When polls closed at 9:00 PM on November 5th, 2024, there was hope in New York City’s suburbs. Former Congressman Mondaire Jones (D-NY17), a progressive reformer, had run to retake the seat he occupied from 2021 to 2023.
The race was a nail-biter. Over 25 million dollars were spent, making it one of the most expensive Congressional races in American history. But Jones came up short of incumbent Congressman Mike Lawler (R-NY) by just 23,946 votes out of nearly 380,000 cast.
“Vindication” is how Jones described election night.
“I was feeling a vindication in my belief that the district had changed from where it was in 2020. Now, of course, the district itself was not the same district in terms of the contours of the geography, but you can recreate how the district would have performed in 2020 quite easily. And what we saw in [the 2024] election is a double-digit shift towards the former president of the United States, now the current president of the United States, Donald Trump.”
This phenomenon, colloquially called the “red shift,” occurred across the country, not only the affluent suburbs Jones aimed to represent. Though the 2024 presidential election was far from a landslide, it was a decisive victory for Trump and the Republican Party. For the first time since 2004, a Republican candidate won the national popular vote, bruising the morale of Democratic organizers across the country.
Yale College Democrats President Christian Thomas ‘26 and his team knocked on doors for Jones in October. Thomas held out hope for Jones—and for Democrats across the country—until the end.
“I held on until the very last minute. I went home. My friends were hosting a watch party, and everyone there was in despair. And I was like, ‘Guys, it’s not over yet. We’ve only counted 20 percent of the votes in Phoenix. Once we get to 100% of the votes in Phoenix, then I can consider us perhaps not winning,’” Thomas recalled.
The next day, Thomas’ emotions took over.
“There’s a moment that is true for a lot of organizers that is just like, ‘damn. That was a lot of work that so many put in, that I also put into this.’ For an hour, I was like, ‘Was any of that worth it? Were any of those three-hour-long drives to Scranton [to knock on doors for Democratic candidates] worth it?’”
While Democrats like Thomas felt uncertainty when Trump was first elected in 2016, they weren’t hopeless. They mobilized to counter his administration. The Women’s March made national news just a day after his inauguration in 2017 by protesting his policies and rhetoric. It was the largest single-day protest in American history. Between 3.2 and 5.2 million people in the United States participated. Intrepid organizers formed grassroots organizations like Indivisible to combat Trumpism.
It is no longer 2016. The fierce resistance that followed Trump’s first election has faded. In its place, the quiet resignation has settled in. The Democratic coalition now wrestles with a painful political identity crisis.
Sam Rosenfeld, Associate Professor of Political Science at Colgate University and recent author of The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics, argues Democrats need to examine the coalitional disconnect between the ideological priorities of the party and those of rank-and-file Democrats.
Since 2016, Rosenfeld said, Democrats have bled support down the income and education ladder. “In 2016, [the erosion] was about white voters outside the South who are non-college-educated, who Democrats used to do decently with. And then they lost ground.”
Today, however, Democrats lose ground on non-college-educated voters across age, racial, and ethnic categories. “That’s a huge problem. That’s a huge problem in terms of who’s in the electorate. And it’s a particular problem for Democrats existentially, in terms of a party that is committed to a vision of economic policy and political economy that is egalitarian and redistributive,” Rosenfeld noted.
This collapse is nothing short of catastrophic for Democrats electorally. In 2012, former President Barack Obama won voters making between $30,000 and $49,999 with 57 percent of the vote. In 2024, Trump won that income bracket 53 to 45. If Democrats are losing the very voters their policies are designed to help, it will become increasingly difficult for them to build winning coalitions.
But it’s not irreversible. Rosenfeld sees a chance to rebuild the Democratic Party and ignite a new generation of bold, unwavering advocates. Rosenfeld argued, “you have to think creatively about trying to rebuild a kind of civic and social and organizational life out there.”
“That could include and encompass ordinary working people in spaces that would habituate them to think it’s normal to vote for Democrats like there used to be,” said Rosenfeld. Several key stakeholders in the Democratic Party—academics, national political leaders like Mondaire Jones, analysts, and organizers—agree with Rosenfeld.
