Are Talks of the Democratic Party’s Extinction Premature?

Democrats in disarray—right-wing media outlets in the United States have been publishing pieces along those lines since Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election. Ever since the left-leaning The New York Times put out their article about the Democrats’ stunning underperformance in party registration, these right-wing outlets and content creators have been even more emboldened to cover their opposition’s demise.

Some, such as a brief segment on the Fox News show The Five last week, even went as far as to talk about a possible extinction of the Democratic Party. On top of the party registration trends, what spells more trouble for the Dems is the looming 2030 census. Reliable blue states like California and New York are set to lose electoral votes, while reliable red states like Texas and the former swing state of Florida are set to gain electoral votes.

So, given all that, is the extinction of the Democratic Party a realistic scenario?

To cut to the chase: no, it’s not. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party have been competing with each other for the presidency since the 1856 election. In those 169 years, both parties have survived massive losing streaks, and both parties have also lived through failing to take second place behind the other once each. In 1872 the Democrats did not nominate a candidate and instead endorsed Liberal Republican Horace Greeley for President, as they thought he had a better chance of knocking off the incumbent Ulysses S Grant. In 1912 former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt decided to launch a third-party campaign with his new Progressive Party. He ended up splitting the GOP base, giving Democrat Woodrow Wilson the presidency, while poor President Taft finished third with just eight electoral votes, the worst showing for an incumbent President in US history.

As for losing streaks, the Democratic Party lost six presidential elections in a row between 1860 and 1880. This was the era after the Civil War, when the Democratic Party was primarily aligned with the Southern states’ interests. Since those states seceded and lost the consequent Civil War—along with the 15th amendment granting voting rights to black men—the Democrats’ electoral prospects were greatly damaged. However, in that time period, they still managed to win the popular vote in the 1876 election, when Republican Rutherford B Hayes was only elected under very peculiar circumstances. In the same election, the Democrats also won a majority in the House, so the party’s national influence did not disappear completely.

It took the emergence of the so-called ‘Bourbon Democrats’, breaking away from primarily representing Southern interests, to allow the party to compete on the national stage again. 1876 Democratic presidential candidate Samuel Tilden and President Grover Cleveland are the prime examples of a Bourbon Democrat. Both also served as the Governor of New York.

The Republican Party’s worst losing streak spanned five consecutive presidential elections between 1932 and 1948. The catalyst for it was the Great Depression, which started with the 1929 stock market crash under Republican President Herbert Hoover. In that time span, the GOP even got down to as few as 88 seats in the House of Representatives, and just 17 (!) seats in the Senate.

‘The Democratic Party lost six presidential elections in a row between 1860 and 1880...The Republicans’ worst losing streak spanned five consecutive presidential elections between 1932 and 1948’

More recently, the talk of the town in political circles in the US was the ‘demography is destiny’ theory, which projected the disappearance of the Republican Party. The idea was that as the Latino population grows in the country proportionate to the white population, it will be harder and harder for the GOP to compete on the national level since their voting base is mostly white. The Republicans also lost the popular vote in four consecutive presidential elections between 2008 and 2020—although, evidently, won the presidency with Donald Trump in 2016—which seemed to give credibility to that notion. However, with President Trump’s massive gains with Latinos in the 2024 election, and the Republicans’ stronghold on Florida, the theory is now suddenly out the window, and it is the Democrats who have to read articles about their potential demise.

This, again, just goes to show you that fortunes and trends can change in US politics.

It would be nearly impossible to launch a new party with the funding and the infrastructure to compete in all 50 states within the Union and replace either of the two major parties—even the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has reportedly given up on that endeavour. So, Republicans and Democrats are here to stay for the foreseeable future. You can count on that.

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