Democrats enter Trump presidency without plan or clear leader

People attend an Arizona Democrats watch party on election night Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

Democrats spent billions of dollars warning American voters that Donald Trump posed an imminent threat to democracy, that his economic policies would benefit only his wealthy friends, that he was literally a fascist.

In the end, voters didn't care — or if they did, it didn't matter.

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And now, after Kamala Harris' decisive loss, Democrats enter a second Trump presidency with no clear leader, no clear plan and no agreement on what caused them to be so wrong about the 2024 election.

“I think there needs to be a cleaning of the house, there needs to be a new generation of leaders that emerge,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., among the few Democrats with presidential ambitions to address the party’s future on Wednesday. “There needs to be new thinking, new ideas and a new direction. And, you know, the establishment produced a disaster.”

With votes still being counted, Trump was on track to become the first Republican in two decades to win the popular vote, although the scope of his Electoral College victory was likely to fall short of President Barack Obama’s 2008 performance in which he won 365 electoral votes.

Trump picked up a small but significant share of younger voters, Black voters and Hispanic voters, many of whom were feeling down about the economy, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide. The Republican president-elect also made progress among voters without a college degree.

Most of the elected Democrats who are most often mentioned as 2028 presidential prospects — including the governors of California, Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania — declined to weigh in when asked. Others canceled scheduled interviews.

The few progressives willing to speak publicly offered different explanations. Relatively few were blaming U.S. President Joe Biden for backtracking on his promise not to run for reelection, which blocked the party from picking a replacement in a traditional primary.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., talks to the media as he walks to the House chamber before President Joe Biden's State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol, Thursday, March 7, 2024, in Washington. (Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo)

Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent and former Democratic primary candidate, had warned Harris before Election Day that she was focusing too much on flipping Republican votes and not enough on pocketbook issues. He issued a statement excoriating party leadership.

“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,” he said. "First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

Others weren’t so eager to make wholesale changes.

“Our challenge is not to overreact to this election,” said Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., who easily won reelection Tuesday night. “We had a candidate with a relatively low profile — no one knew much about Kamala Harris ... who took on one of the best-known people in the history of mankind.”

Just eight years ago, Democrats were stunned by Trump's shocking victory over Hillary Clinton. But at that time, many were united in blaming the loss on dysfunction within the Democratic National Committee. Others blamed Russian influence efforts supporting Trump or FBI Director James Comey's statement excoriating Clinton's handling of classified information in her emails while serving as secretary of state.

There are no excuses this time. The results show Democrats' current problems extend well beyond its political machinery.

Operatives from the party’s progressive wing condemned Harris’ campaign for investing too much time and resources on winning moderate Republicans at the expense of the party’s working-class base, including union workers drawn to Trump’s promises to impose tariffs on friends and foes alike and threats to American businesses thinking of moving jobs offshore.

Warnings about Trump’s threat to U.S. democracy were important, they said, but the issue was not top of mind for most voters.

“In the coming months, our party will be doing a lot of introspection, lots of thinking,” said Democratic Rep. Shri Thanedar, whose district contains much of Detroit. “Democrats focused on Trump’s character. His legal problems, being a felon. But for the large part, the people who are economically suffering, who feel that they are worse off economically, did not pay much attention to his character.

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Others were less diplomatic.

Alexandra Rojas, executive director of the far-left Justice Democrats, said that the party's leadership must “take responsibility for how a second Donald Trump presidency became possible again under their watch.”

“The Democratic Party is rapidly losing its legitimacy amongst the everyday people and marginalized communities continuously used as stepping stones to win elections,” Rojas charged, even as she acknowledged “there are no easy answers for where we as a country and movement go from here.”

Indeed, the data suggests that Democrats have serious work to do.

U.S. President Joe Biden walks from Marine One as he arrives on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Monday, Nov. 4, 2024. (Ben Curtis/AP Photo)

Biden drew about even with Trump among voters without a college degree four years ago, earning 47 per cent of their vote compared to Trump’s 51 per cent. But voters without a college degree inched toward Trump in 2024, giving him a clear advantage with 55 per cent of their vote. Fewer — 43 per cent — backed Harris.

The modest movement of those without a college degree was pronounced among younger voters, with Trump earning 52 per cent now compared with 44 per cent four years ago, and among nonwhite voters, 32 per cent vs. 25 per cent.

Overall, about half of voters under age 30 supported Harris. That’s compared to the roughly 6 in 10 who backed Biden in 2020. At the same time, Black and Latino voters appeared slightly less likely to support Harris than they were to back Biden four years ago, VoteCast found.

Jef Pollock, a veteran Democratic pollster, said the Harris campaign “was dealt a bad hand given the international rebuke of incumbent parties all over the world as voter frustrations over the economy have boiled over.”

“But Democrats have to look internally and ask ourselves what can we do to rebuild our relationship with rural, working class, and Latino voters as well as young men,” Pollock said. "Clearly they believe we are not addressing their every day needs.”

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For now, it's unclear if the party will go through any kind of formal self-examination process to determine exactly what went wrong.

After the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee famously commission an internal “growth and opportunity” report to chart a path forward. But even then, the GOP found electoral success only after Trump ignored the report's recommendations to strengthen the party's infrastructure and adopt a more welcoming and inclusive message.

After the 2016 election, Democrats also made changes to their party infrastructure and fundraising after a period of introspection as well.

Democratic strategist Faiz Shakir, who led Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign, is worried that Democrats won’t do the introspection necessary after this devastating loss.

“A healthy party is challenging itself to do that kind of an autopsy and hear what we did wrong,” he said. “I don’t even know that there is going to be that kind of a process.”

Sanders himself was more blunt in his statement.

“Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?” he said. “Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.”

Cappelletti reported from Detroit. Associated Press writers Dan Merica, Farnoush Amiri and Stephen Groves in Washington contributed