Why Democrats should cheer up | Moran

The election is over, and those of us who were knocked down hard by the results need to find ways to get back on our feet, to keep up morale for the next round in this fight.
Begin with this: Donald Trump’s vote total in this election was about the same as it was when he lost in 2020. There was no surge in support for him. He won because millions of Democrats didn’t bother to vote this time.
Patrick Murray, who runs the Monmouth University poll, has been grinding the numbers. “This was not a Trump surge,” he says. “The bigger story is the huge Democratic turnout nosedive, especially in the bluest parts of the country.”
That is grating, even infuriating. But it’s also encouraging because it means the task ahead is manageable. Democrats don’t need to convert Trump voters to win future elections. They just need to motivate their own people.
“If you’re trying to convert a MAGA voter, that would take a lot more than trying to convince a Democratic voter to get off the couch,” one senior Democratic leader told me. “We have the same principles and values.”
Let’s look at the numbers. In New Jersey, Trump got 1.9 million votes last week, the same total as in 2020. What changed is that an army of Democrats chose not to vote. Joe Biden got 2.6 million Jersey votes in the last election, while Kamala Harris got just 2.1 million.
That happened all over the country, including in New York, where nearly 1 million Democrats were missing in action this year, compared to 2020.
The national vote totals aren’t quite complete yet, but as of this writing Trump had 73 million votes, matching the 73 million he got last time. But the Democratic vote fell off a cliff, dropping from Biden’s 81 million to Harris’s 68 million, so far.
Trump did win some new converts, but not many. Murray expects his vote total to rise by about 2 percent overall when the counting is done. Gains were larger among some groups, especially Latinos, Murray says. In heavily Hispanic Hudson County, Trump got 77,000 votes, a jump of about 20 percent. In Passaic County, normally a reliable blue zone, Trump won by 3 points.
But Harris’s vote total will come in about 14 points lower than Biden’s, Murray expects.
Why did so many Democrats sit this one out, given the stakes? Theories abound. It was sexism, racism, cultural resentment, the mess at the border, inflation, the abandonment of the working class in favor of corporate donors, the disillusionment of progressives. This is where politics becomes more art than science.
Matt Hale, a politics professor at Seton Hall University, suspects that progressive voters sat this one out.
“Part of that is the folks who are pro-Palestinian and strongly so,” he says. “They’re really angry at her. And I’m also guessing that maybe there’s a subset of African American voters who didn’t connect with her but couldn’t bring themselves to pull the trigger for Trump, so they stayed home. I know a couple of folks who said I can’t do her, but no way I’m doing him, so I’m staying home.”
That reasoning drives me nuts. To many people, voting is an expression of identity. They want to feel good about their vote. They seem to think it’s morally corrupt to vote for the lesser of two evils. So, they stay home, or they vote for a pointless nut job like Jill Stein or Ralph Nader.
That’s the story of this election. Democrats have a reserve army that showed up in 2020 and stayed home in 2024. That gave Trump his big win.
So sure, take a week to despair. But don’t for one minute think that Trump’s movement can’t be beaten in the next few elections. He’s no Ronald Reagan, and this was no landslide.
Plus, he’s bound to splinter his own coalition, once he starts to govern. Speaker Mike Johnson wants to repeal Obamacare. The Christian right wants national restrictions on abortion. Billionaires want more tax cuts. Each of those moves would be extremely unpopular, according to every poll.
But if Trump doesn’t deliver, MAGA voters may be the ones to sit on the couch next time.
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Tom Moran may be reached at [email protected] or (973) 986-6951. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
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