As Jeff notes, the new analysis by the New York Times indicates that the Democratic Party’s woes may well be understated, instead of overstated. The nut graph is this:

Democrats lost about 2.1 million registered voters between the 2020 and 2024 elections in the 30 states, along with Washington, D.C., that allow people to register with a political party. (In the remaining 20 states, voters do not register with a political party.) Republicans gained 2.4 million.

Now, in polling, you see debates about whether a sample’s proportion of Republicans, Democrats, and independents should line up with recent election results, and whether partisan identity is something that ironclad and rarely changes, or whether a certain chunk of the electorate is wishy-washy and self-identifies differently depending upon what’s going on in the news and other factors.

But changing your party registration with the state takes some effort; it’s deliberate. Few people fill out the form to formally change their registration on a whim; it reflects some fundamental, and likely lasting change (at least for a while) in how a person sees the country and its leaders and what they want the government to do.

In the comments section of the Times, you can find quite a few readers convinced that the problem is that the Democratic Party has shifted too far to the right. But it makes absolutely no sense that former Democratic voters, deeming the modern party too centrist, would then register as Republicans. (You could make an argument that on a variety of issues including trade, labor unions, gay marriage, and maybe even abortion, that the populist Trump-era Republican Party is shifting to the left, blurring the distinctions on some issues.)

The article’s comments section also includes some complaints that by writing about this development, the Times is helping Trump. Here we see this reflexive instinct that some political news is just too dangerous to be discussed openly and must only be addressed behind closed doors. (Recall the insistence of Kamala Harris’ campaign team after the election that their internal polls never showed her ahead of Trump.)

You can also find comments insisting that the article is outdated; surely since Election Day 2024 many people have jumped back to the Democratic Party. There is little to no evidence of this, but it surely makes Democratic-leaning Times readers feel better to believe it. (And there’s a decent chance that the handful of elections held this year are going to go pretty well for Democrats.)

New York Times readers, in their reactions, are inadvertently illustrating why the Democratic Party finds itself in such dire straits, less popular than a highly unorthodox, combative and polarizing president who generates new controversies every day. They insist that the Overton Window that defines the political mainstream can move endlessly to the left but can never shift back to the right. They believe that certain basic information, like how party registration is changing year by year, is too dangerous to be discussed openly, and that the Times is hurting “the cause” by writing about it. And you see flat-out denial of bad news, an insistence that no one in their right mind could see any positive developments in the current presidency.

As I wrote before the 2024 election, Democrats have almost no ability to “self-scout,” to evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses in a clear-eyed, brutally honest manner. In July 2024, shortly before President Biden withdrew from the race, 81 percent of Democrats approved of the job Biden was doing. Problems fester and worsen because few people in the party (other than Dean Phillips) are willing to say things like, “I don’t care if this hurts Joe Biden’s feelings, he’s too old to serve another four years as president.”

In the immediate aftermath of the election, Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid wrote, “It’s time for us to just be honest. This version of the Democratic Party is arrogant and patronizing, taking minority voters for granted and treating them like children. Well, maybe minority voters aren’t into that.”

The problem with telling Democrats, “you can’t make your party’s brand identity all about believing that you’re better, smarter, more enlightened and more compassionate than the majority of your fellow citizens” is A) that’s exactly what a lot of them want, B) that’s a huge part of their self-identity and C) they don’t see much point to being in a political party if it doesn’t reaffirm their sense that they are superior to most of their fellow citizens.