They have a vision for a Democratic Party that can rekindle its once-collective purpose and rise boldly against Trump-era disillusionment, a plan involving relational organizing, institutional reform, and truthfulness. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
***
Relational organizing might be the future of the Democratic Party.
On Saturday, November 2nd, just three days before Election Day, former Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign knocked on over 1.2 million doors in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The sheer organizing power of the Harris-Walz campaign gave the appearance of unstoppable momentum.
Yet Rosenfeld was skeptical. “I and others have had [suspicions] about parachuting in armies of idealistic, absolutely admirable volunteer canvassers from out of state to go around knocking on doors a million times.”
Rosenfeld called it a “costly way of trying to eke out votes.”
“It may not be effective at all. The scholarship has always said that leveraging people who are in those communities themselves, who are your neighbors or your friends or people you know, has just way more bang for your buck than professionals,” said Rosenfeld. This strategy is known as relational organizing, the practice of building political trust through entrenched personal relationships over long periods of time. Instead of dedicating large sums of campaign cash to temporary brigades of volunteers to battleground states, relational organizing aims to maintain those relationships over time.
Jack Dozier ‘27 is from rural Virginia and researches youth voter priorities with the Yale Youth Poll. Dozier spent three months as a regional organizer with the Virginia Coordinated Campaign—a joint effort spearheaded by the DNC, the Harris-Walz campaign, and the Virginia Democratic Party—and has seen firsthand the impact of relational organizing in his battleground home state. “Relational organizing is such an incredible program. It still has a way to go, but it’s reintroducing the idea of having conversations,” he said.
“When you’re an undecided young voter and you talk about the election with a trusted family member, with a close friend, with a family friend, that’ll have more of an impact on your decision-making than what some celebrity posts on Twitter,” Dozier noted.
Dozier named apps like Reach, a progressive organizing app piloted by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and her insurgent Congressional primary challenge in 2018, which helps campaigns and activists engage voters and supporters in real time through relational and grassroots organizing.
Relational organizing strategies, including bolstered campaign infrastructure and offices open to staff and (importantly) the broader public, tend to become more effective with sustained, year-round implementation. Dozier said that while year-round infrastructure is difficult, he found it more difficult to logistically set up new campaigns every other year. “As someone who helped open the office that I worked in, I spent more days in my first month of employment buying office supplies than actually talking with community members. Oh, my God, it was so hard to buy a stapler.”
Dozier added that when campaigns end, “the office lease goes up, the locks get changed, and all the furniture goes wherever it ends up.” Had the resources been present already, Dozier could have established more entrenched relationships with the community where he worked. Dozier covered nearly 1,500 square miles of territory, so the extra time spent building relationships with voters would have made an extraordinary impact. It’s for this reason that he calls relational organizing “the future of our modern politics.”
“As an organizer, I [have noticed] fewer people opening the doors and responding to text-bank texts. There’s a lot to be said about that. The methods that have won [young people] for years and years aren’t working as well anymore. There’s a route to find more trust, and that comes locally [in relational organizing].”
This recent decline in engagement is partly due to oversaturation—voters are inundated with campaign messages across platforms—and a generational shift in communication habits. Young people are also less likely to answer calls or respond to texts from unknown numbers than previous generations.
Relational organizing, applied to the conventional methods of voter outreach, offers a trusted, local alternative to cut through the noise. It is about elevating endorsements that carry weight within communities where trust and familiarity matter most. Dozier argued that small-scale endorsements, rather than the celebrity endorsements extolled by the Harris-Walz campaign, are intertwined with the project of relational organizing.
Dozier said, “celebrity endorsements are going to reach who they’re going to reach, but they might not have as much of a sway as we’ve thought they did. If your local paper, if your member of the Board of Supervisors, if your school board member is endorsing these national candidates, I think there’s a lot more trust.”
This stands in stark contrast to the Harris campaign’s strategy in 2024.
