If the Democrats Had Won

THE COUNTERFACTUAL SERIES, PART I: An alternative history of an America that never was — and why it would have been better, richer, calmer, and differently flawed

@Worthknowingwithmattrobison and @Danperry (Ask Questions Later) are teaming up to look at a question at the intersection of our expertise: what would things look like today if Kamala Harris had won in 2024, and what can we learn from that alternate-realty comparison? Matt is a longtime senior congressional staffer and campaign manager with expertise in domestic politics and government. Dan is a longtime editor for the Associated Press who oversaw coverage of the Europe, Africa, Middle East and Caribbean regions.

Counterfactuals have always fascinated us. Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Robert Harris’s Fatherland imagine worlds in which Nazi Germany won the Second World War. Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America envisions Charles Lindbergh defeating Franklin Roosevelt and steering the U.S. toward authoritarianism. For All Mankind (and its even sharper successor, Star City) begins with the Soviet Union reaching the Moon first, while Watchmen imagines America winning Vietnam and Richard Nixon remaining president indefinitely.

By changing the hinge of history, these stories reveal how much of the world that we take for granted was never inevitable. The dark mirror is revealing.

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So, here’s a counterfactual: what if the Democratic Party had remained in power after 2024? What if “Harris is For They/Them; Trump is For You?” hadn’t worked?

We can’t know for sure. But we can be reasonably confident about several critical inflection points, and we can make some very educated guesses about what the consequences would be on the alternative path — one where we had a US government that still believed in NATO, science, law, international institutions and predictable governance, but with some of the pitfalls of a government in Democratic hands that remained hesitant to confront its own ideological excesses and vulnerabilities on immigration, identity politics, and meritocracy.

What does the alternate history mirror tell us? For one thing, world events would look very different.

Around the World: Closer Allies, Clearer Enemies

We see five major inflection points where the broader world — and our place in it — would be strikingly different.

Allies Are Actual Allies: The most obvious inflection point is how a Harris administration would have treated European allies. The astonishing Trump assault on NATO simply would never have occurred. President Harris would have complained privately that Germany was free-riding, that southern Europe was underspending, and that Europe needed to shoulder more of the burden. But those conversations would have taken place behind closed doors, among allies, rather than through public humiliation and threats. The American president definitely would not have suggested taking Greenland by force. No one would have casually questioned whether the United States should honor Article Five. No European government would spend every morning wondering whether the White House might accidentally destroy the Western alliance before lunch.

The clear result: a US that was more deeply respected and in a better strategic position against our adversaries, as opposed to one that is less popular than China in most European countries.

Adversaries Weaker: The US would be supporting Ukraine over the Russian aggressor, and per the above, would be more or less in lockstep with Europe on it. Ukraine would still have innovated in drone warfare (the government established the dedicated Unmanned Systems Forces of Ukraine as a separate military branch in 2024) but would also have had greater conventional weapons strength to improve their position. A negotiated end to the war would have been far more likely from this position of greater strength.

Middle East: A complicated place would present a complicated picture. Democrats almost certainly would have forced Israel to end the Gaza war far sooner than in the fall of 2024, two years in. Pressure would have begun months earlier and been sustained relentlessly through military aid, diplomatic leverage and increasing public criticism. More hostages would have returned alive. Washington would have tried to transform a ceasefire into a broader regional settlement involving Saudi normalization, Palestinian governance reform and reconstruction. That effort might well have failed; Middle Eastern diplomacy usually does. Relations with Israel would have been tense, perhaps bitter. But the war almost certainly would not have continued for so long, nor would the humanitarian catastrophe have reached its eventual scale. And consequently, the biggest self-induced threat to the existence of Israel — the deep rift between Americans (not just progressives) and Israel — would be far smaller.

Iran presents the most difficult counterfactual. There would almost certainly have been no military strikes. Instead, Washington would have returned to negotiations, sanctions, intelligence gathering and patient diplomacy. President Harris might have tried to reinvigorate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Critics would rightly complain that Tehran was simply buying time while advancing its nuclear capabilities. Yet one crucial difference would remain. One of the greatest casualties of the Trump era has been trust. Obviously. So, if a Democratic president eventually concluded that military action had become unavoidable, Americans would almost certainly believe that the intelligence presented to justify it reflected genuine professional assessments rather than political manipulation.

No Western Shadow War: In the Western Hemisphere, there would have been no saber-rattling toward Cuba, no invasion of Venezuela. Democratic administrations have generally viewed Latin America less as a theater for confrontation than as a source of persistent frustration requiring endless diplomacy. Critics would call that weakness. Supporters would call it prudence. Either way, the language of invasion would simply not exist. 221 people killed in Trump administration boat bombings (with little evidence of wrongdoing and no judicial process) would be alive.

Lives Restored: International institutions and arms of US “soft power” and global outreach would remain remarkably ordinary. The United States would still participate in the World Health Organization, but more important, USAID would still exist as America’s principal instrument of humanitarian influence. As a result (based on estimates from the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy) 762,000 people, including half a million children, would now be alive.

Inside America: Lower Prices, Less Corruption, No Paramilitary Squads

Domestically, we see five key inflection points as well.

