Millions of Democrats Have Left the Party

This important article by Shane Goldmacher, with Jonah Smith, appeared in the New York Times on August 20, 2025. It provides more evidence — as if the 2024 election results weren’t enough already — for why we need a radical, bottom-up takeover of the Democratic Party.

Goldmacher reports that:

“fewer and fewer Americans are choosing to be Democrats.

“In fact, for the first time since 2018, more new voters nationwide chose to be Republicans than Democrats last year.

“All told, 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.

Ouch!

(When they make a movie about the Democratic Party thirty years from now, they’ll have to call it “Blunder after Blunder.”)

But actually it’s high time to stop griping about the Democrats and all their blunders. After all, we are the Democrats, and we can do something to change it.

Should we look to the some of the rising stars of the Party to lead us out of this wilderness? Mamdani? AOC? Chris Murphy? Ellisa Slotkin?

No. All of these are great, but politicians and candidates alone are not the answer. They inevitably have a top-down view of things because they stand at the top of the Democratic party hierarchy.

We have to turn also to the on-the-ground, rank-and-file Democrats who are working all over the country in their local county and town Democratic Party committees.

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