“One of the first celebrity endorsements of Harris was Charli XCX. A young person might say, ‘oh my gosh, that’s so exciting, Charli did this song [like the popular album “Brat” on which Harris branded her campaign].’ But there’s not complete trust of any given celebrity. It’s time to move even further into relational organizing, because that’s where you can make a real, tangible, and seeable difference,” Dozier remarked.
***
To repair the Democratic Party, the broader American political landscape may need reform.
Mondaire Jones shares Sam Rosenfeld’s observation about the disconnect between the ideology of the Democratic Party and the voters it purports to represent, but he takes the quandary one step further.
“It is untenable that a majority of working class people would not be voting for Democratic candidates as we seek to carry the mantle of the working class economic agenda,” said Jones. His solution: the party “needs to lean into an economic populism in order for us to regain the trust of the American people, particularly working class people we say we are running to represent,” requiring institutional changes that go beyond an increased emphasis on relational organizing.
This economic populism might take shape by the party changing the way it markets the pro-labor policies most Democrats already endorse. Democrats were criticized in the wake of Harris’ loss for overusing technocratic policy rhetoric. Shifting toward language that resonates with working class voters might align the policy—bolstering unions, raising the minimum wage, and cracking down on corporate monopolies that stifle competition and drive up the cost of living—with the politics to garner votes.
Jones felt this misalignment in Harris’ campaign. “I would have been at a loss for knowing what [Harris’] economic platform was, beyond the very good idea of expanding Medicare to include long-term care and the economic assistance for first-time homeowners.” Economic populism would have shaped a political vision that better connected with those who feel left behind by traditional party politics, particularly the working-class voters who are increasingly turning away from the Democratic Party. It demands that the economic struggles of working Americans take center stage in shaping the Democratic agenda.
Jones’ desire to change the messaging and usher in economic populism is one step to regain the trust of the American people. It also may require overhauling the country’s institutional structure to reshape the civic and political order.
Some experts envision strengthening spaces, like unions, community groups, and local civic organizations, where working people naturally engage with Democratic politics in their daily lives. These spaces have historical precedent. Rosenfeld argued that labor unions once contributed to a civic order that lent strength to Democratic candidates who attempted to represent the issues of the working class. At their height, labor unions were powerful engines of civic participation that mobilized millions of workers to channel their collective power into tangible political influence.
“Labor unions were the most clear example of [civic spaces] but kind of ramified all out across American civic life. And now, we are in a moment where Trump is a really important actor in making [their erosion] happen, where if you are a normal, non-highly educated, not particularly political person, you’re just more likely to vote Republican, and that wasn’t always the case,” Rosenfeld said.
In 2024, labor union membership slipped to 9.9 percent, a historic low. This decline can be attributed to a combination of factors, including the rapid spread of “right to work” laws that restrict union participation, globalization allowing companies to relocate jobs abroad, the rise of automation, and deregulation that has weakened workers’ protections.
Christian Thomas wants to develop this infrastructure for the Yale College Democrats. Citizens who identify as Democrats deserve “spaces for the [wide ideological] spectrum of the Democratic Party to coexist.”
“The biggest thing coming into this position that I have [done] is just offering a wide spectrum of opportunity for individuals to explore and act on different issues [that extends beyond just election season],” said Thomas.
Thomas ensures his group meets weekly. “We have conversations about what’s going on around the nation, bring in speakers who are experiencing firsthand the ramifications of a lot of the misinformation that we’ve seen [from the Trump Administration], and encouraging our members to present their own interests.”
It might take more than invigorating American civic organizations. Escaping dark money’s domination of American politics and completely reforming democracy might be the antidote to Democratic troubles, and ostensibly the nation’s anxieties.
In 2024, anonymous sources directed over $1 billion to independent political committees supporting both Democratic and Republican candidates. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the largest outside group supporting Harris’ campaign was a dark-money funded super PAC. Elon Musk gave at least $277 million to two super PACS that supported Trump. If candidates rely on money from secretive wealthy donors, they are incentivized to support donors over their own constituents.
Jones said that “my colleagues in the House and in the Senate, particularly Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, should have joined me and my support for at least reforming the filibuster to pass comprehensive democracy reforms.”
