The parties learned what they always learn

How recent elections just confirm the (differing) beliefs of Democrats and Republicans

“We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.”

― Anaïs Nin

As will happen after an election, particularly one with a somewhat surprising outcome, the parties are trying to learn lessons from this week’s results so they know how to behave in the future. And to a remarkable degree, this election will just reinforce things the parties already believed.

As I’ve written previously, Republicans and Democrats have remarkably different approaches to absorbing election losses. Baked into that is their remarkably different views about the importance of electability.

The quick version is that when Democrats lose a big election, they’re convinced they’ve been doing everything wrong and want to radically remake their party, their nomination systems, and even their approach to politics. When Republicans lose (and acknowledge that loss), they generally regard it as an aberration; with a bit more money allocated a bit better, they could probably have won, and so there’s no need to rethink everything.

Relatedly, Democrats are convinced that they lose when they nominate someone who is too ideologically extreme and makes working class whites uncomfortable, and when they pivot toward the center they tend to win. Republicans are convinced that they lose when they try too hard to please centrists, but win when they stand up for what they believe in. There’s no empirically correct answer here, and the parties have similar win rates, but both these beliefs are defensible given the parties’ histories, and they lead to vastly different behavior.

Let’s look at the past few elections. Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 completely threw Democrats. As I chronicle in my book Learning From Loss, that surprise outcome caused them to question many longstanding assumptions they had about politics, and they came up with many narratives to explain just why Clinton had lost. These included: she practiced identity politics, she campaigned in the wrong places, her messaging wasn’t engaging, there was too much racism and sexism in the electorate, and more. The narratives were pretty diverse, but a lot of them led to a common set of beliefs: they had erred in nominating Clinton, she was somehow too unconventional a candidate, and they needed to find a bland relatively moderate white guy if they were ever going to defeat Trump.

The outcome of 2020 confirmed those Democrats’ beliefs. No, we can’t re-run 2020 with Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or Cory Booker on the ticket, so we can never prove it, but as far as many Democrats were concerned, they needed to moderate (both ideologically and symbolically) to win, and they did and it worked.

Republicans approached their 2020 loss very differently. Many, obviously, chose to accept Donald Trump’s baseless lie that he hadn’t actually lost, and thus there was no pivoting to do. You don’t learn from a loss you don’t acknowledge. Others accepted that the loss had occurred, but either didn’t know how to move their party away from Trump or didn’t think it was important to do so. Importantly, polling right around the time of the Iowa caucuses in 2024 suggested Nikki Haley would beat Joe Biden handily but Trump could lose to him. This did not shake support for Trump as the nominee, who continued to win roughly 70% of the vote in primaries and caucuses after that. The few Republican leaders who were concerned about electability backed Haley, but they had never really been Trump supporters to begin with.

Neither Trump nor his supporters seemed to perceive any need to mollify centrist voters. Despite losing in 2020, he never acknowledged having done anything wrong that year or made any effort to ease concerns about his governing excesses, his criminal indictments, his organization of an insurrection, his casual racism and sexism, or anything else. Indeed, if anything, he doubled down, promising to be even more extreme and to pursue an agenda of retribution against those who had wronged him.

And the results of the 2024 presidential election have confirmed Republicans’ beliefs. As far as they’re concerned, he won because unapologetically he stood up for what he believed in. And that’s the lesson they will absorb as they approach the 2026 and 2028 election cycles.

Democrats are already wrestling with the lessons of 2024, and this will go on for some time to come. Some are focusing on Kamala Harris’ race and sex, suggesting that they need to nominate a white guy to win the White House back. Some maintain that they must win back working class whites through better messaging or policies. Unless I’ve missed it, no prominent Democrats are arguing for doubling down on the party’s message of inclusion or nominating someone more extreme than Harris. Just like Republicans, Democrats learn lessons from their own losses but not from their opponents’ victories.

It's still early and far from clear what Democrats will end up doing over the next few years. (For my sins, I’ll probably end up writing that book.) But what we’ve really seen so far from both sides is a great deal of confirmation bias. Each party perceives the political world as it perceives itself. And, remarkably, each party still has a roughly 50-50 shot of winning national elections.