Shell-Shocked Democrats Stumbling For Answers After Loss To Donald Trump

Democrats are in disarray days after former President Donald Trump soundly defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, a romp that could result in Republicans controlling not just the White House but also both chambers of Congress.
Democratic lawmakers and party operatives offered an array of explanations for their stinging loss, ranging from ineffective party messaging, Harris’ campaign strategy, President Joe Biden’s initial decision to run for reelection, and his administration’s record on immigration and the economy.
Progressives said Harris spent too much time campaigning for moderate Republican votes and not enough time attacking corporate America.
Adam Green, director of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, faulted Harris for not driving attention to her proposal to crack down on grocery company price-gouging, such as by staging a campaign event at a corporate headquarters.
“Since ‘The Apprentice,’ Trump has cultivated a brand that connected with people on economic issues, and we weren’t able to fight fire with fire by having a gut-level message that everyday people heard,” Green told HuffPost. “Perhaps that could have been changed if there was a fiery campaign to take the fight to billionaire offices or corporate price-gouger headquarters.”
Conversely, Adam Jentleson, a former senior aide to Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), said progressive groups hamstrung Harris by making her commit to liberal positions that hurt her this year, such as a 2019 ACLU questionnaire in which Harris said she supported gender-affirming medical care for federal prisoners and abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
“Last time we went straight to protests and an explosion of left-wing groups that proceeded to force our candidates to take politically suicidal positions on a range of issues,” Jentleson told HuffPost of the last time Trump took office.
“It is the left-wing positions that killed Kamala,” he added. “And we need to restructure our extended party apparatus so that it pulls candidates in a winning direction and not a losing direction.”
Other Democrats suggested the Harris campaign failed to connect with voters the same way Trump did.
“People really gravitate towards authenticity. If they think you’re authentic, they trust that more. I think while Trump happens to be a better salesman; most of his campaign stops don’t feel staged. I don’t think the Harris campaign captured that,” Steve Fullop, the mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey, told HuffPost.
“Primaries are important,” he added. “The Democratic Party should embrace primaries, it sharpens the message and builds a party underneath. All of these things, Harris didn’t have. People blame Biden but there’s a lot of blame to be shared.”
Harris became the Democratic nominee soon after Biden withdrew from the race in July. The president’s endorsement of Harris cut off any possibility of an open primary process and gave her just 107 days to mount a new campaign in the general election.
Senior Harris campaign adviser David Plouffe, previously a top aide to former President Barack Obama, suggested the odds were too heavily stacked against the vice president in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “We dug out of a deep hole but not enough. A devastating loss,” Plouffe wrote. He deleted his account soon after what appeared to be a backlash from some who perceived it as a dig against Biden.
Blue-collar workers have moved steadily toward the Republican Party in successive elections since Barack Obama’s 2008 election. Latinos and young voters — two groups Democrats counted as reliable supporters in 2016 — moved toward Trump this year in a historic shift.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) minced no words in a scathing statement on Wednesday accusing Democrats of having abandoned the working class.
“First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well,” Sanders said. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”
But Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison on Thursday pushed back on those arguments, singling Sanders’ statement out as “straight up BS.” He said Biden was the most pro-worker president of his lifetime, noting he came to the aid of union pensions, oversaw substantial job creation “and even marched in a picket line,” something no president had done before.
Harrison pointed to Harris’ proposals for an expanded child tax credit and down-payment subsidies for first-time homebuyers.
“There are a lot of post election takes and this one ain’t a good one,” Harrison said.
Democrats will certainly have to grapple with the fact that much of the country swung right, including in the blue states of California and New York. In New Jersey, Harris won by just 5 points, a huge swing compared to Biden’s 16-point win in 2020.
“We underperformed because the party hasn’t done enough to grow its base of supporters,” Fullop, who is running for governor of New Jersey, told HuffPost. “You have [a] major disconnect between leadership and the base, which is looking for reform.”
Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, seemed to agree that the drop-off for Democrats was among the Democratic base relative to Trump’s in battleground areas of the country.
“It’s probably more appropriate to characterize this race as a Dem-base nosedive rather than as a Trump surge,” Murray wrote in an email. He added a caveat, though, that “there are clearly Trump gains among some groups — but not nearly enough to explain the entire final margin shift.”
Economic frustration was likely the largest single contributor to Trump’s victory. Voters have said all year that the economy is their top issue, and while economic data has been remarkably positive, there is one glaring exception: inflation.
