Any forward pivot in American politics usually involves a fretful look backward, and as the Trumpian GOP sizes up prospects for the 2026 midterms, a new breakdown of the failures of the Democratic Party over the 2024 election cycle has materialized. On Monday, the Democratic polling group Catalist released its in-depth analysis of the 2024 debacle—the most detailed such postmortem to date. The top-line message of the report can be summed up as follows: massive system failure.

Democrats underperformed compared to the 2020 cycle in nearly every significant battleground, and within almost all relevant demographic groups, Catalist finds. Overall turnout was remarkably high, with 64 percent of eligible voters casting ballots. In most postwar election cycles, high turnout has been an advantage for Democratic tickets, but the Harris-Walz campaign consistently lost footing among almost all electoral subgroups. In the biggest such group—return voters from the prior cycle—Harris’s support dropped two points from Biden’s showing in 2020. And the bad news keeps coming as you drill down. Harris-Walz lost support among all voters of color, with Latino males dropping below 50 percent support for a Democratic ticket for the first time, and saw already worrisome gender gaps worsen within voters of color.

Also, new voters broke against the Democratic Party for the first time within Catalist’s data research. Thirty million general election voters from 2020 didn’t return to the ballot box in 2024—the largest such figure in elections conducted in the 21st century. Swing voters—here termed “irregular” voters—also broke against the Democratic ticket, resulting in the Trump-Vance ticket sweeping the seven battleground states of the 2024 balloting. The Democrats’ losses among non-college-educated voters—the marquee shift in electoral politics since Trump’s first election victory in 2016—continues, but the party also saw national support among college-educated voters dip by three points, from 59 percent to 56 percent, between 2020 and 2024.

If you pan further back to 2012—the last time Democrats spoke confidently of holding down a winning national coalition—the numbers are still more sobering. Democratic poll analyst Ruy Teixera, who coauthored the hopium-laden tract The Emerging New Democratic Majority back in 2004, recently surveyed the collapse of that now-remote electoral mirage for his newsletter The Democratic Strategist. Among non-white working-class (i.e., non-college-educated) voters, he writes, “Obama cleaned up…carrying them by 64 points in 2012. In the 2024 election the margin was down to 32 points, exactly cutting the 2012 Democratic advantage in half.” The Hispanic share of the non-college-educated demographic saw the steepest drop-off, with a whopping 38-point Obama advantage in 2012 shrinking to just a six-point pro-Harris margin in 2024. Disparate gender support for Democrats also shows a party in troubling decline; Obama lost the 2012 male vote by five points, while Harris’s male deficit was more than triple that, at 16 points. What’s more, Texiera notes, the Democratic advantage across those two cycles was virtually constant—which means that the overall 11-point shift in the gender gap from 16 to 27 points “is entirely attributable to Democrats doing worse among men, not to doing better among women.” [Emphasis in original]

The comprehensive breakdown furnished by Catalist confirms what’s already painfully obvious to anyone following the recent misfortunes of the Democratic Party: Its woes won’t be remedied by any readily tweaked flaw in party messaging, or a canny nudge toward a newly Democratic-leaning demographic grouping or economic region. No, the party is in the midst of a massive credibility crisis with the American electorate, with key groups once tagged as mainstays of a future Democratic governing coalition defecting in significant numbers.

Of course, the GOP isn’t really presiding over a stalwart majority-in-the-making, either; as the Catalist report notes, the party’s signature gains in the 2024 cycle, among 18-to-29-year-old men, and with Latino and Black men, may include voters who aren’t likely to become regular GOP supporters over the long term. In targeting “low-propensity” voters, Trump’s election team marshaled its first national majority, but this bedrock group by definition is prone to either suspend or switch its political allegiances under shifting economic and cultural conditions. Yet, in spite of ongoing GOP electoral vulnerabilities, there’s no question that Democrats are at an ongoing loss to produce an effective counter-mobilizing strategy to reverse its own flagging prospects. The case to preserve the institutional safeguards of American democracy against attack from an authoritarian MAGA movement has largely fallen flat—as did the multifront criminal prosecution of Trump, as well as the effort to publicize the Project 2025 agenda, and any number of hastily focus-grouped mass appeals.

