Democrats, including many progressives, are hoping for an upsurge in voter turnout to catapult their candidates to victory in future elections. They point to reduced voter turnout for Kamala Harris last November as evidence that the Democrats – despite significant money and media advantages – “underperformed” with their base, tilting the presidential election to Donald Trump and the Senate to the GOP.  The solution: Field a better candidate with a stronger progressive message and mobilize more base enthusiasm and support.  As mainstream voters invariably sour on Trump and his policies, Democrats will naturally rebound to victory in 2026 and 2028, they argue.

Unfortunately, a spate of polling analyses conducted in recent months call into question this rosy prognosis – and these analyses can’t be easily dismissed. The latest such analysis, conducted by the Pew Charitable Trusts and released by the New York Times just last month, reviewed exit poll data from the November election and came to a disturbing conclusion: Expanded turnout would likely have favored Trump not Harris because the largest pool of non-voters – young minorities and those with incomes below $50,000 – were more likely to support the real estate mogul, Pew found. In fact, had most of these abstainers actually voted, Pew estimated that Trump’s popular vote margin of victory would have been twice as large – a sizable 3% not 1.5%. Even worse, there would have been no shift in the outcome in the 7 key swing states that Trump carried handily.

For years Democrats have assumed that a higher turnout naturally favors their party. Why? Because minorities and youth especially were presumed to favor Democratic candidates and policies but their turn out rates were relatively low – in part, due to voter apathy but also because Republicans were intent on suppressing votes, especially from loyal African-Americans. But if Pew and others are right, this long-held view no longer holds up. In 2024, the problem isn’t that traditional base voters didn’t vote – it’s that the politics of these voters has shifted dramatically in recent years. Support for some key Democratic policy planks endures, but many voters – dissatisfied with Biden and his handling of key issues like the economy and immigration – defected from party ranks. Many others decided to stay home, but, in fact,  they were just as Trump-leaning as those that did not, Pew found.

Pew’s analysis is echoed in several other recent studies, not all of which show Trump or the GOP receiving a sizable boost from increased voter turnout.  But none suggest that Harris would have narrowed the final margin – at best, she would have achieved parity, the two candidates benefitting equally.  Pew found that most of these non-voters exhibited a traditional Democratic profile.  Indeed, most had voted for Biden over Trump in 2020, and they leaned Democratic 26% to 17%, with the remainder identified as independent.  Pew found that these non-voters were even more Democrat-identified than voters that cast their ballots for Harris in 2024. But had they shown up at the polls, these disgruntled, long-time Democrat-leaning voters would not have favored Harris over Trump, Pew found.

All of these new studies are suggestive of the deep alienation that Democrat base voters now feel toward their party, a finding echoed in other national surveys where support for the Democrats among all voters has fallen to historic lows. But the key question remains:  Are these alienated voters gone for good or can they be wooed back, and if so, by what means?

On the left, the common sense assumption has been that Democrats need to emphasize a more class-conscious economic agenda. Focus on declining real wages, a tax system that favors the rich, cutbacks to Medicaid and Obamacare, and increased income inequality overall. Bernie Sanders, AOC and Elizabeth Warren, and many lesser known figures, are all promoting this broad strategy, especially against those suggesting that the party should simply tack right in a desperate attempt to win over so-called “persuadables” – moderates inside the party and wavering swing voters – who, in theory, can decide close elections by tilting either way.

Progressives insist that Harris failed because she couldn’t decide who she was and what her candidacy really stood for. Neither moderate enough for conservative nor progressive enough for the left, her pandering and see-sawing alienated support across the board. Her economic message was too weak and muddled to inspire the working poor, while her full-throated embrace of “identity” politics didn’t sit well with culture war moderates, including many minority voters. Was she Biden in a pants-suit or a pathway to something new? Even Harris didn’t seem to know.

