Democrats try to figure out where they go from here
by Niall Stanage -
Democrats are asking what went wrong and where they go from here, as President-elect Trump prepares to take office in January.
The dust may be beginning to settle from Vice President Harris’s loss, but the questions for a party that has lost control of every branch of government have only grown sharper.
Every aspect of the Democrats’ political project — who will lead the party, how they will counter Trump, and what adjustments they need to make to ensure a defeat like November’s does not get repeated — is in flux.
And, in an era of perpetual campaign, the clock is already ticking toward the 2026 midterms and the battle for the White House four years from now.
One big unknown is whether Harris herself will stay in active politics once she leaves office as vice president in January.
On one hand, American politics is usually harsh on losers. Until Trump this year, the last person to have won a presidential election having lost on a previous occasion was Richard Nixon more than half a century ago.
On the other hand, Harris partisans note that she faced a hard task this year. Having taken over in dramatic circumstance atop the ticket after President Biden abandoned his reelection bid in July, the vice president had to crank up a fundraising apparatus, make herself better known to the nation at large, and try to thwart an opponent with an avid base of supporters.
Even though she came up short, the possibility of another attempt for the White House has not been ruled out.
In the shorter term, one of the more notable — and controversial — postmortems on the Harris campaign so far came earlier this week when several of the vice president’s senior campaign staff were interviewed on “Pod Save America,” the podcast run by prominent veterans of former President Obama’s White House.
Among the explanations offered for her loss was that the “political atmosphere was pretty brutal,” the shortened campaign made it “very difficult to do all that the things that you would normally do,” and that right-wing attacks on social issues, including trans rights, made Harris vulnerable to the charge of being “out of touch.”
Those explanations were offered by senior adviser David Plouffe, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and principal deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks, respectively.
But the interview was cited by some on the left as further evidence that the Harris campaign strategy was too focused on trying to win the votes of moderate Republican voters and not sufficiently attuned to working-class concerns.
The “Pod Save America” group interview also did not make a single mention of Gaza, Israel or the Palestinians in its 90-minute-plus duration, despite the Biden-Harris administration’s policy on Israel being a subject of deep contention within the Democratic Party.
Usamah Andrabi, communications director of Justice Democrats, a progressive group, contended that the election loss this year “wasn’t the failure of a single cycle or a single campaign. It’s a decades-long failure, where working class people no longer see us as fighting for their interest. They see the Democratic Party as beholden to the needs of a handful of corporations and billionaires.”
In concrete terms, Andrabi said a reset would foreground policies like increasing the federal minimum wage, imposing higher taxes on billionaires and providing universal health care.
Those views are broadly in alignment with others on the left such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Right after the election, Sanders released a statement contending that the “big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party” were failing to “understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing.”
It is, at a minimum, plain that Trump had an advantage among the large number of Americans who believe the nation is in need of a fundamental shift.
According to a voter analysis conducted for The Associated Press and Fox News, Harris won overwhelmingly among voters who wanted either “no change” or a “small change” in how the country is run.
Unfortunately for her, those people accounted for fewer than 1-in-5 votes cast. Among the roughly 1 in 4 who wanted “complete and total upheaval,” Trump crushed Harris by more than 40 points.
Still, votes in the center and on the center-left caution against any shift to harder left positions.
Their argument is equally stark. They argue it makes no logical sense to believe that voters opted for the right-wing populism of Trump because they felt the Democrats were not left-wing enough.
Any strong shift toward the left, according to the centrists, would put Democrats even further away from the national political center of gravity.
There are, too, some vexing social issues for Democrats to contemplate — perhaps none more politically potent than trans rights.
Some Democrats contend that one of Trump’s most effective attack ads against Harris cited her support for allowing trans rights generally, including allowing transgender people to participate in girls’ and women’s sports.
“Kamala is for ‘they/them’ President Trump is for you,” the ad’s narrator intoned.
Soon after the election, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) told The New York Times that Democrats “spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone.”
Moulton added: “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.”
Those comments set off their own firestorm, with the Democratic governor of Moulton’s state, Maura Healey, among those accusing him of “playing politics.”
Beyond those battles, there is the question of who could be the party’s next standard-bearer four years from now.
Among the names most frequently mentioned are several governors: Gavin Newsom of California, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Andy Beshear of Kentucky.
Democrats have a lot of hard questions to answer before their attention turns to a 2028 pick.
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