Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) looks down before delivering a concession speech during the election at Faneuil Hall November 3, 2004, in Boston. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
In 2004, life as a Democrat was pretty bleak.
The party lost a presidential election to George W. Bush for a second time. Adding insult to injury, Democratic nominee John Kerry lost the popular vote. The party was seemingly losing ground, after having won the popular vote in 2000 and losing the Electoral College thanks only to an exceedingly close (and contested) loss in Florida. It was a different world back then, but Democrats sensed that voters resoundingly had rejected what they had to offer — even while running against a Republican candidate broadly considered vulnerable.
In 2024, life as a Democrat is pretty bleak in many of the same ways it was two decades ago. Ballots are still being counted after the presidential election, but the Democratic presidential nominee is on track to lose the popular vote for the first time in 20 years.
That popular vote loss has forced a broader reckoning: Winning the popular vote “acted as a kind of salve: Yes, the Electoral College may have delivered Bush and Trump the presidency, but on some level, their administrations were illegitimate, unsanctioned by the popular will,” said Nicole Hemmer, a political historian at Vanderbilt University focused on media, conservatism, and the presidency.
Without a “but the popular vote” fallback, Democrats are confronting a harsh reality. “For the first time since 2004, this election felt like an embrace of conservatism, albeit a much different kind of conservatism than the one associated with the 2004 winner,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
Now, as in 2004, Democrats are engaging in what can be generously viewed as introspection (or, less generously, a “circular firing squad”) to chart a new course back to power and assess what went so very wrong this time around. The blame for that is up for debate: It may have been the economy, Democrats’ embrace of “wokeness,” President Joe Biden’s decision to run for a second term, the fact that many Americans actually liked what Trump was selling, or any number of other factors.
Though it may take months for what specifically went wrong to become clearer, the 2004 election and its aftermath might provide some insight into how Democrats can move forward.
After all, four years after the Bush-Kerry debacle, Democrats won the 2008 election in a landslide, with Barack Obama beating John McCain by nearly 10 million votes and entering the White House with massive congressional majorities at his back.
What Democrats today can learn from the party’s loss in 2004There are obvious differences between 2004 and 2024. The aughts election was dominated by 9/11 and the Global War on Terror that followed. This year, those topics barely registered, while Trump and Biden’s respective records, the economy, and the culture wars took center stage. Further, Kerry’s campaign started with winning a very competitive primary, whereas Vice President Kamala Harris took over after Biden stepped aside and gave her his endorsement.
But the vibes among Democrats are similar, and what they do next may determine whether they see a revival in the 2026 midterms and the elections that follow.
Overall, Democrats took three lessons from 2004. Whether one believes those lessons apply to 2024 depends, in large part, on what one believes went wrong for Harris in her loss to Trump. But, given Democrats’ successful recovery from 2004, it’s a history lesson worth taking.
1) They pursued a 50-state strategyFollowing the 2004 loss, a popular meme rocketed around the (still somewhat nascent) internet: a map that depicted the Democratic “United States of Canada” as existing along the coasts and a Republican “Jesusland” encompassing the vast majority of land in the US.
If that seems reductive and problematic on multiple fronts, you’re not wrong, but the map, aforementioned problems aside, served in part as shorthand for pointing out Democrats’ turnout problem. Yes, Kerry had turned out 9 million more votes than Al Gore had four years before, but he still fell almost 3 million short of Bush.
That gap revealed a vulnerability for Democrats: their inability to mobilize a broad coalition in swing states and beyond that would translate into an Electoral College victory. Kerry couldn’t summon the kind of voter enthusiasm necessary to match Bush’s strong performance in rural areas and outer suburbs.
To goose turnout, Democrats looked to Howard Dean, who ran a populist primary campaign but lost to Kerry.
Elected as chair of the Democratic National Committee in 2005, Dean became a proponent of a “50-state strategy.” The idea behind this strategy was that Democrats need to try to compete in every state, maximizing turnout in Democratic areas while cutting into Republican margins where possible.
This year, former DNC chair Donna Brazile, like Dean, believes part of the solution could be the return of the 50-state strategy. They’re not alone: “We cannot run in just the few states that we need,” said Claire Potter, a professor emerita of history at the New School. “The Democrats have, in some ways, really backed off that strategy, and I think they’re wrong to have done so.”
