Opinion | Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won

This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.I’ve been spending some time recently with top Democrats as they think about how to rebuild after the 2024 loss.And in the 20-some years I’ve been covering politics, I have never heard Democrats so confused: about who they are — aside from their opposition to Donald Trump — as well as how and why they lost.Democrats are losing working-class voters.

They’re seeing their margins among nonwhite voters erode and vanish.They’re losing young voters.

Something is wrong in the Democratic Party.So I think it’s important that the conversation among Democrats is grounded on a pretty real understanding of what happened in 2024.And someone whose analysis on this I have come to respect over the years is David Shor.He is the head of data science at Blue Rose Research, which is a big Democratic consulting firm that does a huge amount of political surveying, data interpretation and message testing.Shor works with campaigns and progressive groups, so he has a perspective from the inside.

But he’s also a very skilled interpreter of data.He has gotten a lot of things right before other people did, including that educational polarization was becoming the central fault line for democracy — not just in America but in other countries, too.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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