Donald Trump did not win the 2024 election — the Democratic Party lost it.

So argues Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the AFL-CIO and author of the highly influential Substack, Weekend Reading.

Podhorzer’s recently published newsletter on how Trump “won” — he insists on those quotation marks — garnered lots of attention among Democratic insiders. In it, he explains that America didn’t “shift rightward” in 2024 but “couchward.” American voters’ “basic values or priorities” did not become more conservative. Democrats lost merely because turnout among “anti-MAGA” voters collapsed.

Podhorzer does not pair his diagnosis of the Democrats’ woes with any detailed prescription for remedying them. But he suggests that the party does not need to “move right”: Its task isn’t to win over swing voters who sympathize with the Republican message on immigration, crime, inflation, or any other issue. Rather, it is to mobilize young, disaffected anti-Trump voters by alerting them to the dangers of Republican rule and addressing their desire for “systemic change.”

The demobilization of such voters in 2024 had two primary causes, in Podhorzer’s account: First, the media, the Biden administration, and Democrats in Congress all failed to convey the “existential dangers” that a second Trump administration posed. And second, “justifiable disaffection and anger” with a “billionaire-captured system” left many anti-MAGA voters too cynical to bother with the electoral process.

Some aspects of Podhorzer’s analysis are both correct and salutary. He is right to insist that the 2024 election did not reveal a broad mandate for the conservative movement’s agenda. Trump’s national margin was exceptionally narrow and Republicans just barely managed to eke out a House majority.

This said, I think Podhorzer’s big-picture take is wrong. Democrats’ problem in 2024 was not merely that it failed to mobilize cynical, anti-Trump voters. The party also lost the arguments over inflation, immigration, and crime to the Republican Party. Trump did not convert a supermajority of Americans to conservatism. But he did convince a critical slice of voters that he was the better option on at least some of the issues that they cared about most.

There are (at least) three problems with Podhorzer’s analysis:

1) Voters who backed Biden in 2020 — and then stayed home in 2024 — are not necessarily resolutely anti-Trump.

Podhorzer’s argument assumes that Biden voters who stayed home in 2024 could not have done so out of sympathy for any of Trump’s messages. But there’s little basis for that assumption. Low-propensity voters are less ideological than reliable ones, and voters often choose to sit out elections because they are conflicted, agreeing with some of what each party has to say. There’s reason to think that this dynamic drove part of the Democrats’ turnout problem in 2024: Both polling and geographical voting patterns indicate that low-propensity voters became more Republican-leaning during the Biden era.

2) Young, first-time voters turned against the Democratic Party.

The electorate’s youngest voters appear to have been far more right-wing in 2024 than in 2020. This is not a problem that can be attributed to mobilization. Republicans seem to have simply had greater success in appealing to first-time voters last year than they have for a long time.

3) In the Biden era, American voters did become more conservative in some of their values and priorities.

Contrary to Podhorzer’s suggestion, there is considerable evidence that voters grew more right-wing in their attitudes toward immigration and criminal justice and more likely to prioritize those issues. Meanwhile, the electorate also grew more confident in the GOP’s economic judgement.

Given these realities, if Democrats accept Podhorzer’s thesis — and conclude that they do not need to win over Republican-curious voters, but can win solely by mobilizing staunch anti-Trumpers desperate for “systemic change” — they will likely have a more difficult time winning White House in 2028.

Perhaps more importantly, unless Democrats manage to win over some Trump voters, they will have little hope of winning back Senate control. It is worth remembering that Joe Biden’s 2020 coalition only delivered a bare majority in Congress’ upper chamber — and that majority hinged on the fluke that was Joe Manchin. Thus, to regain the power to pass legislation and appoint judges without Republican permission, Democrats must not only mobilize their coalition, but broaden it.

If you’re losing voters to “the couch,” you’re probably losing arguments to the other party.

The foundation of Podhorzer’s analysis is one incontrovertible fact: The Democratic Party’s presidential vote tally fell by far more between 2020 and 2024 than the GOP’s increased. Kamala Harris received 6.26 million fewer votes than Biden had in 2020, while Trump improved on his own tally from four years ago by just 3........

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