America’s Democratic Party and the Future of American Democracy

In the wake of the 2024 election, the Democratic Party – the largest center-left party in the West – is in crisis. Jacob S. Hacker draws on new research into voters, party-aligned interest groups, and policymaking at all levels of government to examine the party’s shifting priorities. How have these changes shaped its appeal to working-class voters? How have its geographic and demographic voting bases changed? Finally, what must the party do now to mobilize its own fractious coalition to respond to its radicalizing right-wing rival – an increasingly authoritarian-minded Republican Party?

Jacob S. Hacker is Stanley Resor Professor of Political Science, co-director of the Ludwig Program in Public Sector Leadership at Yale Law School, and director of the American Political Economy eXchange (APEX) at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He is also a founding director of the Consortium on American Political Economy (CAPE) An expert on American politics and policy, he is the author or co-author of more than a half-dozen books, numerous journal articles, and a wide range of popular writings. His latest book, written with Paul Pierson, is Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality (2020). A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he received the Robert Ball Award of the National Academy of Social Science in 2020 and was inducted into the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2021. Through fall 2025, he is a Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.

Jacob S. Hacker, Paul Pierson. 2025. “From Leader to Laggard? American Democratic Capitalism in the Knowledge Economy: Race, Capitalism, and Democracy in Our Time.” In: Sidney M. Milkis and Scott C. Miller (eds.), Can Democracy and Capitalism be Reconciled? Oxford University Press.

Jacob S. Hacker, Amelia Malpas, Paul Pierson, Sam Zacher. 2024. “Bridging the Blue Divide: The Democrats’ New Metro Coalition and the Unexpected Prominence of Redistribution.” Perspectives on Politics 22 (3), 609–629. DOI 10.1017/S1537592723002931.