How Democrats Lost the Argument About Defending Democracy in the 2024 US Federal Elections

Note: The following is an article that I wrote and was presented at the 2025 Alta Argumentation Conference regarding the reasons why the Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election. Specifically, how the Democrats lost their primary argument about Trump being a "threat to democracy." The article was considered too "right wing" to publish in the proceedings of the conference, so I have chosen to share it in its entirety here. Please enjoy.

Introduction

The 2024 U.S. presidential election was remarkable in several respects. It marked the first time since the 1890s that a former president appeared on the ballot, and the first time in over half a century that an incumbent president withdrew from the race in the months leading up to their party’s national convention. The last such instance occurred in 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson declined to seek re-election. That year, the Democratic Party, reeling from the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and having held only a dozen statewide primaries, selected Vice President Hubert Humphrey at the convention. Humphrey, who had not participated in the Democratic primaries, ultimately lost to Republican nominee Richard Nixon.

Though history does not repeat itself, it often rhymes. In 2024, the Democratic Party nominated Vice President Kamala Harris following President Joe Biden’s abrupt withdrawal from the race. Like Humphrey, Harris was nominated without competing in any primary election. Biden endorsed Harris on the day he exited the race and instructed his pledged delegates to support her on the first ballot at the convention, an effort that proved successful. Notably, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the late Senator, had earlier withdrawn from the Democratic primary to launch an independent campaign, adding another notable parallel with the 1968 election.

Despite the abrupt change at the top of the ticket, Harris chose to maintain the campaign messaging that had been used by the Biden-Harris ticket (Berman & Rosenberg, 2024). That messaging, which had already shaped the party’s argumentation up and down the ballot, focused on a singular, existential theme: the defense of democracy. Democratic strategists framed the election as a referendum on democratic survival, operating under the belief that the threat posed by Donald Trump and his allies would unify voters to keep him out of the white house. They assumed that preserving democracy was an a priori issue, one that undergirded all others and could transcend partisan divisions (Wright, 2024).

This strategy, however, failed to resonate with much of the electorate. Instead of mobilizing broad support, the message struggled to gain traction, particularly among working- and middle-class voters, who were more concerned with economic instability than abstract threats. The result was a decisive electoral defeat. Harris underperformed Joe Biden’s 2020 results by six million votes, lost ground in all 50 states, and failed to carry a single swing state (Cook, 2024).

The rhetoric of a “democracy in peril” began well before Harris’s nomination. Democratic leaders had labeled Trump a “threat to democracy” as early as November 2022, weeks before he had even officially announced his candidacy (Gans, 2022). Within a matter of months, the phrase had become a staple in President Biden’s speeches and media appearances (Schofield, 2024). To build upon the foundations of the biden campaign, Harris continued to utilize this messaging after assuming the top of the ticket in the summer of 2024.

There is a temptation to overcomplicate the 2024 election, to ascribe the Democrats’ loss to factors like racism, sexism, or anything else that the pundits want to claim. But the most straightforward explanation is also the most compelling: the American public rejected the Democratic Party’s core argument because it did not resonate with them. Despite historic fundraising levels, a unified party apparatus, and widespread institutional support pushing the Harris campaign forward, the campaign failed to persuade key demographics of voters that democracy itself was on the ballot.

This paper explores why the Democratic argument about defending democracy failed in 2024. It examines the disconnect between elitist messaging and voter priorities, the obvious counterarguments that gave the Republican party the upper hand, and the impact of the Democrats’ blatant hypocrisy when pushing their narrative during the 2024 US Presidential Election.

Not an A Priori Issue

One of the core reasons the Democratic Party’s central argument that Donald Trump represented a “threat to democracy” failed to connect with voters in 2024 is that it was not an a priori issue for most Americans. Despite the frequency and intensity with which Democratic leaders, media figures, and strategists repeated the phrase “defending democracy,” voters simply did not buy what they were selling. In a July 2024 Emerson College poll, only 19.5% of respondents listed threats to democracy as the most important issue in the upcoming election. By contrast, 39.6% prioritized economic concerns, and an additional 22.3% cited immigration or crime as their top issue (Mumford, 2024). The disparity became even more pronounced in a Gallup poll taken just after the election, which found that 34% of Americans named economic issues as their primary concern, while a mere 3% chose protecting democracy (Gallup, 2025).

This underscores a fundamental miscalculation by Democratic strategists: the belief that voters would place the abstract threat of “the end of democracy as we know it” over their immediate, material concerns. The “threat to democracy” rhetoric, which may have resonated with political elites and highly engaged liberal voters, failed to break through to working- and middle-class Americans, who were more focused on issues that were tangible. This crucial demographic was certainly more focused on the rising cost of living, the prospect of losing their jobs to a growing influx of illegal immigrants, and the safety of their children attending schools where fentanyl was being distributed by classmates.

This disconnect is reminiscent of James Carville’s famous axiom from the 1992 Clinton campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.” While the Republican campaign centered its messaging on restoring pre-pandemic economic prosperity, controlling inflation, and curbing illegal immigration, Democratic messaging fixated on abstract institutional concerns. Democratic operatives and candidates increasingly leaned into intellectualized appeals, arguing that democracy itself was at stake, rather than meeting voters where they were. In doing so, they violated a cardinal rule of political communication: speak to the lowest common denominator (Lucci, 2024).

