approaches policies and politics only as a means of turning that ideology into practice.<\/p>\n
By contrast, the progressive postmortems show less interest in laying out a worldview. Instead, they mostly start from the position that the Democratic Party\u2019s central problem is tactical and electoral. Their recommendations all circle the question of how to win: Does the party need better policy solutions? Does it need to govern better when in power? Has the party allowed itself to become captured by unpopular left-wing ideas? The approach is understandable. The Democrats are deeply unpopular, including with their own voters, and the past few elections have shown an erosion of the party\u2019s vote share with groups including young men, Black men, and Hispanic people. (The political scientist Jonathan Bernstein offers a contrarian argument that Democrats\u2019 electoral prospects aren\u2019t actually that dire, noting that their candidates outperformed expectations in 2024 and that Trump is very unpopular.)<\/p>\n
One new report this week, from the centrist Democratic organization Welcome, declares its electoral orientation right in the title: \u201cDeciding to Win.\u201d The report\u2019s contention is that \u201csince 2012, highly educated staffers, donors, advocacy groups, pundits, and elected officials have reshaped the Democratic Party\u2019s agenda, decreasing our party\u2019s focus on the economic issues that are the top concerns of the American people. These same forces have pushed our party to adopt unpopular positions on a number of issues that are important to voters, including immigration and public safety.\u201d<\/p>\n
The group that calls itself Project 2029 focuses less on how liberal or moderate certain policies are and more on their inherent merits. Its founder, Andrei Cherny, told The New York Times that the project will gather \u201cthe best thinkers from across the spectrum\u201d of the party, which is so disparate that it runs from the moderate Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez to Zohran Mamdani. In other words, Project 2029 is not just nonideological\u2014it\u2019s anti-ideological.<\/p>\n
These may be worthwhile efforts, but they bear little resemblance to Project 2025, which is not an electoral project. Project 2025 begins with an ideology\u2014a desire to build a very traditional, male-dominated, Christian-nationalist society\u2014and only then starts outlining which policies might bring it about. This vision is not popular, and polling last year by the Heritage Foundation, which convened Project 2025, found strong disapproval among voters in battleground states. But the authors believe deeply in their worldview, and to them, that supersedes popularity with voters.<\/p>\n
The authors of \u201cDeciding to Win,\u201d along with other Democratic figures, argue that the party\u2019s broader, philosophical warnings about Trump\u2019s danger to democracy in 2024 were a political error. These critics insist that Democrats must focus on a more practical economic message to win. But Project 2025 elevates ideology above practicality: It argues forcefully that liberal government is a threat to the Constitution, and offers only a skeletal economic program, which is neither popular nor populist\u2014ending the Fed, cutting taxes on the wealthy, deregulating the financial sector. And it barely addresses inflation, a top issue for voters in 2024, at all.<\/p>\n
Project 2025 may not be the best model to emulate anyway. What works for a demographically and politically homogeneous Republican Party may not work as well for the more fractious Democratic Party. Project 2025\u2019s success as an election strategy is also somewhat accidental, because Trump tried to disown it during his campaign. But thinking about the contrasting approaches of Project 2025 and these left-of-center efforts reminded me of the \u201cautopsy\u201d conducted by the GOP following Mitt Romney\u2019s defeat in the 2012 presidential election. The party concluded that in order to win, it would need to be more inclusive and open, adopting minority outreach more like the Democrats. And crucially, it needed to change its tone on immigration, including embracing \u201ccomprehensive immigration reform.\u201d<\/p>\n
The party\u2019s next nominee, much to the horror of its establishment, was Trump, who rejected the autopsy\u2019s prominent argument to embrace immigration\u2014yet won with a campaign focused on reducing immigration, while also increasing his share of the vote among minorities. That\u2019s the rub with these postmortems: There\u2019s usually not one single way to win, and if it were obvious, everyone would do it.<\/p>\n
Related:<\/p>\n
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:<\/strong><\/p>\n Today\u2019s News<\/strong><\/p>\n Dispatches<\/strong><\/p>\n Explore all of our newsletters here.<\/em><\/p>\n Evening Read<\/strong><\/p>\n Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: 20th Century Fox Film Corp \/ Everett Collection; Everett Collection.<\/p>\n The Movies That Capture Women\u2019s Deepest Fears<\/p>\n By Sophie Gilbert<\/p>\n Stephen King has never shied away from talking about how much he dislikes Stanley Kubrick\u2019s adaptation of The Shining, King\u2019s novel about a writer possessed by malevolent forces at an isolated hotel in the Colorado mountains. Kubrick\u2019s 1980 adaptation, King has argued, is \u201ctotally empty\u201d and a \u201cgreat big beautiful Cadillac with no motor inside,\u201d a film much more interested in the conventional awfulness of a man terrorizing his wife and child than in the uncanny suspense of the book. \u201cKubrick just couldn\u2019t grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel,\u201d King explained to Playboy in 1983. \u201cSo he looked, instead, for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones.\u201d The movie, he insisted, \u201cnever gets you by the throat and hangs on the way real horror should.\u201d<\/p>\n With the greatest respect for an author who\u2019s had to see someone else\u2019s vision of his work become culturally indelible, I think King is wrong. But he\u2019s wrong in a fascinating way\u2014one that speaks to how little ownership artists have over their work as it goes out to the broader culture.<\/p>\n Read the full article.<\/p>\n More From The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n Culture Break<\/p>\n Pat Martin for The Atlantic<\/p>\n Explore. Thomas McGuane\u2014fisherman, hunter, rancher, writer\u2014is the last of his kind, Tyler Austin Harper writes. What will we lose when we lose the \u201cliterary outdoorsman\u201d?<\/p>\n Watch. Love Is Blind\u2019s latest season (out now on Netflix) had a notably old-fashioned streak that ended in a breakdown of the show\u2019s premise, Julie Beck writes.<\/p>\n Play our daily crossword.<\/p>\n Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.<\/p>\n When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Did you hear about the new Democratic Party postmortem on the 2024 election? Perhaps I need to be more<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31689,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[581,18417],"class_list":{"0":"post-31688","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-democrats","9":"tag-overthinking"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n