Former Obama aides Dan Pfeiffer and Jon Favreau expressed concern during a Friday podcast that population shifts from blue to red states could weaken Democrats’ prospects in future presidential elections.
Texas and Florida are projected to gain four congressional seats by 2030, while California is projected to lose four and New York two, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Pfeiffer, on their “Pod Save America” podcast, urged Democrats to do “massive work” to rebuild their coalition and adapt to changing political realities.
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“What I worry about in some of the responses to date is that we … remain unwilling to truly reckon with this election. We can tell ourselves a story that the election was closer than the voters would — sort of, the narrative, and that is true in one sense,” Pfeiffer said. “But it’s also true, and more importantly, that we have bled massively with the most core parts of our coalition — Latino voters, black voters, young people — and that is an ongoing trend. If you take a look at the Latino numbers, it’s massive over the last four years.”
President Donald Trump’s November victory over Vice President Kamala Harris was fueled partly by his improved support from Hispanic and black men as well as young people.
“And it just feels like the same people are doing the same things they were doing six months ago, as opposed to really, really rethinking how we communicate, how we speak. Not our message … What are the words that come out of our mouth? How do we sound different?” Pfeiffer continued. “What are we going to do that’s different than before? And I see that a little bit in the way the DNC race is playing out is that we want the easy way out. What we want to do is kind of get lucky. And that, we’re going to survive this period and then Trump’s going to be unpopular. It’s kind of an election, maybe we can win it, kind of like we won 2020.”
Trump’s approval rating is presently 47%, which is 6% higher than his disapproval rating, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found on Tuesday.
“But that doesn’t solve our bigger problem. I don’t even want to depress people, but take a look at what the 2032 electoral map’s going to look like. And once you do that, you’re going to realize that we have massive work to do to reconfigure our coalition,” Pfeiffer added. “And we have to be willing to ask really hard questions and I’m not convinced that enough people in the party are willing to ask those questions right now.”
“When you say the 2032 electoral map, you mean that some of the blue states could lose electoral votes because of the new census by then because blue states are losing people to red states,” Favreau responded.
California lost approximately 500,000 people between April 2020 and July 2022, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. New York experienced a net population loss of 101,984 people between July 2022 and July 2023, according to the bureau.
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