Representative Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat, interrupted me before I finished my question: Congressman, were you… “Surprised? No, I wasn’t surprised,” Torres, who represents a poor and working-class neighborhood in the Bronx, told me. “A lot of my side in politics, and a lot of the media, found themselves in a state of self-deception. We confused analysis with wishful thinking.”

That is to say, too many people in Torres’ party assumed that they were pioneers of virtue and endangering democratic values, and that the Americans would not do so, as an act of desperation. New York Times columnist said it this week: vote for an ‘authoritarian grotesquerie’.

This, Torres argued, was the purest delusion. Inflation and soaring interest rates on credit cards, car loans and mortgages may not have been President Joe Biden’s fault, but they have plagued Americans. The immigration system was broken and migrants flooded shelters in major cities. There is no need to assume — as some commentators have done after Donald Trump’s landslide victory on Tuesday — that the United States has a uniquely fallen electorate; Across the world, voters have been throwing out governments left and right over the disruptions of the past five years. “A majority of Americans disapprove of Biden’s performance and felt they were worse off,” Torres said; Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, “was not responsible for inflation, but objectively that was a virtually insurmountable disadvantage.”

Thomas Chatterton Williams: What the left keeps going wrong

Torres also pointed to the cumulative toll taken by progressives who for at least a decade have loudly defended cultural causes and chanted slogans that have turned off rank-and-file Democrats in many demographic groups. “Donald Trump had no bigger friend than the far left,” Torres told me, “which alienated historic numbers of Latinos, blacks, Asians and Jews with absurdities like ‘Defund the Police’ or ‘From the River to the Sea’ or ‘Latinx.’ ”

The result is the reality that Americans woke up to on Wednesday. The overwhelming majority of provinces in the country, even some of the bluest, had moved to the right. The Republicans had broken down the door of the Democrats’ house and were sitting in the living room drinking their beer (or wine, as the case may be). The day after the election, I clicked through a digital map of New Jersey election results. Biden won New Jersey, a Democratic Party bastion, in 2020 by nearly 16 percentage points over Trump; Harris won the state by a more parsimonious five points. Everywhere, Republicans narrowed Democratic margins. In the northeastern corner of the state, across from New York City, Biden carried prosperous Bergen County by 16 percentage points in 2020; Harris took the same county by three points. Far to the south, in Atlantic County, which includes the deteriorating casino capital of Atlantic City, Biden had won by seven points; Trump took it by four points.

Torres emphasized that, in his opinion, Harris ran a strong and effective campaign, given the circumstances. He did not notice many missteps. Although she was sometimes vague when asked about past positions, she was disciplined and avoided uttering the buzzwords of the cultural left during her 2024 campaign. But she couldn’t sidestep her previous concessions to liberal cultural fevers, as she discovered when the Trump campaign bashed her with endless commercials highlighting her decision, during her bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, to stand up for state-funded gender transition surgery for prisoners. .

In recent election cycles, Democrats have pinned much hope that “people of color” — the highly varied and disparate peoples long thought to be a monolith — would embrace an expansive list of progressive causes and reshape American politics.

Politics, unfortunately, is more complex than simply organizing virtuous ethnic and racial voting blocs, and Trump’s gains this year among non-white voters are part of a longer trend. Four years ago, even as Biden was victorious, a majority of Asian and Latino voters in California rejected a ballot proposal that would have restored affirmative action in education and hiring.

For some anti-Trump and progressive commentators, the leakage of Latino, Black and Asian voters from the Democratic column this year was a shock, even a betrayal. This week, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough and his guest, the Rev. Al Sharpton, both angry about Trump’s triumph, suggested that Harris’s race and gender were working against her. “Many Hispanic voters have problems with black candidates,” Scarborough argued; Black men, Sharpton said, are among “the most sexist” people.

To accept such stereotypes, piles of counterevidence must be ignored. In 2008 and again in 2012, to take one example, Hispanic voters throughout Texas’ Rio Grande Valley delivered huge electoral margins for President Barack Obama, who is black. Many millions of black men, nearly 80 percent of those who voted, exit polls show, voted for Harris last Tuesday.

Black and Latino voters aren’t the only demographic groups blamed for Trump’s victory. Some commentators have pointed the finger at white women, suggesting that they bear group guilt for selling out women’s rights. This actually fails. Nearly half of white women voted for Harris. But more to the point, telling people how to think and not to think is toxic in politics. Yet many liberal commentators seem unable to help themselves.

A week before the election, Marcel Roman, a Harvard government professor, explained on X that he and a Georgetown colleague had discovered that Latino voters strongly dislike being considered Latinxa gender-neutral term now widespread in academia. This term was also used by Democratic politicians eager to build a bona fide relationship with progressive activists. Unfortunately, voters didn’t like it that much.

Josh Barro: The Democrats deserved to lose

This problem seems easy to solve: refer to voters by the term they prefer:Latinosay, or Spanish. Roman drew a different conclusion, calling for “political education designed to eradicate queerphobia in Latino communities.”

Professors might heed the words of Rep. Ruben Gallego, a Latino Democrat currently embroiled in a tight race for a Senate seat in Arizona. Four years ago I spoke to him about identity politics in his party. Gallego, a progressive man, is a favorite of Latino activists, who come from California to work on his campaigns. He told me he appreciated their help but warned them if they used the word Latinx When he spoke to his Latino constituents, he loaded them onto the next bus back to Los Angeles.

“It’s just important that white liberals don’t impose their thoughts and policies on us,” he told me.

And non-white liberals too, he might have added.

After losing to Trump twice in three election cycles, and this time watching Republicans regain control of the Senate, Democrats would do well to listen carefully and respectfully to the tens of millions of Americans they claim to want represent. This need not necessarily entail a distaste for populist economics, but rather a clear-eyed view of self-serving rhetoric and millennial demands.

The party could pay some attention to Torres, the Bronx representative. He is a veteran of political wars, is a progressive Democrat on economic issues, and has recently drawn a lot of grief from left-wing activists for his strong support of Israel. He noted in our conversation that he is a strong supporter of immigration, and that his predominantly Latino district has many hardworking undocumented residents who need his help.

But he acknowledges that the national electorate, not least many Latino and Black voters, are now trying to at least partially close the door and tighten restrictions. He accepts that reality. “You have to recognize that in a democracy, public opinion matters,” he said. “We cannot simply assume that we can reshape the world in a utopian way.”

In an election year that was hardly utopian for Democrats, such advice is seen as entirely practical.