It’s been more than six months, but Democrats are still picking over the cold, dead body of the 2024 election. The latest autopsy comes courtesy of Catalist, a Democratic data firm with a widely coveted voter database.

By now, you may feel that you know more about how Democrats lost last year than you ever wished to know. Which would be understandable. But Catalist’s findings are especially authoritative, as the firm tracks the actual voting behavior of 256 million Americans across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In other words, they are not relying purely on surveys of how people said they would vote, but also hard data showing which party individual voters registered with, and which elections they did and did not show up for.

Previously, David Shor of Blue Rose Research released a 2024 analysis that drew partly on similar data sources. But Catalist boasts the longest-running voter database of any institution besides the Democratic and Republican Parties, as it has tracked the electorate’s behavior for over 15 years. Many, therefore, consider its characterizations of shifts in voting patterns to be uniquely trustworthy.

Their entire report is worth reading. But I’d like to spotlight three takeaways that have especially significant implications for Democratic strategy going forward.

(One note: When Catalist reports election results, it strips out all ballots cast for a third party. This is because the third-party share of the vote is highly noisy from one election cycle to another, shifting in response to semi-random factors, like whether a rich businessman decides to throw his hat in the ring. Thus, all the figures cited below represent the Democratic Party’s share of all ballots cast for a major party presidential candidate in a given election year, not its share of all votes cast, although the two tend to be very similar.)

1. Democrats did not lose because they failed to turn out the progressive base.

Some analysts have attributed Harris’s loss entirely to weak Democratic turnout. Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the AFL-CIO, argues that American voters didn’t shift “rightward” in 2024 so much as “couchward.” In his telling, Trump didn’t prevail because he won over a decisive share of swing voters, but because Democrats failed to mobilize America’s anti-MAGA majority.

And many

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