Even though inflation has returned to levels last seen early in 2021, the prices themselves aren’t going down, because that’s generally not what happens outside of a recession. Consumer sentiment has remained well below levels seen during Trump’s presidency.
“The share of consumers telling us that high prices are eroding their personal finances, that did not come down at all over the last couple of years, in spite of the fact that consumers, when we ask them about inflation specifically, they’ve definitely noticed how much it has slowed down during this period,” Joanne Hsu, director of the University of Michigan’s influential consumer sentiment index, told HuffPost this week.
Voters dissatisfied with the economy overwhelmingly told exit pollsters this week they voted for Trump.
Trump’s victory prompted an I-told-you-so moment for Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.), who thwarted Democrats’ plans for a “Build Back Better” spending bill in 2021 and ultimately left the party after a series of disagreements with Senate Democrats.
“When I first [warned] about inflation, they all said I was crazy. ‘No, it’s transitory,’” Manchin told Punchbowl News. Manchin retired rather than run for reelection; his seat will be occupied by Republican Jim Justice next year.
“It’s probably more appropriate to characterize this race as a Dem-base nosedive rather than as a Trump surge.”
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire Democratic donor, pinned the blame on the party writ large for shielding the 81-year-old incumbent president from scrutiny regarding his age and resisting an open primary process after he withdrew from the race in July.
“It probably wasn’t great to cover up President Joe Biden’s infirmities until they became undeniable on live TV,” Bloomberg wrote in an op-ed on Thursday. “It wasn’t ideal that party elders replaced him with Harris, a nominee who had received no electoral votes and had failed decisively in a previous presidential run.”
Harris did underperform compared to Democratic Senate candidates in several key battleground states. Though Trump won their states’ electoral votes, Sen. Tammy Baldwin eked out a win in Wisconsin, Rep. Elissa Slotkin won in Michigan, Sen. Jacky Rosen is on track to win in Nevada, and Rep. Ruben Gallego is also expected to win in Arizona. Similarly, House Republicans are expected to gain only a handful of seats following Trump’s win, with House Democrats retaining an outside shot at winning the chamber.
But Democrats suffered bruising losses in Ohio and Montana, where Democratic Sens. Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester, respectively, outperformed Harris but still couldn’t overcome the groundswell of support for Trump.
“People started to see that it was getting scary. [Republicans] were just pounding [Brown] so hard,” said an Ohio Democrat who wanted to stay anonymous to avoid offending allies in the party. This person noted how even Brown’s tactic of running ads explicitly to woo Republicans couldn’t help him overcome Trump and the GOP’s grip on the state.
“The minute I saw him running ads on trans [issues], I thought, that’s really going to get you some grief on the left,” this person said, arguing that ads in which Brown disavowed any support for trans athletes and aligned with Trump come from a “defensive crouch.”
The Ohio Democrat believes Harris lost the election — and did worse than Biden did four years earlier in Ohio — because she was basically viewed as an extension of an unpopular president.
“I don’t think Biden was ever as personally popular as [Democrats] thought. He won that South Carolina primary in a fluke way,” because of the endorsement from powerful South Carolina Rep. Jim Cylburn, ultimately propelling him toward clinching the nomination. “He did not have a long arc of a deep connection that Barack Obama had.”
Trump campaign officials, meanwhile, are patting themselves on the back for their strategy, which involved a ton of spending on anti-trans ads, including one about Harris supporting gender-affirming surgery for federal inmates.
The Harris campaign did little to counter the anti-trans attacks, and Democrats have noted that voters don’t rate the issue as important in surveys.
Former President Bill Clinton reportedly pushed for a response to the ad, according to unnamed sources who spoke to The New York Times. “We have to answer it and say we won’t do it,” Clinton said, referring to gender-affirming surgery for transgender inmates.
Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas) also faced a deluge of anti-trans attacks in his unsuccessful bid to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Allred fought back with an ad calling Cruz a liar.
“Let me be clear, I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports or any of this ridiculous stuff Ted Cruz is saying,” Allred said in the ad.
Allred ultimately lost by nearly 9 points — better than the margin for Harris in Texas, but worse than what his campaign had hoped for. One Democratic aide said the transgender ads had less impact on the race than inflation, immigration and abortion.
“They get to be geniuses for two years until they aren’t,” the aide said of Republicans.
Harris herself didn’t address what went wrong for her campaign in her speech conceding the election on Wednesday, but she offered a message to young people not to give up hope.
“It is OK to feel sad and disappointed, but please know it’s going to be OK,” Harris said at her alma mater Howard University in Washington, D.C.
“Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win,” she added.