The consequence of this was that the Democrats’ central message came across as elitist discourse and disconnected from the concerns of ordinary Americans. Most voters were not preoccupied with abstract arguments about the fabric of our political institutions. They were more concerned with keeping a roof over their heads, putting food on their tables, and keeping gas in the tank to go to work. The “threats” they felt most viscerally were real. They were economic and personal, not abstract, and certainly not what the Democratic pundits told them to care about.

Polling data throughout the campaign confirmed this disconnect. The “threat to democracy” framing tested the lowest of all of the campaign’s arguments, especially among working-class voters (Guastella, 2024). Trump even outperformed Harris on economic issues among pro-choice voters (Brownstein, 2024). The Democratic Party’s messaging failed to persuade the very voters it most needed to reach, while also losing support among the Democratic faithful.

When people are worried about their basic needs, abstract arguments about democracy are furthest from their mind. The Republican messaging was focused on bringing America back to the economic prosperity seen before the COVID-19 pandemic, and that resonated with working class voters on their way to cast their ballots. In short, the Republicans focused on issues that directly impacted the lives of key voters, while the Democrats’ messaging felt ignorant to their needs.  As a result, many Americans saw the Democratic campaign as offering more of the same, while the Republican campaign promised a return to the economic prosperity of the early Trump years.

Obvious Counterarguments

One of the most significant weaknesses in the Democratic Party’s “threat to democracy” messaging was that it invited direct, obvious counterarguments  that many voters found more persuasive than the Democrats' core argument. Chief among them was this: Donald Trump had already been president. If he truly intended to dismantle American democracy or install himself as a dictator, he had four years and ample opportunity to do so. And yet, for all the rhetoric about Trump being a “threat to democracy” and a “dictator”, Trump left office on January 20, 2021, following the Constitutional process. Despite his refusal to concede and his repeated claims that the 2020 election was stolen, Trump did not attempt to remain in the White House by force. After losing several election-related lawsuits, he ultimately ceded executive power to Joe Biden, and the government functioned under Democratic leadership for the next four years. It didn’t take a PhD, or even a college education, to recognize this.

To many voters, this undercut the credibility of the Democratic claim. If Trump had been such a dangerous threat to democracy, why did democracy continue to function under his administration, and why did it continue after his departure? This line of reasoning was reinforced by comparisons to past elections. Just as Trump rejected the legitimacy of the 2020 election, Hillary Clinton and many Democrats refused to fully accept the legitimacy of Trump’s 2016 victory, citing Russian interference and voter suppression (Itkowitz, 2019). To independent and swing voters, both parties had a history of questioning electoral outcomes, making the Democratic arguments about Trump appear as it was, blatant partisanship.

In the absence of compelling new evidence, many voters saw the Democrats’ central argument as speculative at best and hysterical at worst. Rather than running against Trump’s first-term policy record, the Democratic Party built its campaign around a hypothetical scenario: that Trump’s second term would mark the end of American democracy. But voters had already lived through his presidency. If Trump was as dangerous as Democrats claimed, they wondered, why didn’t he destroy the country the first time?

Moreover, with Kamala Harris now at the top of the ticket, the contrast was not simply between Biden and Trump, but between two visions of America’s past. The election came to feel like a referendum on whether voters preferred the Trump administration’s past or the Biden-Harris administration’s present. Harris offered continuity with an unpopular presidency, while Trump promised a return to a prior state that many Americans remembered as economically stronger.

These dynamics created a narrative clash: Democrats campaigned on a hypothetical threat, while Republicans appealed to the reality of what many Americans had gone through. The result was a credibility gap. Voters questioned why, if Trump posed such a dire threat, his previous term did not reflect that. And if Harris had the solutions to today’s problems, why hadn’t she already implemented them as Vice President? These were the kinds of pragmatic questions that occupied many swing and independent voters; questions for which the Democrats never offered compelling answers.

Hypocrisy

The Democratic Party’s undemocratic nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 undermined its central campaign message of "defending democracy." Following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race, party leaders quickly consolidated support around Harris without organizing new primary elections or pursuing a contested convention, despite many potential candidates making calls for an open process to select the nominee. While framed as a necessary move to ensure unity and for the party to field a well-funded candidate, this internal selection process bypassed the very democratic mechanisms the party had spent the campaign season extolling (Morgan, 2024; Klinghard, 2024). In doing so, Democrats handed their opponents a powerful rhetorical weapon: the charge of hypocrisy.

This contradiction gave rise to what scholars identify as a tu quoque argument (Aiken, 2008). Or, as the average voter would put it, obvious hypocrisy. The textbook structure is simple: the speaker advocates for something, but does not follow it, so the audience disregards that message as false.