The truth, according to a recent voting analysis by Alan Abramowitz at Larry Sabato’s Democrat-leaning think tank Crystal Ball, may be a bit more complex, however. Abramowitz, in a piece entitled, “It’s Not the Economy Stupid, the Roots of Working Class Republicanism,” argues that advocates on the left may be slightly overstating the appeal of more overt class politics to White working class voters who have long titled slightly or significantly Republican – at least since the 1970s. Despite the Trump-MAGA celebration of a new working class “populism,” Abramowitz cites data showing that White workers aren’t significantly more Republican today than they were in 2020 or 2016.  Moreover, it’s not economic appeals that have swayed them to Trump’s side – but cultural and ideological ones, including gender issues. Many still consider themselves Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents – but they’re still not loyal Republicans, far from it.

To many who have decried the “racism” and “misogyny” of Trump and his MAGA followers, this is hardly surprising news, of course. But Abramowtiz isn’t calling for a complete abandonment of class-based appeals – just a better targeting of them. Economic populism, he suggests, needs to be more carefully tailored to working class voters of color who bear the real brunt of joblessness and diminished mobility opportunities and who are naturally less susceptible to the traditional racial “dog whistling” that distracts their White counterparts from voting their pocketbooks. But Abramowtiz says Democrats also need to reach college-educated voters of color, who, like their White counterparts, are still voting Democrat in large numbers, but at shrinking levels of support. Both groups of minority voters, working class and college-educated, are defecting from Democrats, a reversal of past patterns, especially during the Clinton and Obama eras, when massive across-the-board minority voting support plus aggressive campaign mobilization of these same groups, put the two Democratic candidates squarely over the top. These defections, Abramowtiz suggests, are actually more impactful than shifts in support among the White working class, the issue that has received the lion’s share of attention from pundits, pollsters and many activists to date.

If Abramowitz is right, some of the class-based appeals emanating from the ranks of Sanders and Warren, especially, may not be enough to woo back sufficient numbers of disaffected Democrats. Who or what can unite White working class voters in rural Pennsylvania and Michigan with minority voters of all backgrounds in Philadelphia and Detroit?  Clinton – America’s “first Black president” – and Obama – the real McCoy – were dynamic communicators who found ways to embody that alliance in their positive vision of a multicultural Rainbow Coalition. Neither Biden nor Harris exhibited any real ability to operate on a comparable level. In the end, it was the “threat” of Trump that propelled their candidacies forward, and in the end, it became their only compelling rationale. Once the perception of the Trump threat was neutralized, or at least blunted – against a background economic malaise and exaggerated fears of crime and social chaos – Trump’s return – aided by a wave of nostalgia for his first term, pre-January 6 – proved almost inevitable.

Can Democrats weave together a strong economic class agenda with a cultural agenda that targets a racially diverse electorate, neutralizing GOP attempts to exploit the often stark ideological differences among working class voters? It happened in 1992 with Clinton and with Obama in 2008 because economic conditions grew dire and Republicans seemed incapable of steering the ship of state back to prosperity. Right now, Trump is still cruising along and voters are waiting to see how their fortunes will fare. His approval and favorability ratings, still in their mid-forties and above, haven’t fallen to the nadirs experienced by the Bushes in the1990s and 2000s or for that matter, to Biden’s sagging ratings last year. Sure, there are signs of growing disaffection, but they are still slight fissures more than real cracks. Trump, overall, through a whirlwind of initiatives, and with little close voter awareness of the likely effects of his policies, is still riding high, and Democrats are largely on the defensive, issuing broadsides and diatribes, full of sound and fury, but signifying almost nothing.

It could be that the essential missing ingredient for Democrats is simply this: a compelling national leader, someone who can articulate the vision of a Clinton or Obama but who also projects personal strength and leadership in command. These attributes were largely lacking in the Biden-Harris regime, and with conditions in the country seemingly awry, voters clearly sensed it.

