FTA:

"If the Democratic brand was fundamentally broken and needed to be thrown out, this election would have been a complete blowout. And it was not. It was way too close," Yasmin Radjy, the executive director of Swing Left, a Democratic organizing group, told me. Another Democrat, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly, put it this way: "We lost an election. We didn't lose the country."

In some areas, the election looked like a red wave; compared with four years ago, the presidential vote swung to the right by about 10 points in some of the most populous blue states, such as New York, California, and New Jersey. But down-ballot races offer a solid case for Democratic optimism. The party label appeared to be far less of an albatross for Democratic congressional candidates than it was in strong Republican years such as 2010 and 2014. In the Senate this year, although Republicans flipped four seats, Democratic candidates prevailed in four battleground states that Kamala Harris lost to Trump. And according to the Cook Political Report's David Wasserman, Democrats could have retaken the House majority with only 7,309 more votes across three congressional districts.

The country is till pretty evenly divided, which is why I think if Republicans tried to go full steam ahead on Project 2025, they will be making a very big mistake:

By the way, did you know that Trump won the crucial blue wall states--Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin --by 231,000 votes? So if just 116,000 voters across those three swing states " or 0.7% of the total " had switched from Trump to Harris, it is the vice-president who would have won the electoral college ... and the presidency!

. . .In 2024, Republicans flipped the Senate and held onto the House but Trump still ended up having "limited coattails", to quote from the New York Times analysis. Of the five battleground states (Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania) which held Senate races in November, the Republican candidate triumphed in only one of them (David McCormick in Pennsylvania, by a narrow 16,000 votes). Democrats held on to the other four.

#3 The second sentence of the Atlantic article I linked to, but cut out in the intro for the sake of brevity, reads:

"Compared with incumbent governments elsewhere in the world, Democrats' losses were modest."

TY for highlighting that fact and in greater detail.

When Republicans lose, they claim they won. When Republicans win by a little, they say they won by a lot. When Democrats lose by a little, they act like they got massacred. I'm not saying Democrats don't have work to do with the working class, but my prediction is that if Republicans misread the 2024 election results and overplay their hand, they will go a long way in helping Democrats win back that segment of the populaiton.