On Trump, Democrats and a New Era of Politics: A Look at the Year Ahead

Hello, everyone! You may have noticed that it’s been a while since my last newsletter. That’s because I’ve been on leave for the last three months — and I’ll be on leave for most of the next three — but I wanted to check in with a few thoughts and programming notes.

Since a few of you asked: Yes, The Tilt goes on. The newsletter will ramp back up as I return to work, and needless to say, there is a lot to cover. This is not an ordinary moment in American political history.

Here are a few themes on my mind so far:

The public reaction to Trump’s second term

From the usual job approval surveys to more profound issues regarding executive power, attitudes about President Trump will probably be the topic of the year.

To that end, my colleagues have already started collecting polls on his approval rating (we’ll add charts with the polling average in the weeks ahead).

Already, Mr. Trump has squandered his post-election honeymoon. His approval rating is back under 50 percent, with slightly more Americans disapproving than approving of his performance. This puts his standing more or less where it was before the election.

There are good reasons to think his ratings will continue to slip. One of the better rules of thumb in American politics is that public opinion tends to shift against the direction of policy change. Some political scientists call this “thermostatic public opinion,” in which the public turns up the A.C. to cool things down when the government starts running too hot. Few presidents have run the government as hot as Mr. Trump, and there isn’t much reason to think he’ll turn anything down on his own.

The 2024 election and a new era

The 2024 election may seem like old news, but it will reverberate for years to come. We have plainly entered a new era of politics, as I wrote in December, and there will be no way to make sense of where things are headed without making sense of the enormous changes of the last decade.

Over the next month or so, we’ll finally get the last few important bits of data on the 2024 election. Most important, we’ll have a comprehensive account of exactly who voted, based on voter registration records. We’ll also have most of the results by precinct (my colleagues have been publishing a detailed map of those results).

Together with Times/Siena polling, it will be enough to offer our best answers on the big outstanding questions, like the role of turnout, how demographic groups shifted, and why the polls modestly underestimated Mr. Trump. We’ll do our best to analyze the most surprising shifts of the election, from young men and Hispanic voters to the TikTok effect and the new Silicon Valley right.

The Democrats

Mr. Trump did not win the 2024 election by a wide margin, but Democrats nonetheless suffered an extraordinary defeat.

After all, Mr. Trump — a felon who lost and then sought to overturn his prior election — was not a popular candidate. The exit poll found that only 46 percent had a favorable view of him, compared with 53 percent who had an unfavorable view. To be blunt: He won because voters thought the Democrats were even worse.

The implication, as we wrote before the election, is that Democrats might have lost in a landslide if they had faced a more typical Republican. With the exceptions of abortion and democracy (Republican own-goals), Democrats comprehensively lost the election on essentially every other issue. Democrats haven’t faced a challenge like this since 1980.

The debates about the Democrats’ future have already begun. There are a few novel angles, like the call for a politics of “Abundance” co-written by my colleague on the Opinion side, Ezra Klein. But most discussions have been just another rehash of the recurring debate between the party’s moderates and progressives. This time, it’s hard to see how either side can argue they have the answers to the major problems facing the party.

Democrats also face a more immediate challenge: how to respond to Mr. Trump, who will probably do more to shape the future of the Democrats than anything they do themselves.

This will be a big topic this year. The next Democratic presidential primary campaign isn’t as far away as it might seem today; the New York Democratic mayoral race is already underway.

The coming election calendar

This is what it looks like: special elections, the Virginia and New Jersey governors’ elections in November and the run-up to the midterms next year.

I am not sure this will be the most suspenseful year or two of elections. We have already seen enough over the first eight years of the Trump era — including the first special elections of his current term — to be confident that Democrats will fare quite well. We have also seen enough to know that Democrats can fare quite well in these kinds of contests without necessarily having it translate to better chances in a presidential election.

We’ll talk more about this in Tuesday’s newsletter, timed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court race and the special congressional elections in Florida.

The bottom line: Democrats may face serious questions about their identity and message, but it probably will not stop them from posting big victories over the next few years.