The Democrats’ Blame Game Begins

Kamala Harris has been defeated, Donald Trump is headed back to the White House, and the Democrats have begun soul-searching to determine what went so wrong in a landslide that saw the party lose ground with some of its most reliable constituencies.

There’s plenty of blame to go around. But most of the finger pointing hasn’t been aimed at Harris, who ran a truncated campaign that was generally well-regarded before the Election Day drubbing. Instead, some of the sharpest criticism focused on President Joe Biden for moving forward with a catastrophic re-election bid that set the stage for an across-the-board failure.

"The story might have been different if he had made a timely decision to step aside and allowed the party to move on," says David Axelrod, the strategist behind both of Barack Obama’s presidential wins.

The frustration with Biden, many Democrats argue, must be extended to those who enabled his bid for a second term, including members of his inner circle who shielded an 81-year-old President in physical decline. "I don't believe that Joe Biden believed he was diminished,” says John Morgan, a Florida attorney and Biden donor. “Now who may have known he was diminished were the sycophants around him in the White House.”

But as the extent of Harris’ loss becomes clearer, the focus on her missteps is likely to grow. Harris didn’t just lose swing states. She ceded territory across the nation, including in blue states that Democrats have long taken for granted. In Rhode Island, the party’s 27-point advantage under Obama shrunk to 21 points when Biden was the nominee, and shriveled to 9 points with Harris atop the ballot.

Read More: How Trump Won.

Across the first wave of exit polls were manifold signs of Harris failing to match Democrats' showing four years earlier. Biden carried 57% of women; Harris slipped to 54%. Biden carried 55% of voters who earned less than $50,000; Harris carried 48% of those working-class voters. Biden won the vote of 48% of those without a college degree; Harris claimed 44% of them. Biden won 71% of voters of color; Harris won 65%. Voters split 49%-49% on whether Biden or Trump could be trusted on the economy; Trump held a four-point advantage on the question.

A Democratic strategist with deep ties to Biden’s orbit says Democrats have long known they were weak with Latino and Black men, making the decision by Harris’ team to put so much focus on turning out women with appeals to protect reproductive rights a major misstep. On the question of abortion rights, Latino voters who said abortion should be legal in most cases backed Biden—who struggled to even say abortion—by a 63%-34% margin. Four years later, Harris won by 9 nine percentage points on that question with Latinos.

Among Black voters, Biden prevailed over Trump on the question of having abortion legal in most cases by a 94%-6% split. This year, Harris posted a 79%-18% advantage. It was clear, in hindsight, that an issue the party saw as a potent political weapon to turn out women may have also turned off men of color.

Read More: What Trump's Win Means For His Legal Cases.

While the initial criticisms of Harris were fairly mild, some party strategists saw in her cautious campaign a series of strategic blunders.

“She let the GOP define her,” says one senior Democratic operative. “She could have left the convention and tried to reach out to voters from across the political spectrum, but she and [running mate Tim] Walz went inexplicably into hiding and didn’t do interviews for weeks.”

Plenty of other tactical choices drew second-guessing. Maybe Harris should have been nicer to “bros.” Maybe she wasted too much money on digital ads. Maybe she should have steered clear of lefty icons like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or distanced herself from her boss more explicitly.

Yet many had nothing but praise for Harris’ polished run. “I can't sit here and be like, 'She didn't come to Michigan enough.' She was here almost every day,” says Representative Haley Stevens, who was re-elected to represent her district in the northern Detroit suburbs. “They didn’t take anything in the Blue Wall for granted.”

“I think she ran the best campaign anyone in her position possibly could have. But that doesn’t mean she was the right person,” says former Democratic congressman Tom Malinowski of New Jersey. “In hindsight, I think there is a strong argument for having had an open competitive process in place” to replace Biden on the ticket, Malinowski says.

Read More: World Leaders React to Trump's Win.

The party’s soul-searching is likely to extend to the groups it relies on to turn out the vote. Take, for instance, NextGen America, the party's biggest youth-vote machine, which spent almost $56 million, hired 256 staffers and recruited almost 30,000 volunteers. It was a massive undertaking—and yet Harris won just 55% of voters under the age of 30, lagging Biden’s performance by five points. Another group, Swing Left, raised $25 million from Red State Democrats for on-the-brink districts, knocked on almost 350,000 battleground doors in the final weekend, and placed more than a half-million calls in that final push. The celebrity-tinged GOTV machine didn't work.

Yet to some observers, focusing on campaign minutia misses the bigger picture—that Harris may have been doomed from the start by forces outside of her control. “No incumbent party has ever won with a president with a 40% approval rating or under,” says Axelrod. “No party has won with people's attitudes about the economy what they were.”

Harris, Axelrod argues, had the added challenge of running while the country is still suffering from post-pandemic PTSD, which helped Republicans tap into anti-establishment rage. “These forces were so large that I'm not sure where there are strategic or tactical decisions that could have changed the outcome,” says Axelrod. “At the end of the day, being the VP of an Administration that people wanted to fire may have been an insurmountable obstacle.”

Another Democratic strategist with deep ties to organized labor suggests the stars were aligned for Democrats to fail, even against a candidate as flawed as Trump: "Maybe this was actually just inevitable as a result of years of economic concerns and inflation—like [what] happened to pretty much every incumbent in the entire world."

Yet even considering world trends and economic cycles, some saw in the verdict an unmistakable sign of misogyny. To this camp, it’s hard to ignore that Trump has now won twice against female opponents, while losing to an old white man. Rodell Mollineau, a former senior aide to Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid, notes that despite his overwhelming victory, Trump was an unpopular candidate himself. "They picked him over a Black woman,” Mollineau says. “This is a tough pill to swallow.” 

It’s a point not lost on Biden’s shrinking circle of defenders. “"Everyone who destroyed Biden and pushed him out, got the race they demanded,” says a Democratic state committee member in Pennsylvania. “There was a choice: The only person that ever beat Trump, or a gigantic unknown."