At the same time, however, the data analysis of a lapsed election only adds up to an incomplete account of the conduct of national politics, which after all concerns both the crafting of narratives and campaigns of mass persuasion. That’s why, at the end of its glum roll call of voting reversals, the Catalist team writes that “for Democrats to secure a victory, they need to simultaneously (1) convince a portion of relatively high turnout ‘swing voters’ to vote for them, while (2) refreshing their pool of rotating voters who tend to lean Democratic but who have inconsistent participation in elections.”

To get a broader sense of fresh political opportunities beckoning to Democratic leaders and candidates, you can toggle over to a new Axios report on how the Trump-led GOP is already trying to fend off losses in the crucial 2026 midterms. Trump’s pet super PAC, Securing American Greatness, is already unloosing its multimillion-dollar war chest on ads touting the president’s economic agenda in the districts of eight vulnerable House GOP incumbents, while short-circuiting threatened primary challenges to similarly situated Republican lawmakers. And Trump is motivated by something more than simple solicitude for his party’s narrow eight-vote House majority. As a veteran of two prior impeachments, Trump “knows the stakes firsthand,” said former GOP campaign official Matt Gorman. “Investigations, impeachment—he knows it’s all on the table with a Speaker [Hakeem] Jeffries.”

It’s a good rule of thumb, when a political opponent is moving preemptively to close off a source of narrative-shaping political power, to correspondingly step up your own efforts in the same direction. Yet Democratic leaders on the Hill have instead moved with efficient dispatch to tamp down the impeachment resolutions offered by Michigan Representative Shri Thanedar, and to sideline one of Thanedar’s more powerful allies, Texas Representative Al Green. And while the party has floated many outraged statements about the brazen corruption sanctioned under Trump’s second term, in such things as his sweetheart deals for Elon Musk and the $400 million gift of a new Air Force One plane from Qatar, Senate Democrats buckled in support of the crypto industry’s GENIUS Act—thereby fortifying one of Trump’s own prime tributaries of untrammeled corruption. Given the far from unrelated collapse of congressional Democrats before the xenophobic and demagogic Laken Riley Act—and given Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer’s ignominious surrender during government shutdown negotiations—Democrats are already signaling an acute aversion to exercising the limited power they now have in the face of an authoritarian regime. Is it any wonder that voters across the board regard Democrats as unserious prosecutors of the public interest?

The same criticism holds in the crucial matters of income inequality and political economy, which a corporate-compromised Harris campaign was unable to synthesize into an effective message of left populism. Now that Republicans have enacted, via their signature tax-cut and immigration-police-state bill, the single greatest upward distribution of wealth brought about by any piece of legislation in American history, a serious economic populist platform isn’t something that the party’s policy braintrust can continue to avoid. Indeed, the critical anchor of that 2012 Obama campaign was Obama’s own decision, against the counsel of his chief campaign adviser, David Axelrod, to bail out the then-flailing US auto industry. That decision furnished the basis of the “blue firewall” of upper Midwestern states that secured Obama’s reelection—and Hilllary Clinton’s wanton disregard of that same firewall helped seal her electoral doom four years later.

Right now, the party’s economic populist flank, like the cause of Trump’s impeachment, has been taken up by insurgent figures—chiefly Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who’ve been conducting a series of barnstorming rallies against the American oligarchy that are bringing in enormous crowds in many red-state locations. But party leaders typically can’t be counted on to turn out for the same organizing opportunities—and members of the Democrats’ overpaid and indolent consulting class have gone to the trouble of publicly whingeing against the term “oligarchy” as somehow too recondite for the working-class base that they’ve been systematically alienating since 2012. In other words, Democrats continue, against all the evidence given to them by a restive anti-status quo electorate, to position themselves as the sclerotic and hidebound defenders of the status quo. And this system-wide resistance to change is continuing heedlessly on track to the next total system failure.