The Harris campaign — for very understandable reasons — did not utilize Dean’s method. With only a few months to campaign, Harris focused on swing states and select demographic groups. She largely did not visit historically “safe” Democratic states. While it’s not clear that she could have stanched the bleeding in those places, there were significant rightward shifts from New York City to Southern California.
And it’s not clear how well the 50-states theory has aged. After all, Hillary Clinton ran up the popular vote total after winning big in solidly blue states, but she got to serve as president for exactly zero days.
That strategy was later credited with helping Democrats make gains in the 2006 midterms and with helping to put Obama in the White House in 2008.
And after 2024, where Democrats lost ground in just about every county in the US, a plan to boost the party’s popularity nationally is not one it can afford to ignore.
2) Democrats reevaluated their messagingIn 2004, Democrats didn’t have a response to the rise of the right-wing blog Drudge Report and Fox News’s consolidation around Republicans. Kerry was often cast as an elitist with an expensive haircut, and right-wing commentators successfully turned one of his strengths as a candidate — his military service in Vietnam — into a liability through viral attack ads.
“There is this kind of disingenuous attack on Kerry as the Harvard boy, as somebody who’s faking having really fought in Vietnam,” Potter said. “Bush is able to play the card of being an outsider, even though he is an incumbent, even though he went to Yale, even though his father was president.”
In response, Democrats sought to reevaluate their overall messaging strategy. The influential book Don’t Think of an Elephant! by the cognitive linguist George Lakoff served as a guidebook for reframing debates in their own terms and for explaining their policy positions by evoking values of empathy, fairness, and community without adopting the language of conservatives. They also embraced Dean — dubbed by the Washington Post in 2005 as an “outsider insurgent” who wore beat-up shoes and flew coach, spending most of his time outside of DC.
In 2024, Democrats were again outflanked by a new Republican media machine — this time, including the likes of Joe Rogan and Theo Von — to deliver their message. Harris, for her part, declined to appear on Rogan’s podcast, reportedly for fear of how it would be perceived within the party.
3) Democrats sought to become a party of ideasKerry campaign adviser Kenneth Baer said that, in 2024, Democrats repeated their mistake in 2004 of defining themselves as being the opposite of Republicans.
“Smart people seem to have come around to the idea that you can’t just say Trump’s terrible,” Baer said, arguing that Democrats had the same issue in 2004, when Kerry spent much of his time on the campaign trail criticizing Bush instead of defining affirmative reasons to vote for Democrats. That called for Democrats to “rethink all our policies and our approaches,” Baer said.
Baer went on to found the magazine Democracy: A Journal of Ideas as a platform for those ideas. That’s where Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), then a Harvard Law School professor, published a 2007 manifesto about how financial products like mortgages and credit cards should be regulated by the government. That idea would later give rise to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Today, some Democrats say the party still needs to better connect with the working class, but Baer noted that there is disagreement about what that means and whether that should involve an economic or cultural approach.
The limits of political strategyDemocrats would very much like a silver-bullet strategy that guarantees them a post-2004-esque recovery. But the truth is, political strategy and planning can only go so far. And that may be one of the biggest lessons from two decades ago.
The party’s return to power in 2008 was principally driven by two factors: Obama was a generationally politically gifted politician. George W. Bush was a generationally terrible president whose second term featured a bungled and deadly response to Hurricane Katrina; an even more disastrous and deadly handling of the Iraq War (the false pretenses of which came fully to light during Bush’s second term); and the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing economic meltdown.
“The conditions that would collapse Bush’s support in his second term were already in place when he won reelection,” Hemmer, the political historian, said.
So how Democrats do in 2026, 2028, and beyond will likely have a lot to do with Trump’s performance during his second term.
Today, preliminary exit polls suggest Trump is unpopular, his proposed tariffs could be disastrous for the economy, Democrats may mobilize against his policies as they did in his first term, and he may only have a very narrow House majority to work with, potentially hampering his agenda.
If such a collapse happens, however, Democrats also have to be prepared to seize on it.
vox.com