No “Liberation Day.” The clearest difference is that there would be no tariff war. We include this on the domestic side because, as every thinking person has been at pains to explain to Trump, tariffs are a tax on Americans, not other countries. The Trump disruptions to manufacturing supply chains, inflationary pressures, retaliatory tariffs, uncertainty for exporters, and chronic instability in sectors from automobiles to lumber simply would not have occurred. The American economy would be far stronger: inflation would be between 0.4% and 0.8% lower, households would have had $1,000 more in the bank, 367,000 people would have kept their jobs, and our GDP would be almost half a point higher. Businesses would still complain about regulation, but they would not have to wonder what tariff schedule awaited them after the president’s next social-media post.

No DOGE Destruction: There would have been no assault on federal employees and agencies. To be sure, government inefficiency would remain immense, frustrating and expensive; but since the real world DOGE saved the federal government the equivalent of a cup of coffee for every American, and since DOGE fomented chaos, instigated mass firings and re-hirings (as Elon Musk discovered that federal employees actually provide critical services to Americans), and sowed confusion, the alt-American government led by President Harris would be been more efficient and effective.

An Incalculably Stronger Long-term Economy. If you asked Americans what’s the most effective thing the federal government does, almost everyone would get it wrong. The answer is: investing in basic scientific research (if you have any doubts, read Robison’s piece in Newsweek), which creates more economic growth, prosperity, and well-being for Americans than anything that any government has ever done on Planet Earth. Simply by not taking a wrecking ball to American science — which in the real world had amounted to billions of dollars erased, more than 7,800 research grants killed, and 25,000 scientists and oversight personnel fired at the start of 2026 — the future alt-America would be virtually certain to be richer. Also healthier, especially because Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would still be relegated to the dark corners of the Internet while hundreds of thousands more Americans would have fewer diseases through better vaccination.

No Paramilitary Squads: We can’t know what a President Harris deportation and immigration enforcement record would look like: more like Biden’s lax approach of 2022, or his stringent approach of 2024? Given that President Biden actually had more deportations in 2024 than Trump did in 2025 (President Obama had way more during his second term), it is conceivable that the border results would be not that different than in the real world. But one thing is certain: there would be no ill-trained, heavily armed, lawless paramilitary running around America shooting people with impunity. No renditions to foreign gulags. No snatches by masked men into unmarked vans.

No Extreme Corruption: It’s hard to draw a distinction between the type of corruption that involves subverting the law and the type that involves self-dealing and personal enrichment – so we won’t. We’ll simply say that in a Harris administration, we would have seen almost none of what we’ve seen in the real world: not the hundreds of formal rebukes and legal blocks against the Trump administration’s policies and illegal actions during his second term, including 77 direct rulings featuring severe judicial criticism, over 4,400 orders finding specific immigrant detentions unlawful, and at least 31 instances of defying active court orders; not the $2 billion in personal cryptocurrency-related Trump enrichment, international real estate and name-licensing agreements overseas, Qatari jet baksheesh, no-bid contracts for the White House ballroom and reflecting pool and other projects to allies, or IRS tax audit shield.

The Alt-History Pitfalls

Taken together, this imagined America would feel recognizably normal, and in many ways far better. But if Democrats had prevailed, there would be problems and pitfalls on their ledger as well.

• Washington would still have urged European allies to spend more on defense, as every American administration has done for decades, and probably with the same fruitless results. Hence, NATO capabilities would likely be lower. The Europeans might one day thank Trump for his brutal and vulgar pressure, which went too far but had some positive results.

• Venezuelans would today likely be suffering more, still chafing under the criminal Nicolas Maduro.

• On immigration, the Democratic party’s greatest internal contradiction would remain unresolved. Traditional Democrats would have understood perfectly well that countries require secure borders. Yet, they would have had no impetus to confront the activist left, which continues to interpret almost any meaningful enforcement as a moral failure and sign of institutional racism. It is therefore entirely plausible that illegal migration would have remained substantially higher than most Americans were prepared to accept. Granted, in the real world, the schism on this issue is also real, and the momentum to “Defund ICE” has grown. So it’s not clear that matters would have been definitively worse.

• Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs would probably have remained more prominent in universities, corporations and public, though they were on the wane even before Trump returned to office. Democrats have consistently underestimated how alienating many Americans find the pretense that merit is a racist construct. Som while Trump has engaged in a performative DEI witch hunt, he may have inadvertently done Democrats a favor by forcing institutions back from their own overreach in a way that they never could have through internal reckoning.

• Instead of an executive branch repeatedly testing the limits of presidential power against judges, the principal constitutional confrontation would pit a Democratic administration against an aggressively conservative Supreme Court. Court expansion, once a fringe proposal, would increasingly enter the political mainstream as frustration mounted over decisions touching abortion, environmental regulation, and voting rights. Whether justified or not, an attempt to expand the Court would have taken the country down another institutional rabbit hole, deepening polarization and triggering a constitutional struggle with unpredictable consequences.

• Most of all, the Democrats of the alternative world would have had no more drive than here in the real world to examine the deep sense of frustration and dislocation, the deep desire for disruptive change, that led to Trump’s return in the first place. Ever since Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders jointly revealed the extent of it in 2016, the Democratic Party has yet to fully reckon with how to capture it.

The ultimate question for voters then becomes a multiverse version of Reagan’s: would you be better off in that world? We think we know the answer, but it is not clear whether most Americans will see it (and remember it in the coming years).

And the ultimate question for Democrats becomes, can you see what is reflected in this dark mirror and learn from it? Can you reconcile the Democratic Party’s respect for institutions, alliances, expertise and the rule of law with a willingness to confront your own blind spots?