In the outpouring of assessments, castigations, autopsies, recommendations, and blame following Democrats’ 2024 election losses, one particular public figure stands out: Hawaii’s junior senator, Brian Schatz. Where many Democrats, pundits, and politicos rushed to provide answers to the party’s 2024 shellacking (conveniently, these tend to comport with their own world view!), Schatz held back, instead suggesting any clear postmortem was premature.

What I admire about Schatz is the self-acknowledgement that he is something of a coastal elite, or at least a “coastal progressive,” and his willingness to reflect on how he communicates and how it may be different from other people without that background. Perhaps representing the only state 2,000 miles away from the mainland makes Schatz especially cognizant of what makes him different, but as any election will show, you don’t have to travel more than a few miles to find a community vastly different from your own.

Broadly speaking, Schatz’s reticence to declare the “why” of the 2024 election boils down to one defining assessment and a related prescription. To paraphrase his assessment generally: overbroad conclusions are built on nebulous and often anecdotal assumptions and ignore the simple fact that people are complicated (I would tone this up a rhetorical notch and say that any takeaway made a week after an election which prescribes one simple fix is lazy). In his mind, Democrats should not ignore the fact that there are many voters who don’t fit into categories, who “voted for Obama, then Trump, then Biden,” or “who are pro-choice [and] voted for Ron DeSantis.” 

As he puts it, “Republicans are talking to people, and [Democrats are] talking to groups and tendencies and categories.” And it is this that belies the rare prescription he’s been comfortable giving. Schatz implored Democrats to start talking like “normal” people – exorcising the coded words used predominantly in liberal college-educated circles from the party’s discourse, in favor of the ability to communicate regarding kitchen table issues. He doesn’t explicitly refer to this as “woke” language, but it’s hard to read it as a reference to something else.

Democrats aren’t exactly alone in this particular behavior of using coded language to signal allegiances and who is in and outside of the group. In fact, Trump is a master at this. His use of coded language – understood by MAGA supporters but played as comedy or horror to outsiders – is widely documented. But, what does distinguish Democrats from Republicans when it comes to the use of in-group language is the complexity of their respective coalitions. A more homogeneous coalition, like the Republican Party still is, is more conducive to effective use of coded language, as everyone in the group “gets” it – they’re all in on it. Meanwhile, Democrats – who are still a more demographically diverse coalition – have allowed the college educated and academic discourse to permeate across their rhetoric to all parts of the coalition. Schatz has a point: whether Democrats are conversing with a Black union member in Wisconsin, a Latino attorney in Texas, or a “Never Trump” Republican with liberal kids in New Jersey, this kind of rhetorical purity and signalling is alienating and unnecessary. 

I mention all of this because I think it’s a sensible exercise in how to start thinking about the 2024 election: less in terms of groups and types of people, and more from the bottom-up as to what actually happened. Though the return of Trump – and the ample pressure that will place on the rule of law and our system of government – requires urgency and serious opposition, there’s little that Democrats can do from an electoral perspective about that right now. Instead, the Democratic Party has a couple years to debate and test new approaches, and its diverse coalition provides ample opportunity to see how any given approach can work in practice. It should seize that moment. 

Having spent much of the last few years unpacking the state-level trends that inform electoral results, it’s clear that any starting point should begin with some basic consensus. For one, Democrats failed to capture the center. As unfathomable as it might seem to many Democrats, voters simply felt Trump was the more moderate candidate – or, he was at least notably closer to the median Americans. Just like Americans felt Biden was the more moderate candidate in 2020 and Trump was perceived as the more moderate candidate in 2016. The party was simply perceived as too liberal in 2024. 

Second, it’s also clear that Trump won this election despite himself. Democrats faced headwinds agnostic to their own messaging issues in 2024, as they faced the same anti-incumbent sentiments that incumbent parties in democratic nations did last year. In fact, as of Harris’ loss in November, every incumbent party up for election in a developed nation lost vote share – the first time this had ever been documented. Probe a bit further and you’ll notice that Democrats actually performed substantially better than most incumbent parties. Chalk it up to Trump’s unpopularity, his antidemocratic sentiments, his withdrawal from norms, an exhaustion with his own quasi-incumbency, or the series of black swan events across 2024 (including the incumbent president withdrawing from the race and an assassination attempt on Trump), but the notion that Democrats lost to Trump, though literally true, disguises the fact that they were on the path to a loss anyway. A generic Republican almost certainly would have done better in November, likely carrying two or three more Senate seats with them. Put another way: the fundamentals for a Republican victory were manifest and Trump underperformed them.

By assuming too much more than that, Democrats risk misreading what actually happened this year. This was not quite a rebuke of centrism and moderation, nor a rebuke of “normalization” of politics, nor an election swung by the likes of male-dominated podcasts, Israel-Palestine,  protectionism or neoliberalism, or vice presidential picks. By and large, this was an election swung by the same things they always are: a national environment and the economy. 

A single prescription cannot possibly change these fundamentals. Nor is doing nothing an option. The desire for Democrats in their exile to leap at an ideology or seize on a particular strategy is understandable, but the party should realize it finally has something it hasn’t had in years: the opportunity and time to wait, test ideas, and see what works. They should take it.