Democrats Again Examine Their Fate After Second Loss to Trump
(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump is set to return to the White House in a political comeback for the ages. That reality, following the defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris, is forcing the Democratic Party — and its progressive and moderate wings — to once again reassess its future.
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Trump’s victory reignites the long-simmering internal debate among Democrats about whether to campaign from the moderate middle, which worked for Joe Biden in 2020 but not for Harris, or to answer the pleas of the progressive left and provide an entirely new vision for voters, one that has yet to capture a popular wave.
The implications — political, economic, cultural — could be enormous.
“The sell-by date on the current Democratic strategic thinking has passed,” said Jeff Hauser, a former antitrust attorney and political operative who founded the nonprofit Revolving Door Project.
Harris’ loss will lead to a search for a new standard-bearer for the party going forward, as the last of the Democrats’ Baby Boomer generation departs the stage.
Yet the candidates most discussed about claiming the torch are moderate governors, like Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, and Wes Moore of Maryland.
The party’s progressive wing – already irritated by what it saw as Harris’ caution on economic issues and foreign policy – is likely to oppose a push to the center, as happened after losses to Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. Billionaire Democratic donors were already pushing Harris to moderate some of Biden’s most progressive economic positions, like a focus on antitrust and combating corporate power, while a similarly strident cohort on the left lamented that the vice president didn’t do enough to tout the administration’s successes in that area, or pledge to press them further.
Frustrations with Biden are likely to bubble over again. When the president was urged to drop his reelection bid last summer, Democrats complained that he had hung on too long, depriving the party of the chance at a contested primary that might have yielded a more seasoned and competitive general-election candidate than Harris.
At first, the Democrats’ decision to quickly coalesce around Harris’ candidacy appeared to work. Her campaign raised more than $1 billion, faster than any in history, and trained it on a foe virtually all American voters knew.
The party’s argument was existential: In Trump, Democrats claimed, the country faced not just bad character and bad policies, but a threat to the representative democracy itself.
Then he beat them anyway.
Union leaders, who have traditionally been able to turn out strong support for Democrats, acknowledged that the late switch to Harris was a hindrance because it forced voters to quickly get to know someone with much lower name recognition than either Biden or Trump.
“The challenge she had is that she’s not as known as one would have wished her to be,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said at a rally in Philadelphia the weekend before Election Day.
Some veteran Democratic operatives fear the party has focused too much on ethnic and personal identity, rather than finding the broader bases of appeal — economic confidence, a sound border policy and a focus on the working class — that have been lost along with guaranteed support from organized labor.
“The more that Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Americans vote like the rest of the country, the more that a political appeal based on racial identity won’t work,” said Kenneth Baer, a Democratic consultant and former speechwriter who now runs the firm Crosscut Strategies.
CNN exit polls showed that Democrats severely underperformed with Latino voters, with Trump up 10 points among that bloc in 2024 after Biden was up 23 points with Latinos in 2020 and Hillary Clinton up 31 points with Latino voters in 2016.
Democrats should be leaning harder into opposition to corporate power and the interests of the rich, Hauser says, policy areas that align with the views of some working-class voters who have drifted away from the party, and where the Republican Party’s current rhetorical tack toward populism has proved electorally powerful.
“It’s hard for the party that keeps putting Mark Cuban forward as a spokesman to inveigh against the power of billionaires in politics,” Hauser said. “Mark Cuban is messing with a very clean story.”
Hauser and others also said that Democratic Party leaders and strategists have failed to account for the decline of traditional institutions – especially the nonpartisan news media – and have been slow to combat an information landscape in which the voters they are competing for can’t agree on a shared set of facts and realities.
Tuesday’s result also shed an uncomfortable light on the party’s tactics. Despite months of focusing on voter turnout, including millions of dollars in spending and the efforts of labor unions, affiliated political committees and volunteers, the party fell far short of its goals for turning out Harris voters. In Philadelphia, for instance, where Harris needed a large margin of victory to have a hope of securing Pennsylvania’s critical electoral votes, party leaders boasted that they had made hundreds of thousands of voter contacts through door-knocking, texts and phone calls.
On Election Day, Harris and the party not only failed to match Biden’s 2020 performance in Philadelphia, but fell well short of Hillary Clinton’s totals from 2016 — effectively dooming her chances to take the swing state on which the campaign and its labor and progressive allies had focused the majority of their attention for months.
The past decade has also seen the Democrats — with few exceptions — almost exclusively focused on opposing Trump, a character whose ability to monopolize public attention and scandalize his foes has shone like a bright light in his opponents’ eyes.
Party stalwarts seized eagerly for evidence of Trump’s incivility or worse, regularly insisting that he had finally crossed lines that would doom him with a bipartisan majority of voters. Insulting wounded veterans and prisoners of war; admitting on camera to sexual assault; toying with the rhetoric of violence toward his opponents and rivals; and finally overseeing a cacophonous Madison Square Garden rally in Manhattan that featured multiple speakers lobbying racist innuendo at minorities and Harris herself.
None of these ever proved to be the silver bullet some Democrats presumed they would be, or stood in for a party that sometimes seemed incapable of summing up its ethos as anything other than Trump’s opposition. The final days of the cycle saw Harris campaigning with former US Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican, and touting the support of her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney — once uniformly blamed for the invasion of Iraq, the most disastrous US foreign policy blunder in a generation.
Still, the gloomy Democratic outlook now isn’t shared by everyone.
“The Democratic Party is not going anywhere and it’s asinine to be contemplating otherwise,” said Joshua Raymond, a Democratic lobbyist and former aide to then-Congressman Chris Murphy of Connecticut. “As asinine as saying MAGA would go away after 2021.”
A Harris loss, he said, would be the result of structural disadvantage in the Electoral College, and the party emerges from a defeat with a strong bench of potential future candidates, despite losing the popular vote for the first time in 20 years.
“It will be a tough few years, and like in 2000 through 2006, the Democrats will be on defense. Been there before, will be there again. And if Trump goes further, it’s not whither the Democratic Party, but whither the US system of government.”
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