In every branch of the federal government, Democrats will find themselves on the outside looking in next year, setting off a wave of recriminations within the party as President Joe Biden prepares to leave office.
Despite an unprecedented postprimaries nominee switch, attempts by Democratic candidates in multiple races to tack to the center or erase past policy positions, and dire warnings that fascism was coming to the United States if Republicans prevailed, this month’s election was largely a bitter disappointment to Biden’s party.
Democrats are undoubtedly most upset by President-elect Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House, this time with at least a plurality of the national popular vote behind him and having swept the seven battleground states. When asked by a reporter how she was doing, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) replied, “Terrible.”
However, Republicans also took control of the Senate while retaining a slim majority in the House. Republicans appear to have knocked off three incumbent Democratic senators, although Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) is moving forward with a recount request, and won the open Senate seat in West Virginia in a landslide.
All this came after Democrats deployed a bevy of A-list celebrities, often at great expense, and their top campaign surrogates, led by former President Barack Obama, to try to prop up their ticket. Democrats were also buoyed by confidence that they had “closed strong” and Trump had erred with his big Madison Square Garden rally, which seems to have had no appreciable electoral repercussions whatsoever. While the polling averages suggested a Trump win was possible and perhaps probable even after Vice President Kamala Harris replaced Biden, many Democrats were still caught by surprise.
“This is a historic disaster of Biblical proportions,” Chris Kofinis, a Democratic strategist and former chief of staff to Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV), told the Wall Street Journal. “The Democratic Party, as it is, is dead. This is a historic realignment. There were Reagan Democrats. Now there are Trump Democrats.”
Manchin was West Virginia’s only congressional Democrat until earlier this year when he registered as an independent, but he still caucused with Senate Democrats. Manchin represents a state former President Bill Clinton carried twice and was one of the few remaining centrists in his old party’s Senate coalition. He is among the Senate Democratic Caucus members departing Capitol Hill in January.
Democrats are now second-guessing whether Biden should have left the race sooner or never should have run in the first place. Or whether Harris should have had to go through a more competitive process to win the Democratic presidential nomination. Once nominated, should she have picked Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) as her running mate or someone else, such as Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA)? (It should be noted that the Rust Belt governors did not seem eager to join the ticket.)
“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi told the New York Times after the election. “We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”
Pelosi and Obama’s roles in nudging Biden aside after they surrendered their leadership positions — in Obama’s case because he was term-limited under the 22nd Amendment — have also come under scrutiny.
“Nancy Pelosi, everybody talks about how the speaker emerita, you know, she’s so strategic, she can count, she did all of that when she was the speaker in Congress, but my question is: Where is your calculator now?” said Symone Sanders Townsend, a former Biden White House official, on MSNBC. “She played in presidential politics this cycle, and she helped orchestrate the very public demise of the president.”
There have also been increasingly intense debates about what the substance of the Democratic agenda should be, with some arguing for more thoroughgoing progressivism and others contending the party needs to move to the center. Harris’s refusal to clearly brand herself one way or the other, which was her attempt to hold together a bipartisan, transideological anti-Trump coalition that ultimately underperformed expectations, made her campaign vulnerable to both lines of criticism.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in a blunt postelection statement.
However, voters did not buy what Biden or Harris were selling. Would Sanders have been a better salesman?
“The reality is stark: Biden spent four years implementing what was essentially Bernie Sanders’ vision for labor, employment, and economic policy,” wrote Tahra Jirari of the Chamber of Progress. “The verdict from voters, particularly the working class and union members who were supposed to be the primary beneficiaries, was unambiguous rejection.”
“Progressive economic messaging, no matter how well-crafted, simply couldn’t overcome voters’ lived experience under these policies,” she added.
Social and cultural matters also divide Democrats after the loss.
“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) told the New York Times. “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
The Massachusetts Democratic Party distanced itself from Moulton’s comments, and there were reports that Tufts University planned to limit its support for internships in his office, although a spokesman for the school later walked it back.
Every Harris campaign decision is now under the microscope. This includes her light interview schedule when she could have been reintroducing herself to voters. Democrats also wonder if she should have sat down with podcaster Joe Rogan instead of appearing with Oprah Winfrey, whose production company received a million-dollar payout.
The Harris campaign raised a billion dollars in just three months but is reportedly at least $20 million in debt and did not win a single swing state. This has led to reports of turmoil within the Democratic National Committee.
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Things can change quickly in politics. Clintonian New Democrats arrived on the scene after the party lost three presidential elections in the 1980s, never carrying more than 10 states in that time period. Former President George W. Bush was reelected in 2004, and Republicans controlled 55 Senate seats. Two years later, Democrats won both houses of Congress. Trump’s political career looked like it might be over at the end of his first term. Now, he is about to be back in the Oval Office.
However, many Democrats see this month’s election results as a wake-up call. We’ll see how many others decide to hit the snooze button.