“That, I believe, would have made a difference, certainly down-ballot in terms of control of the House, but also potentially and probably in terms of the outcome of the presidential election,” Jones said.
Senators Joe Manchin (I-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), both formerly elected as Democrats, stymied Jones’ efforts to reform democracy.
What were those reforms?
“We are talking about rooting out big money in politics, implementing a robust system of public matching dollars when it comes to candidates seeking federal legislative office, restoring the Voting Rights Act that was largely neutered in the 2013 decision by the Supreme Court called Shelby County v. Holder. These are the kinds of things that would have prevented the voter suppression that we saw in key swing states, even this past cycle because laws were able to be enacted in the wake of that 2013 decision and have only proliferated over the past several years,” Jones said.
The reforms that Jones mentioned, including public matching funds that aim to augment the power of small-dollar, in-district donors, are aimed at reinvigorating local political power. By enabling ordinary people to facilitate the political conversation rather than wealthy mega-donors or disconnected national forces, the Democratic Party might be able to rebuild the coalition of working-class voters it has increasingly lost.
Jones concludes by arguing, “A lot of what we are dealing with right now could have been avoided. It is much less easy to enact the kind of institutional reforms absent control of Congress and the White House—to say nothing of all the damage that could have been avoided in terms of the lived experiences of women and people of color and the LGBTQ+ community and so on and so forth these past several years.”
***
Democrats must also combat the precipitous rise in misinformation.
While Jones thinks “Kamala Harris could have done a better job of branding herself as a champion for the working class,” he notes that Harris’ campaign team is not entirely to blame. According to Jones, another challenge Democrats faced was a “lack of information.”
“Conservatives and MAGA Republicans increasingly can control our systems of information in this country,” Jones said.
Thomas agrees that this is the biggest challenge he faces on the ground as a representative of the party. It reminds him of his time as a school board member at the height of the coronavirus pandemic in Maryland. “Combatting the misinformation of the Trump administration is a [seemingly] impossible task to undertake. I come from an educational policy perspective, and thinking of how we could [combat misinformation] in schools is in itself an impossible undertaking because of the divisions that have been escalated from the days of the pandemic.”
Dr. Rachel Bitecofer is a political strategist and author of Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game. She believes that the answer to the rise of political misinformation requires Democrats to correct the misinformed right-wing narrative that the Republican Party has been the true torchbearer for the working class agenda. Even if that new narrative means muting contemporary efforts to uplift minority groups and preserve political correctness, Bitecofer thinks a narrative shift is worth it—and that might be difficult for some progressive Democrats to wrestle with.
“I mean, it’s a tough f—ing RX, right? You don’t get popular telling people what they have to hear,” Bitecofer remarked.
The tough prescription, in Bitecofer’s mind, is clear. “It’s time to tell the story of the middle class and the working class, where all their money went, and where it went was to the rich billionaires that financed the Republican Party. We have to remind people who takes care of them economically, and it isn’t the Republican Party.”
In the last decade, Democrats have become commonly recognized as the party that stands up for marginalized groups rather than guarantors of economic growth. The Financial Times analyzed the main reasons people said they liked the Democratic Party in every election between 1948 and 2012. For over six decades, the party was most prominently seen as the party that represents the working class. During the 2010s, that changed. Today, voters primarily associate the Democratic Party with standing up for minorities.
“It’s great to be part of a party that people associate with helping people who are less fortunate, right? [But] it is literally the hardest f—ing thing you could ever market in politics because voters don’t give a f— about other people. You do. I do. Progressives do. But most people are self-oriented.” Bitecofer emphasized that “the prescription doesn’t say you abandon the causes of civil rights and liberties from marginalized groups. What it’s saying is: you let that speak for itself. Our diversity speaks for itself.”
For Bitecofer, this is how Democrats can counter what she sees as Republican misinformation on the economy. Had the party addressed this crisis sooner, the erosion of Democratic majorities in the 2010s under Obama—and Trump’s resurgence in 2024—might have been less severe.