The Louisiana rapper who was pardoned by President Donald Trump once said “F— Donald Trump” in a 2017 song. 

NBA YoungBoy, whose real name is Kentrell Gaulden, has been thanking Trump for the reprieve, writing in a recent Instagram post that the president is “giving me the opportunity to keep building — as a man, as a father, and as an artist.” 

However, in his song “Red Rum,” the 25-year-old Gaulden once rapped “And f— Donald Trump b—-, that NBA s—.” 

Pardon czar Alice Marie Johnson was asked about the remark during an appearance on “Fox & Friends” earlier this morning. 

RAPPER THANKS TRUMP FOR PARDON ON GUN CONVICTION 

President Donald Trump, left, and rapper NBA YoungBoy. (AP/Jacquelyn Martin/Erika Goldring/Getty Images)

“So a couple of rappers have come out or let’s say one in particular — YoungBoy. One of his lyrics in 2017 that he put out is “F Donald Trump” and some more disparaging things to say. He had a violent past of assault and battery. Multiple cases of that, and firearm, drug and fraud charges. What sold you on him getting a second chance?” co-host Brian Kilmeade asked her. 

“I looked at the age and how this young man grew up. He grew up in a very impoverished neighborhood. And the things that he had to face, NBA YoungBoy growing up. Most of those were gun charges without the guns being discharged,” she said. 

“But I also looked at what happened to him on a set where he was filming a video and he had a prop in the set. That’s really where this came from. He didn’t come out of prison. He was given a pardon so he could have a new beginning. And the officers who in this particular case they came at him as though he was a terrorist and he was on a set, filming for a video. They gave him a gun charge for that… the officers who did this were all investigated and fired. So I look at the elements of what happened to this young man,” Johnson added. 

Last year, Gaulden was sentenced by a federal judge in Utah after he acknowledged possessing weapons despite being a convicted felon. However, he reached an agreement that resolved Utah state charges against him and settled two sets of federal charges against him — one carried a 23-month sentence and the other ordered five years of probation and a $200,000 fine.  

TRUMP PARDONS EX-CONNECTICUT GOVERNOR ROWLAND AND COMMUTES CHICAGO GANG LEADER HOOVER’S SENTENCE   

Rapper NBA YoungBoy performs in Atlanta, Georgia, in November 2018.  (Paras Griffin/Getty Images)

“I want to thank President Trump for granting me a pardon and for giving me the opportunity to keep building — as a man, as a father, and as an artist,” Gaulden, whose stage moniker stands for “Never Broke Again,” wrote on his Instagram. “This moment means a lot.”  

“It opens the door to a future I’ve worked hard for and I am fully prepared to step into this,” Gaulden added.  

Gaulden was released from federal prison in March and sent to home confinement after receiving credit for time served, his attorney Drew Findling told the Associated Press. With home confinement finished last month, the pardon means he won’t have to follow the terms of his probation, including drug testing, he said. 

The rapper has acknowledged that he possessed a Glock 21 .45-caliber pistol and a Masterpiece Arms MPA30T 9mm handgun while filming a rap video in Baton Rouge. He has also said he had a Sig Sauer 9mm semi-automatic pistol at his home in Huntsville, Utah. He had agreed to give up the guns.  

NBA YoungBoy performs at the Lil’ WeezyAna Fest at Champions Square in August 2017 in New Orleans.  (Amy Harris/Invision/AP, File)

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Gaulden had previously been convicted in Louisiana of aggravated assault with a firearm. He had also pleaded guilty in November to his role in a prescription drug fraud ring that operated out of his home in Utah. He had to pay a $25,000 fine and was given no prison time. 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.