MADISON, Wis. — A depressed and demoralized Democratic Party is beginning the painful slog into a largely powerless future, as its leaders grapple with how deeply they underestimated Donald Trump’s resurgent hold on the nation.
The nationwide repudiation of the party stunned many Democrats who had expressed a “nauseous” confidence about their chances in the final weeks of the race. As they sifted through the wreckage of their defeats, they found no easy answers as to why voters so decisively rejected their candidates.
In more than two dozen interviews, lawmakers, strategists and officials offered a litany of explanations for Vice President Kamala Harris’ failure — and just about all of them fit neatly into their preconceived notions of how to win in politics.
The quiet criticism, on phone calls, in group chats and during morose team meetings, was a behind-the-scenes preview of the intraparty battle to come, with Democrats quickly falling into the ideological rifts that have defined their party for much of the Trump era.
What was indisputable was how badly Democrats did. They lost the White House, surrendered control of the Senate and appeared headed to defeat in the House. They performed worse than four years ago in cities and suburbs, rural towns and college towns. An early New York Times analysis of the results found the vast majority of the nation’s more than 3,100 counties swinging rightward since President Joe Biden won in 2020.
The results showed that the Harris campaign, and Democrats more broadly, had failed to find an effective message against Trump and his downballot allies or to address voters’ unhappiness about the direction of the nation under Biden. The issues the party chose to emphasize — abortion rights and the protection of democracy — did not resonate as much as the economy and immigration, which Americans often highlighted as among their most pressing concerns.
Many Democrats were considering how to navigate a dark future, with the party unable to stop Trump from carrying out a right-wing transformation of U.S. government. Others turned inward, searching for why the nation rejected them.
They spoke about misinformation and the struggle to communicate the party’s vision in a diminished news environment inundated with right-wing propaganda. They conceded that Harris had paid a price for not breaking from Biden’s support of Israel in the war in the Gaza Strip, which angered Arab American voters in Michigan. Some felt their party had moved too far to the left on social issues like transgender rights. Others argued that as Democrats had shifted rightward on economic issues, they had left behind the interests of the working class.
They lamented a Democratic Party brand that has become toxic in many parts of the country. Several noted that the independent Senate candidate in Nebraska ran 14 percentage points ahead of Harris in the state.
And many said they were struggling to process the scale of their loss, describing their feelings as a mix of shock, mourning and panic over what might come in a second Trump administration.
“I am pretty devastated and worried,” said Rep. Veronica Escobar of Texas, who served as a co-chair for the Harris campaign. “There’s real, imminent danger for people here. There is real danger here ahead for Americans — including many Americans who voted for Trump.”
Soul-searching over strategy and values
Not everyone was quite as mournful.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the longtime progressive standard-bearer, blamed what he called a partywide emphasis on identity politics at the expense of focusing on the economic concerns of working-class voters.
“It’s not just Kamala,” he said. “It’s a Democratic Party which increasingly has become a party of identity politics, rather than understanding that the vast majority of people in this country are working class. This trend of workers leaving the Democratic Party started with whites, and it has accelerated to Latinos and Blacks.”
Sanders, who has long criticized the influence of the party’s biggest donors and veteran operatives, offered a pessimistic forecast: “Whether or not the Democratic Party has the capability, given who funds it and its dependency on well-paid consultants, whether it has the capability of transforming itself, remains to be seen.”
‘The dynamics of this race were baked in’
And then there was the blame for Biden.
Even before he announced his run for reelection, Democrats were whispering that the president, now 81, was too old to seek reelection, and polls confirmed that voters had serious reservations.
Democrats who were worried at the time now say Harris never really had a chance.
“The dynamics of this race were baked in before Kamala Harris became a candidate,” said Julián Castro, the former housing secretary who also ran for president in 2020. “She was dealt a bad hand. She was trying to get elected in the shadow of a president who was unpopular and who the public had overwhelmingly been saying should not run for reelection and took too long to step aside.”
Even David Plouffe, a veteran Democratic strategist whom Harris brought into her operation after Biden dropped out, seemed to suggest that the president had put her in a difficult position.
“We dug out of a deep hole but not enough,” Plouffe wrote on the social platform X.
For her part, Harris delivered a concession speech that urged supporters to remain vigilant about the present and optimistic about the future, and to keep fighting for their values. She did not point fingers or cast blame.
“I am so proud of the race we ran and the way we ran it,” she said. “Hear me when I say, the light of America’s promise will always burn bright. As long as we never give up. And as long as we keep fighting.”
On Thursday, Biden addressed the nation from the Rose Garden, urging his supporters to remain optimistic and tenacious.
“Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable,” he said. “We all get knocked down, but the measure of our character, as my dad would say, is how quickly we get back up.”
As they reflected on the fallout, Democratic officials compared notes about where this Election Day ranked on their list of horrible experiences.
Matt Bennett, the executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, a centrist think tank, said the party had not faced a crisis as severe since the 1980s, when Democrats lost three straight presidential races in landslides.
To regain their grip on power, Democrats must embrace a more moderate approach, he argued. But that will not be easy, Bennett warned, since the party is facing a leadership vacuum with Biden weakened and Harris defeated.
“The one way to beat a right-wing populist is through the center,” Bennett said. “You must become the party that is more pragmatic, reasonable and more sane. That’s where we have to go.”
A leadership vacuum
Mini Timmaraju, the CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said Democrats must develop a long-term plan to directly confront the sexism — both within their party and the nation — that hampered Harris and Hillary Clinton, the only women to win a major party’s presidential nomination.
“We can’t keep brushing it under the rug,” she said. “The narrative cannot be, ‘Kamala Harris somehow failed.’ There’s a bigger failure here, and we have to figure it out and reckon with it.”
With Biden and Harris now political lame ducks, the Senate majority gone and without a likely House speaker in the party, Democrats in 2025 will find themselves short on clear leaders, as they did after Trump won in 2016.
The next decision party leaders face is whom to choose as the next leader of the Democratic National Committee, a post that was largely ceremonial with Biden in office but will include far more responsibilities and power without White House officials calling the shots.
Jaime Harrison, the party’s chair since Biden installed him in the post four years ago, has said for months that he will not seek another term. A new election is set to take place early next year.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2024 The New York Times Company