Win or Lose, The New York Times Tells Democrats to Move Right Every Time

On November 6, 2024, the morning after Donald Trump won a second term, the New York Times editorial board had some advice for the party that lost. “For the Democratic Party, rear-guard action as the political opposition will not be enough,” the board wrote. “The party must also take a hard look at why it lost the election. It took too long to recognize that President Biden was not capable of running for a second term. It took too long to recognize that large swaths of Democrats’ progressive agenda were alienating voters, including some of the most loyal supporters of their party.”

Fine. That’s what happens when you lose.

---

---

On November 3 of this year, Democrats won full control of Congress, flipping seven Senate seats, including ones in Texas, Kansas, Iowa and South Carolina. Six days later, the board had some advice for the party that won. “The candidates’ success offers a road map to a sensible future for the party,” it wrote. “How did they do it? The simplest summary is that they ran as economic populists and cultural moderates.”

Pundits and partisans always say the results proved them right (I wrote about that on Election Day), and the Times opinion section has a version of its own: after elections, especially in recent years, it tells Democrats to drop their culture fights. Republicans don’t tend to get told they need to moderate. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t imagining it, so I went back and counted.

I took the opinion pieces the Times published in the 11 days starting on each Election Day since 2010, nine elections in all, and looked for ones that told either party to back off a culture-war position (on trans rights, immigration, policing, “wokeness” and the like) or said that backing off was the lesson of the result.

A sampling of NYT opinion headlines since the election.

Since 2016, I found 24 pieces telling Democrats to back off and four telling Republicans to. Democrats got nine after they lost in 2024 and seven after they won this month. (The other eight: two in 2016, two in 2020 and four in 2022. There were none in 2018, though Bret Stephens’s column from that week, which I’ve written about before, comes close; it mostly told Democrats to become “a shrewder, humbler opposition party.”) Republicans got none after either of Trump’s wins and none after their losses in 2018 and 2020. Their four came after the 2022 midterms, when they won the House but not the Senate, and after this month’s wipeout.

After Republicans won the Senate in 2014, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz asked in a Times op-ed what “Republicans at all levels” could do with their win. Part of his answer: “Aside from a small activist constituency, Americans are not looking for another fight over same-sex marriage or abortion. This isn’t to say that voters want their leaders to co-opt their convictions.” Across the four elections Republicans clearly won (2010, 2014, 2016 and 2024), that’s the only piece I found telling them to back off a culture fight.

Democrats won this time, and the advice didn’t change

After Trump beat Kamala Harris in 2024, Bret Stephens wrote in a November 6 column headlined “A Party of Prigs and Pontificators Suffers a Humiliating Defeat”: “The Democratic Party at its best stands for fairness and freedom. But the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity. It also, increasingly, stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms on hundreds of millions of Americans who want to live and let live but don’t like being told how to speak or what to think.” Maureen Dowd’s column three days later began, “Some Democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke.” And Pamela Paul, writing about trans issues (as she always did during her time at the Times), said Democrats should “ensure that everyone, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation, is respected and protected under existing law,” and then: “Rather than double down on beliefs and policies that are out of step with the best medical evidence, Democrats and everyone else who support transgender rights should embrace a common-sense approach from their government, their schools, their mental health care workers and their doctors.”¹

The board’s November 9 editorial credits this year’s winners with an economic populism that included taxes on the wealthy and higher minimum wages. On culture, it wrote that “this year’s candidates frequently denounced ideas — on immigration, energy, policing, gender and voter ID requirements — that have taken hold in elite left-leaning circles and alienated many working-class Americans of all races.” Then it went issue by issue. Here’s the part about gender:

We are dismayed that some Democrats used harsh and inaccurate language, such as describing trans girls as boys. Still, much of the repositioning on gender is justified. People born with male biology are taller, faster and stronger, on average, and most Americans believe that the differences create an unfair advantage in girls’ sports. Too many progressives equate this recognition with bigotry.²

The editorial ties this year back to 2024 on its own, saying that two years ago “many Democrats were in denial about why they lost.” Other pieces this month made the same case. Chuck Rocha argued for “running politically moderate and somewhat culturally conservative candidates in heavily Latino districts that are rural or exurban.” And nine days after the election, the Times put a podcast episode under the headline “Democrats Have Power Now. They Shouldn’t Waste It on Woke.“ Its guest, Catherine Liu, is someone the Times itself describes as “a left-wing cultural critic,” there to explain “why Democratic elites are still invested in culture wars.”

To be fair, the section ran the other argument, too. M. Gessen wrote that Democrats make a mistake “when they agree with Republicans that ‘wokeness,’ of all things, is an urgent problem America needs to address,” and David Wallace-Wells argued that “under conditions like these, you can only win big liberal majorities if the country itself, as a whole, is left of center.” But the editorial board, the closest thing the section has to an institutional voice, wasn’t the one making it.

And then there’s Nicholas Kristof. Here he is on November 9, 2024, explaining the loss: “Wokeness may seem a little thing, but it offended people viscerally and was taken as an emblem of a party run amok.” (What is “wokeness?” Who’s to say, really?)

Here he is on election night this year, explaining Sherrod Brown’s win in Ohio: “While he is reliably liberal on social issues, Brown’s focus has always been on economic concerns. He kept the faith with private sector labor unions and mostly avoided the woke language that alienated so many working-class Americans.” In other words, the Times believes that Brown won in spite of his record of being “reliably liberal on social issues.”

Republicans get told to drop Trump, but not much gets said about his policies

Most of the board’s November 6, 2024, editorial is about Trump and what he might do to democracy, and none of it is gentle. “At this point, there can be no illusions about who Donald Trump is and how he intends to govern,” it said. “He showed us in his first term and in the years after he left office that he has no respect for the law, let alone the values, norms and traditions of democracy.” All true! As for Republicans, it noted that “Congress has the power — and for some ambitious Republicans, perhaps the political incentive — to set a course away from Mr. Trump’s antidemocratic agenda, if it chooses to pursue it.”