2024 Broke the Democrats. Can They Put Themselves Back Together?

Reveal

The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

News

4.7 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For the first time in two decades, the Democratic Party has found itself without a clear party leader or even an obvious frontrunner. Angry and adrift, politicians and voters are clashing over how to fight back.

They’re also grappling with an uncomfortable new reality: The places that shifted hardest away from Democrats last fall were the kinds of communities that formed the backbone of the Democratic coalition for years—working-class, nonwhite, and heavily immigrant areas of blue cities and states.

Now the battle for the party’s future and reckoning over its recent past is coming to a head in New York City, where support for Democrats has cratered among Latino and Asian voters. In one of the first big tests of the party’s direction after Donald Trump’s reelection, Democrats will choose between radically different options for mayor: a centrist former governor in his 60s who resigned in disgrace and a millennial democratic socialist whose rise in the polls has shocked the political establishment.

This week on Reveal, we head to New York to talk to voters who abandoned Democrats in November and take you inside the bitter fight to win them back.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal.
0:04.6	I'm Al Ledza.
0:08.2	It's spring in Tempe, Arizona.
0:11.3	Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC, is walking onto a stage in a hockey arena at Arizona State University.
0:20.2	The arena seats 5,000 people, and tonight, it's packed.
0:24.7	And I want you all to know there's another couple thousand people outside in overflow as well.
0:32.4	It's AOC's first day on the Fighting Oligarchy Tour,
0:36.3	a series of rallies organized by Vermont Senator Bernie
0:39.3	Sanders.
0:40.3	We have a message for Mr. Trump.
0:44.3	We will not allow you to move this country into an oligarchy.
0:52.0	The tour aims to put pressure on Republican members of Congress by rallying opponents in their backyards.
0:58.0	The next stop will draw even bigger crowds, 20,000 in Salt Lake City, 34,000 in Denver, and more than 12,000 in deep red Nampa, Idaho.
1:09.0	And they're not even running for anything.
1:11.6	Are you all ready to take our country back?
1:14.6	We're gonna throw these bums out and fight for the nation we deserve.
1:20.6	At this point, President Donald Trump has been in office for a couple months, and a sense of urgency is growing among Democrats.
1:29.5	And let me tell you something.
1:32.7	This isn't just about Republicans either.
1:36.3	We need a Democratic Party that fights harder for us, too.
1:43.1	The 2024 election has triggered an identity crisis for the Democratic Party.
1:49.0	Trump's polls are down, but the Democratic Party's numbers are through the floor.
	...

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