“If you’re a working person in a blue state [in 2008], you work too much and don’t get free health care. But because of Obamacare, for the first time ever in American history, you can access cheap health insurance. Medicaid was expanded to cover the working poor. There’s not been a delivery for the working poor better than that since the New Deal and Social Security. In other words, we’re delivering policy for the working class, and the whole time the public is saying we are not representing the working class more and more.”
The internet, particularly with its influence from right-wing billionaire figures like Elon Musk, has undermined the public’s perception of the Democratic Party. Bitecofer says, “There’s no way to quantify how much human behavior has changed because of what we’re doing right now, with cell phones, Internet technology, social media, all of the bells and whistles of the modern internet. Elon Musk bought Twitter right before the midterms, by the way, two weeks or so before the 2022 midterms with a clear political mission. He has used that political mission effectively, and it’s a megaphone that is of a size and scope that has never existed in the world before.”
When that megaphone amplified misinformation, Democrats stood down and abided by a traditional playbook.
“We got down into the weeds on all these culture issues and tried to talk to elements of the coalition in ways that are focused on the ways these elements differ: Black voters, Latino voters, young voters. Well, what [the Republicans] were doing the whole time is treating all their voters like one type of person—and that was a person [who] should know Democrats are scary socialists who are going to turn your boys into girls and let migrants kill you,” Bitecofer said.
“That was not what we did. We did our traditional Democratic strategy,” Bitecofer stressed.
***
There’s one thing that might complicate the calculus of an American civic renaissance. Bitecofer has reason to believe that we are toeing a dangerous line between democracy and autocracy.
“As soon as [Trump] announced the Cabinet picks, it was clear to me, ‘yeah, he is going to do exactly what he said he was going to do.’ They’ve got Project 2025, they’ve got the staffers ready to roll. You don’t nominate Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel unless you are planning on violating the law.” In turn, Bitecofer is increasingly “bearish on the future of our democracy” and warns Yale in particular that “especially if I was on Yale’s faculty and I engaged in a protest about Gaza, I’d be pretty worried right now.”
But Democrats are not in an existential crisis. They existentially lost ground, yes, but according to Rosenfeld, “Parties in the past have faced much steeper electoral troughs than Democrats have right now, and they’ve recovered quickly. Democrats have kind of a long-running challenge that they don’t seem to have the answer to.” It’s a different time. “Donald Trump is not an aberrant, weird, shocking figure anymore. It’s taken multiple election cycles for various people to adjust to new, disruptive realities,” Rosenfeld said.
And those disruptive realities desensitized voters to the chaotic character of Donald Trump. For Democrats to function as a party, they may need to rethink their organizational and civic structure—not just in terms of party strategy, but as a broader vision for governance. That structure must be built on relational organizing, sweeping institutional reforms, and the courage to counter misinformation with a compelling narrative that traces Republican policy weakening the working class.
Democrats have to move fast. As Bitecofer said, “resistance in a democracy is one thing. You can do some protesting or do lawsuits. But resistance in an autocracy is going to be very, very different. Being in opposition in an autocracy is very different.”
A Republican government that no longer operates within democratic guardrails could be fatal to Democratic organizing. The ruling party could criminalize dissent and target opposition leaders. Opposition leaders could be targeted. It could make the judiciary and media institutions its tools.
Bitecofer’s earlier account of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now X) and the efforts to advance Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel for FBI Director are consistent with this vision, she thinks.
Traditional electoral strategies may no longer apply when the playing field is rigged and protests could carry real legal consequences. In a nation wrestling with the erosion of democratic institutions, deepening political polarization, and—as observed by Jones and Rosenfeld—the continued alienation of working class voters, the Democratic Party might need to rethink what it means to be in the opposition party. This is precisely the moment to act with unrelenting force and conviction.
Jones puts us “in an era in American politics and world history where we have to accept some hard truths about what our failure as a society to rise to the occasion when it mattered most has wrought.”
It might be time to confront those hard truths and, from that reckoning, build something transformative.
It might be time for an American civic renaissance.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Mondaire Jones served in Congress from 2019 to 2021. Jones represented New York’s 17th Congressional District from 2021 to 2023.