Mobilize the base? Sure, if the base is broad enough and engaged enough.   But the current party leadership has failed base voters, many of whom have turned away in disgust. The latest tell-all books have revealed the true depths of the gaslighting and outright lying that occurred to keep the Biden regime afloat, and which allowed Harris, without a single party vote, to succeed him, despite widespread doubts about her commitment and competence to lead.  Virtually every Democratic leader of consequence – including most of the likely 2028 contenders – is implicated in this betrayal of the public trust, and a full accounting and mea culpa has yet to be issued. Meanwhile, the gaggle of party octogenarians that shut the party down last year continue to prattle on about the threat to democracy, all the while refusing to leave the stage and doing their best to neutralize legitimate challenges from within the ranks.  First, AOC, then DNC vice chair David Hogg, were barred from assuming new roles. And the latest disturbing news: Senior Democrats, seemingly aghast at Zohran Mambani’s extraordinary breakthrough victory in the Mayor’s race in New York – thanks to an outpouring of grassroots support from college-aged Whites and minorities – are now frantically plotting to prevent him from winning in November.  Some are leaning toward former governor Andrew Cuomo, who was ousted after a sex scandal, others toward former Mayor Eric Adams, who was forced to resign after a criminal conviction but then pardoned by Trump.

It may be that Mamdani’s victory is something of an outlier – an explosion of base outrage in a diehard Blue city in one of the nation’s bluest States. Even so, NewYork’s global stature – and dominance of US media markets – magnifies its significance substantially. Win or lose in November – and victory is in reach –  Mamdani’s primary upset is a shot across the bow of the party’s decaying leadership; it’s a political lightning bolt that opens up the possibility of fresh debate on the party’s uncertain future. Mamdani pioneered new base mobilization tactics – capitalizing on viral videos and social media  – that made a real difference in voter turnout – the highest turnout in 36 years. He also focused his campaign message squarely on the class issue of  “affordability,”  an emphasis that was sorely lacking in the Harris 2024 campaign. The city’s renters (facing the lowest vacancy rate in years), unemployed and underemployed youth and most ethnic voters (except for African-Americans) swung sharply to Mamdani. But exit polls indicate that he also did surprisingly well in precincts that Donald Trump carried last November, one sign of his potential for broader crossover appeal.

Democratic strategists like Chuck Rocha, who’s worked in the past for Bernie Sanders, says Mamdani may have broken the code when it comes to espousing staunch progressive stances while casting himself as a bold new cross-cutting leader unwedded to the status-quo and to establishment thinking.  “There’s a lot of desperation out there,” he argues, “and an openness to new ideas and to new faces.”  Even Mamdani’s “democratic socialist” label could work in his favor by helping to position him as an “anti-establishment” figure much like Trump intent on shaking up the status-quo with outside-the-box thinking and dynamic new leadership.

“Donald Trump was successful because … he wasn’t afraid to be against and call out people in his own party and other parties,” Susan Del Percio, a longtime New York-based Republican strategist told the Hill newspaper last week. “Mamdani was the exact same. He was calling out everybody, and that’s when you get to act with no fear.”

What lessons might be learned in New York about mobilizing new working class and multu-class ethnic coalitions?  Mamdani may not be every Democrat’s idea of a visionary party leader, but his campaign has clearly found a responsive chord that is pregnant with lessons for grassroots Democrats everywhere. The party is reeling from its loss to Trump and any new opportunity to rethink and refurbish its badly tarnished brand should be encouraged. Democrats are flailing and could use a big win – somewhere, anywhere – and the NYC mayor’s race is clearly within reach.  Win or lose the Mayor’s race could prove to be a potent catalyst and learning lab for thinking about other contested House and Senate races in 2026, and perhaps eventually the presidency. Democrats need a new way to connect with voters – their own, especially. Mamdani shows one possible way to do that.  Preemptively shutting him down and propping up tired and discredited mainstream Democrats is a cowardly retreat from the difficult challenges lying ahead for the party. It’s a recipe for continuing despair and defeat.

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