The Democrats’ Refusal to Break With a Broken System Cost Them Dearly

It’s become something of a glum tradition in the Democratic Party. After an electoral beating, opinion makers and political elites—along with everyone with a social media account—offer their takes as to why Democrats blew it. For many, it is that the Democratic Party and President Joe Biden didn’t do more to help protect innocent lives in Gaza. For others, it is that Vice President Kamala Harris dared to campaign with Liz Cheney. Senator Bernie Sanders and many others point to the Democratic Party having moved away from its roots as the party of working and blue-collar folks.

The one self-evident answer that no high-minded pundit wants to admit is that people simply bought what Donald Trump was selling. Specifically, that Trump manages to appeal to voters who believe the system sucks and respond to what he says, over and over again, he’s going to do about it: crush it, shove obstacles out of the way, and get immediate results. It’s obviously authoritarianism and a terrible way to actually run a country. But I sympathize with many of the people who pinned their hopes on a radical transformation of a status quo that’s left people behind, including many in traditional Democratic constituencies.

Donald Trump tapped into something that everyone feels—that our current system of checks and balances and polite political norms doesn’t allow the country to move either nimbly or boldly enough, resulting in a consistent failure to deliver relief and results that people tangibly feel and desperately want.

A survey of Americans in 2024 from the Partnership for Public Service showed that trust and confidence in government was at an all-time low. A whopping 63 percent of Americans said they do not trust the government—up from the mid-40s in 2022. There is not a single demographic where the majority believes the government can be trusted—not Democrats, not Republicans, not men, not women, not Latinos, not Black Americans. No one.

Only 23 percent of Americans said they trust the government, far below the 35 percent who said that in 2022. Sixty-six percent say the government is incompetent. A full 68 percent of Americans say democracy is not working in the United States today, versus only 23 percent who say it is. Read that last part again. Nearly seven in 10 Americans say democracy is not working.

In this environment, Donald Trump’s promise to “crush the system” is a winning message. The Democratic Party could have all put on hard hats, joined laborers in building infrastructure projects, flown out to Gaza to personally disarm Israeli munitions, and told Liz Cheney to take a hike, and it wouldn’t have made the difference for a straightforward reason. Democrats defended the system, and all its dreary norms, and hoary traditions—the very ones most Americans say are broken, can’t be trusted, and don’t work for them. Not only did it make Donald Trump an attractive candidate to many, but it also was likely a factor in the decision of millions of voters to just stay at home, stewing over their feelings that the choice was to keep the system that they feel is broken and not working at all for them or vote for a fascist.

This is not to say that Democrats have to embrace authoritarianism; far from it. But no issue, no outreach to any constituency, and no return to the party of labor is going to matter until Democrats fully embrace the idea that Americans across the board see our government as a stale, stodgy, ineffective, and corrupt 250-year-old relic and believe that every promise you make to them will be broken. To these voters, Washington is where all the pretty promises are forced through a sausage grinder, only to come out the other side an unpalatable mess, if they come out at all.

Here, Democrats might take a cue from one of their own: Elizabeth Warren. In 2020, the senator from Massachusetts had a boomlet in the Democratic primary with two simple messages:  “We need big, structural change,” and “I have a plan for that.” 

Senator Warren may have arrived on the scene too early to be broadly accepted. Maybe Democrats, understandably terrorized by the Trump administration and reeling from horrific pandemic losses, were of the mind to play it safe, to endorse normalcy as a cardinal virtue. Joe Biden was best positioned as this sort of nominee, and by Super Tuesday, voters were inclined to follow the Democratic Party’s post–South Carolina primary signaling and fall in line behind the former vice president. However, Donald Trump reportedly feared Warren as the nominee the most; more than Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, or anyone else.

What Donald Trump understood, what Senator Warren got, and what Democrats should start to grasp now is that people don’t want to hear promises and don’t want politicians to just reach out to them. Voters and nonvoters alike want candidates to acknowledge their belief that the current system is horribly broken. Long before a candidate talks about their policy solutions, they just want some acknowledgment that voters are right to feel about the status quo in the way they do—and that they want their leaders to address the systemic issues that keep bold action from making it out of Washington alive.

None of this forces anyone to embrace authoritarianism or ditch democracy. The good news is that in the same survey from the Partnership for Public Service, most Americans think civil service workers do a good job, and their interactions with the government have been positive. Almost unanimously, Americans believe that having a competent federal government is key to having a strong democracy. In the survey, 90 percent backed that notion.

Democrats don’t have to abandon democracy or even checks and balances. But they do have to present a vision for a radical remaking of how our government works and how it legislates to meet the needs of people swiftly and boldly in the twenty-first century. And the story of how this change is wrought must be easy for people to understand, because Donald Trump’s message is two words: “Smash it.”

The Democratic vision for big, structural change can range from ditching the filibuster (assuming Republicans don’t do it first) to national referenda for the purpose of introducing more direct democracy into government, to adding more judicial circuits and, thus, more seats to the high court—the better to break the stranglehold that corrupting influences have on the judiciary. It could include term limits for Congress and full public financing of elections for all federal offices so that politicians can’t be bought off. These reforms would move quickly with no filibuster and a more favorable Supreme Court.

It may include a remaking of the Department of Labor to ensure unions have a permanent seat inside government to advocate and represent workers, and more independent watchdogs to report to the public on the activities of the FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies that engender so much distrust.

Some of the above may be good ideas, and some may stink. But here, we get to the kinds of structural changes that might help voters trust our governing institutions again—a trust that must be cemented before anyone chats about specific policies.

In the end, there was nothing Democrats could have done to win the 2024 election—not with any issue or any candidate—as long as they were put in the position of having to defend a status quo system that had fallen out of public favor, in the mistaken belief that the American people hold it dear to their hearts and would choose to keep it over Trump’s promise of smashing it all to pieces.

If there are to be elections in the future that are free and fair (a prospect that is sadly now less than certain), then Democrats must start developing a bold, clear, easy-to-understand set of structural changes to how government is organized and how it works. They must meet most voters—and nonvoters—where they live. Before anything else, Democrats must tell voters: “We hear you. The system sucks. And here’s what we’re going to do about it.”