Tu quoque arguments are typically considered fallacious in formal logic, because a person’s hypocrisy does not necessarily disprove the truth of their claim. Yet in real-world rhetoric, especially in politics, they are highly persuasive. People have a negative “gut reaction” when they see obvious hypocrisy in action (Govier, 1984). Voters expect some level of consistency between what a candidate or party says and what they do. When that consistency breaks down, the perceived credibility and moral authority of the speaker collapses, evaporating their ethos as a speaker.

In 2024, this dynamic was glaring. Democrats insisted that Donald Trump represented a threat to democracy, and that the upcoming election was a referendum on the future of American democracy itself. But by orchestrating a top-down nomination process with no meaningful voter participation, the Democratic Party appeared to violate its own professed principles. The Republican response was straightforward and effective: how can you claim to defend democracy when you won’t even practice it within your own party?

This was a textbook tu quoque, and it stuck. Conservative media outlets, Republican candidates, and everyday voters echoed the sentiment, turning the Democrats’ core message into a liability. The accusation of hypocrisy resonated emotionally and intuitively. Hypocrisy is always damaging to ethos, but in politics it can be a near death sentence. Voters are already distrustful of politicians, and are especially wary when arguments are used as tools to maintain or gain power. When they saw the Democrats’ actions contradicted their core argument, the credibility of their messaging evaporated.

Ultimately, the party’s failure to adhere to democratic principles in its own nomination process did not just provide fodder for Republican attacks; it fundamentally weakened the moral force of their central argument. What might have been seen as a principled stand for democratic values while Biden was at the top of the ticket came to look like political theater after Harris was chosen by party insiders as the next nominee. The rhetorical power of "defending democracy" cannot be sustained when the speaker’s conduct raises doubts about their sincerity, and those doubts proved decisive.

Conclusions

The Democratic Party’s failure in the 2024 presidential election must also be understood as a failure of rhetorical strategy. By framing the election as a referendum on democracy itself, Democratic leaders assumed that their core argument would be an a priori issue to key voters. But voters were not persuaded by intangible arguments about an abstract concept. Most Americans were focused on issues pertaining to their security and basic economic needs. As a result, the messaging from Democratic elites was perceived as exactly that: elitist. Harris should have focused on the message that matters most to voters. They wanted to know how she was going to make their lives better, not some political jargon about defending the fabric of democracy.

In the end, the Democrats’ claim that Trump was a dictator that was going to destroy American democracy failed to overcome the simple, observable reality of his first term. Voters had already lived through a Trump presidency, and the sky had not fallen. Faced with a choice between a known past and a deeply unpopular present, many Americans opted to return to the Trump years. The Democrats’ insistence on a speculative threat, rather than engaging with the lived experiences and concerns of voters, widened a credibility gap they were ultimately unable to close. By framing the election around what might happen rather than what had actually happened, they forfeited the power of pragmatic persuasion and paid the political price.

Moreover, the Democrats' own actions undercut their message. The coordinated, undemocratic selection of Kamala Harris as the party’s nominee rightly exposed the party to devastating tu quoque criticism from Republicans and voters alike. These were rhetorically powerful rebuttals that framed the Democrats as hypocritical and disingenuous. By violating their own democratic principles while claiming to be democracy’s greatest defenders, the Democratic Party lost credibility on the very issue that they chose to center their campaign around. In the end, their central argument failed because it wasn’t what voters needed to hear, there were obvious flaws in the argumentation, and the messenger had lost credibility on the issue.

References

Aikin, S. F. (2008). Tu Quoque Arguments and the Significance of Hypocrisy. Informal Logic, 28(2).

Berman, A., & Rosenberg, J. (2024, November 21). Democrats need to stop defending a broken democratic system. Mother Jones.

Brownstein, R. (2024, December 2). Why they Lost. The Atlantic. 

Cook Political Report. (2024). 2024 National Popular Vote Tracker. Cook Political Report. 

Gallup. (2025, January 16). Most Important Problem. Gallup. 

Gans, J. (2022, September 7). William Cohen labels Trump a “clear and present danger to democracy.” The Hill. 

Govier, T. (1984). Worries About Tu Quoque as a Fallacy. Informal Logic, 3(3). 

Guastella, D. (2024, October 22). To win, Harris should talk more about working-class needs and less about Trump. The Guardian. 

Itkowitz, C. (2019, September 26). Hillary Clinton: Trump is an “illegitimate President.” Washington Post. 

Klinghard, D. (2024, August 5). Democratic Party’s choice of Harris was undemocratic − and the latest evidence of party leaders distrusting party voters. The Conversation. 

Lucci, M. (2024). Fight the Good Fight: A Framework for Winning Hearts and Minds to Our Conservative Cause. American Liberty Media.

Morgan, R. (2024, August 9). Kamala Harris Is an Undemocratic Candidate. But She’s Hardly America’s First. Slate Magazine. 

Mumford, C. (2024, July 9). July 2024 National Poll: Trump 46%, Biden 43%. Emerson Polling. 

Schofield, R. (2024, June 28). In Raleigh, a fiery Biden blasts Trump as a threat to democracy, seeks to quell age concerns. Arkansas Advocate. 

Wright, L. A. (2024, October 31). Democrats’ commitment to the democracy message could cost them the election. The Hill.