NEW YORK– Almost a month after a devastating election loss As Democrats have exposed cracks in their party’s foundations, they remain deeply divided over the size of their political problem — or even if they have one at all.
Some Democratic leaders are downplaying the power of Donald Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris as the inevitable result of an inflation-fueled anti-establishment reaction that shaped elections worldwide. But others are convinced that the Democratic Party is facing an acute crisis that requires an urgent overhaul of its brand, message and economic policies.
Trump engulfed every battlefield state on November 5, becoming the first Republican candidate to win the national popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004. Yet almost half the country voted against him. With final votes still being counted in some places, Trump won the popular vote by just 1.6 percentage points. He carried the top seven swing states with about 760,000 combined votes out of a total of more than 151 million votes cast nationwide.
“The glass is half full. It was close. If we got another 2% or 3% of American voters, it would have successfully led to presidential victories,” said Colorado Governor Jared Polis, who heads a group called Governors Safeguarding Democracy.
But for Ken Martin, chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Labor-Farmer Party and candidate to lead the Democratic National Committee next year, the election was “a damning indictment” of the Democratic Party.
“People don’t believe the Democratic Party is fighting for them or their families or cares about their lives,” Martin told the Associated Press. “We lost ground among almost every group except wealthy households and college-educated voters.”
The internal debate over the health of the party comes at a crucial time.
Trump returns to the White House on January 20, claiming a mandate to implement a law dramatic ‘Make America Great Again’ agenda led by the mass deportation of millions of immigrants entering the country illegally; an overhaul of the federal departments of health, education and justice, and major import tariffs that threaten to strain both the U.S. economy and international alliances.
Democrats, even diminished and divided, are the only organized resistance to Trump and his emboldened MAGA allies. But for now, at least, the Democratic Party has no leader and no agreement on what political problems to solve or how to solve them.
Many Democratic groups and leaders are working on post-election analysis to better understand what went wrong on November 5, but few are working together. And some already fear that the differing autopsy reports will yield competing recommendations that are likely to be lost in a rush to put the pain of 2024 behind them.
Priorities USA, one of the Democratic Party’s leading super PACs, will unveil its post-election findings this week. The group will, among other things, recommend that Democrats listen better to voters rather than pollsters, while offering a more forward-looking positive alternative to Trump’s MAGA movement.
If they don’t make significant changes, Priorities believes, according to a preview of that briefing, that there is no guarantee that key elements of the Democratic base — especially young people and voters of color — will return to the party in future elections.
Some of the loudest voices calling for dramatic changes represent the party’s far-left wing, which is often ignored by the establishment Democrats who control the party’s message, strategy and policy platform. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont irritated some party leaders the day after the election with scathing criticism: “It shouldn’t be a huge surprise that a Democratic Party that has failed the working class would find that the working class has failed them. ”
“While Democratic leaders defend the status quo, the American people are angry and want change,” Sanders continued. “And they are right.”
In the weeks since, California Rep. Ro Khanna, a Sanders ally and potential future presidential candidate, has urged his party to reconsider its economic message. In particular, he advocates a “New Economic Deal” aimed at creating good-paying jobs for the middle class.
Khanna’s chief of staff, Marie Baldassarre, said some Democrats may heed Khanna’s message and his willingness to share it on podcasts and right-wing outlets such as Fox News.
“I don’t know how you look at this election and not let it defeat you. This is the time to change,” Baldassarre said. ‘Why not do some work now? We have had no resonance.”
Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid, a former spokesman for Justice Democrats and the “Uncommitted” group that was critical of Joe Biden’s primary nomination, said Harris’s loss revealed that the party “has a major problem with bleeding working class, low information, non- -college voters.”
He notes that some Democratic leaders have responded with a collective shrug.
“Many people at the highest levels of the party feel quite lost,” Shahid said. “I am skeptical that they will be able to create the kind of coalition they need for transformative change in our lifetimes.”
That of the National Committee upcoming elections to choose a new leader serves as a litmus test for the direction of the party.
The DNC is expected to choose a new chairman in February, following a series of four candidate forums in January, according to an internal memo released last week. It remains unclear whether delegates will embrace a high-profile outsider or an insider more familiar with the intricacies of the party’s political apparatus.
Few are calling for large-scale changes.
Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler, who announced his candidacy for the DNC chairmanship on Sunday, said Democrats must embrace a new communications strategy to connect with voters who don’t pay much attention to politics. He complimented Trump’s mastery of the media landscape and suggested that his own party pay more attention to non-political and right-wing podcasts and news networks.
However, Wikler was skeptical that the 2024 election results would spell a political crisis for his party.
“What we saw was a small shift to the right, driven most by the people most affected by inflation who paid the least attention to the news,” he said. “That does not indicate a permanent shift towards Trump. I think there is a very real opportunity for Democrats to gain ground.”
He added: “I also think Trump will very likely do more than repeat history and be a disaster.”
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Cappelletti reported from Lansing, Michigan.