Ruy Teixeira takes his Democratic Party to task.

Democrats cannot decisively beat their opponents as this election has shown once again. The party is uncompetitive among white working-class voters and among voters in exurban, small town, and rural America. This puts them at a massive structural disadvantage given an American electoral system that gives disproportionate weight to these voters, especially in Senate and presidential elections. To add to the problem, Democrats are now hemorrhaging nonwhite working-class voters across the country.

The facts must be faced. The Democratic coalition today is not fit for purpose. It cannot beat Republicans consistently in enough areas of the country to achieve dominance and implement its agenda at scale. The Democratic Party may be the party of blue America, especially deep blue metro America, but its bid to be the party of the ordinary American, the common man and woman, is falling short.

There is a simple—and painful—reason for this. The Democrats really are no longer the party of the common man and woman. The priorities and values that dominate the party today are instead those of educated, liberal America which only partially overlap—and sometimes not at all—with those of ordinary Americans.

This election has made this problem manifest in the starkest possible terms, as the Democratic coalition shattered into pieces. Trump not only won, he won fairly easily, carrying all seven swing states and, much to Democrats’ shock, the national popular vote. …

… Contrary to much pre-election discussion, Harris’s margin among women was actually less than Biden’s in 2020, 7 points for Harris vs. 12 points for Biden. And the Trump margin was better among men, 10 points vs. 5 points in 2020. The overall gender gap went from 17 points in 2020 to….17 points in 2024. How about that. The Democrats invested so much hope in the women’s vote, especially the idea that the abortion issue would spike their margin among women, and it just did not pan out.

Even more startling, Democrats believed with an almost religious fervor that young women would move sharply in their direction given liberal trends among this demographic and, again, the salience of the abortion issue. And, again, it did not happen.