The Pundits Were All Wrong

My apologies for the delay between newsletters – I’ve been out of commission with an illness for a few weeks. I started this piece last month and finally felt well enough to finish it. Enjoy, and thanks for bearing with me. - Peter

The past few days have seen some of the worst polls of Donald Trump’s political career. A new Gallup poll has his approval rating at 36%, just a hair above where it was in the immediate aftermath of January 6th. His net approval rating is -24%, having dropped 11% in just a month. 

Those numbers aren’t just an abstraction. Trump’s unpopularity (even preceding the most recent decline) led to a series of Democratic wins this November. The party’s candidates won overwhelmingly in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City, not to mention a gerrymandering referendum in California and state Supreme Court seats in Pennsylvania.

Given this, we might take a moment to reflect on what we were told following Trump’s win in 2024. Trump won convincingly, but more importantly he made huge gains among key elements of the Democratic coalition, in particular Hispanic voters and young people. Democrats, we were told, faced a “reckoning.” The party had been “shattered.”

Many pundits also had a diagnosis. One of the most popular was that the Democrats had moved too far left in recent years. The New York Times’ Ross Douthat said that “[i]t is completely obvious that the party lost in 2024 because it overcommitted to a range of unpopular left-wing positions.” Jonathan Chait, writing in New York Magazine, said that “the Democratic Party responded to Trump’s 2016 victory not by moving toward the center, as defeated parties often do, but by moving away from it.” Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote in The Atlantic that “Biden either could not or would not forcefully distance himself from the Democratic Party’s need for performative ‘wokeness,’” and that "in signaling their commitment to an extreme and debatable idea of trans rights, Democrats hemorrhaged other constituencies.”

Barely a year later, none of these narratives are compelling. The Democratic Party has not fundamentally changed in the past year. Whatever ailed them in 2024 ails them in 2025. And yet, that same Democratic Party dominated the 2025 elections. Not only that, it recovered from its 2024 deficits among key demographics. The Democratic advantage among young people returned. Republican gains among Hispanic voters vanished (a change also reflected in polling).

What happened? We were just told by Thomas Chatterton Williams that the Democrats’ commitment to trans rights alienated those constituencies. We were told by Ross Douthat that it was “completely obvious” that the party had embraced too many unpopular left-wing ideas. And yet Abigail Spanberger cruised to victory in Virginia while openly championing trans rights. Republican culture warriors running for school board got wiped out in swing states.

I circled back with these pundits to check in on what they wrote about the Democrats’ success in 2025. What did they think now that their prior theory of the political moment had been rendered incoherent? Most of them solved this problem by simply not writing about the 2025 elections at all. Nothing from Ross Douthat or Thomas Chatterton Williams. Nothing from David Brooks, who wrote in 2024 that Democrats had to “do some major rethinking.” 

It might seem a little trite to point out that the typical pundit is a bit of a hack. But it’s worth noting the scale of the failure here. These pundits have dedicated much of their recent careers to the issue of how woke ideology is undermining the Democratic Party and alienating regular voters. Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote a whole book about it. This is their entire framework for understanding progressive politics. In a just world, where the career of a political pundit was somehow tied to his ability to analyze politics, this would be an extinction-level event for these morons.

It’s worth noting that conservatives weren’t the only ones drawing big conclusions from Trump’s win. Dave Sirota wrote for Jacobin that “Democrats’ rejection of working-class politics — and the party’s open hostility to populist politicians in its midst” created the conditions for Trump’s victory. It’s common wisdom on the left that the Democrats’ problem is their equivocating centrism. Yet an equivocating centrist, Mikie Sherrill, outperformed expectations in the New Jersey governor’s race last month. 

There’s an unanswered substantive question here: what did just happen? Trump seemed to realign key constituencies in 2024, and a year later nearly all his gains have washed away. Was 2024 the dawn of a new political era, or was it just a blip?

The boring but honest answer is that no one really knows. It’s easier to discern what’s not true than what is. Trump didn’t build a lasting multiracial coalition. The Democratic Party didn’t ruin its brand by moving too far left (or, to my chagrin, by moderating too much). But it’s hard to pinpoint why so much of the country veered one way in 2024 and the other in 2025.

There’s still a lesson to be learned. The winds of politics are strong and chaotic. It seems likely that Trump didn’t win because of his ideology, but in spite of it; if voters were excited for his policy agenda, his approval rating wouldn’t have tanked once he started implementing it. The best theory, with the most data behind it, is that Trump rode a wave of simmering resentment to power. People were upset about inflation and whatever else, and they voted for upheaval.

A lot of pundits and analysts get this backwards. They think of policy as a method for winning in politics: you propose popular policies, and political victories follow. But it’s often the other way around: you win power due to anything from charisma to sheer circumstance, and you use it to implement good policy.

It’s easy to think of this as a cynical view, but I find it hopeful. The possibilities of politics are broader than they appear. Pundits and politicians alike tie themselves into knots trying to craft widely appealing policies that won’t alienate any of their constituencies. The result is usually a watered-down, unambitious platform. We’d be better served spending less time thinking about how we’re going to win power and more time thinking about how we’re going to leverage it once we do.