The corpse of the Democratic Party’s 2024 election campaign has been loaded on to the mortuary slab and the postmortems are under way. Political pathologists have been attempting to establish the exact cause of its demise, but it seems to have been a complex and multifaceted case of misadventure.
Several major organs that seemed to be working well as recently as two years ago at the midterm elections – president Joe Biden, the party’s defence of democracy, its support for a woman’s right to choose, and the idea that Donald Trump was too toxic to re-elect – failed to function as expected this time around.
A significant piece of the Democrats’ heart – low- and middle-income workers – skipped a beat on hearing the Republican candidate’s repeated insistence that only he had a plan to cure the ills left behind by once rampant inflation.
On the campaign trail it was clear that the cost of living – fuel, groceries and interest rates – had the average voter more exercised than any other issue. Kamala Harris outlined policies to stop price gouging and support families, small businesses and manufacturers with an aim of “making our middle class the engine of America’s prosperity”.
However, the billionaire Republican succeeded in presenting himself as best placed to erase the crisis, with promises to tackle “burdensome” regulation and create loads of jobs despite the already low unemployment rate, while at the same time dodging questions on whether the minimum wage should be raised.
“A lot of people are essentially apolitical, and they don’t feel their lives are good,” says Robert Howard, professor of political science at Georgia State University. “A strong majority of people felt the country was on the wrong track and, in the end, Biden was a very unpopular incumbent.”
The conscience was the next part of the Democratic Party’s make-up to come under duress. Harris faced a Catch-22 when she took over the faltering Biden campaign with fewer than 100 days until the polls opened.
Should she agree in part with Trump’s well got and repeated view that the administration in which she is vice-president has let down those her party is meant to represent? Or should she stay loyal to Biden, who has been a big figure in the Democratic movement for decades?
It all came to a head in an unlikely setting, during an appearance on an episode of ABC’s The View, a daytime talkshow.
“What, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” presenter Sunny Hostin asked Harris, offering a tap-in to put a polite score between herself and Biden.
She replied: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”
That response proved to be a self-inflicted gut punch, which the Republicans pounced on and used in ads to target a then rising political force.
Harris had effectively pitched herself as an agent of change after intervening in a battle between two old men when she replaced the declining Biden on the ticket in July, but she now appeared afraid to criticise her boss and the status quo in a campaign so focused on strength and frailty.
“I think it would have been smart to acknowledge things that could have been done differently,” says former Democratic Party congressman for Pennsylvania Conor Lamb, “and the things she would do differently going forward, because it was obvious that voters wanted a change from what they were getting. Whether you love Joe Biden or hate him, they were ready to move on.”
The Democrats will hope that understanding the past can help to shape a better future.
Lamb says “humility is an important virtue right now” as the party seeks to resurrect its fortunes. He says that had Harris talked about the things she has learned as vice-president, it “would have been powerful” means of showing how change was possible moving forward. She had shown a willingness to do so before by, for example, adapting her view on fracking.
Ted Smyth, a member of the Irish Americans for Harris committee, says the Democrats will have to learn “to sell people something they want” after voters were “not moved by warnings that Trump is a fascist given most have never experienced” what kind of a world such an ideology can create.
It could be challenging for the Democratic Party to make a big splash in Washington DC for some time, having lost the legs on which it proudly stood last week – the White House and Senate – while the Republicans appear on course to hold the House of Representatives.
“We will see in two years’ time, with the midterms, or in four years’ time, at the election,” Smyth says. “If Democrats do their job in the meantime and think big, they could win back a lot of middle- and low-income people.”
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Before that, Lamb says, there will have to be “a lot of soul-searching”.
“People used to just instinctively understand that if you were in the working- and middle-class end of the economy, the Democrats are the party for you, and that has evaporated over time,” he says.
“When I first ran for Congress, I started by listening. I was running in a district that Trump had won by 19 points just 18 months before, so we had got smacked in the face there even though it was old Democratic territory.
“When I started campaigning, I didn’t go around claiming I had all the answers and I was going to impose my views on the constituents. In small groups, and in formal settings, I just kind of asked people what they thought.”
Many of the postmortem reports since Tuesday night have arrowed in on how members of certain groups turned their back on the Democrats.
Some Jewish voters were unhappy with the handling of Israel; some Muslim and Arab American voters felt aggrieved about what has been allowed to happen in Gaza and Lebanon; white women were not as exercised by abortion rights as hoped; and support from African American and Latino people, men in particular, declined.
Smyth says the Democratic Party “needs to stop dividing voters into white, black or Latino groups” and “to see them as middle- and low-income people who have no savings and pay huge interest on car loans”.
“They’re all Americans and trying to break them up into racial categories or gender categories is, to me, insulting and self-defeating.”
He believes Democrat time would be better served by trying to “provide solutions on bread-and-butter issues”.
Lamb agrees. “The job we are running for here is to represent people and I think, sometimes, people forget that very basic thing. We aren’t running to get in and to just impose the views we brought with us from university or the internet,” he says.
“We’re supposed to stand in the shoes of our constituents and make them feel as if their own voice is heard and their own needs are being met and we’re obviously not doing that in a large part of the country.”
Who is likely to be the figurehead of a rebuilding party?
Lamb believes it is too early to speculate as to who might be best equipped to try to take back all that has been lost.
He says identity – where the person is from, their race, their gender – gets a lot of focus but it should be more about finding someone who can demonstrate how “what they have done relates to the lives of ordinary people”.
Whoever it is will have much to ponder, but should have far more time that Harris to figure out a strategy.
Smyth says he is not sure if the vice-president would emerge as the strongest candidate to run in 2028, should she have an interest, but some would-be runners – Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer – appear to be “warming up”.
Robert Howard says that in 2028, “assuming we have elections, and I am not joking about that”, he suspects Shapiro, Whitmer and California governor Gavin Newsom could be leading candidates.
Lamb says the next opponent is unlikely to be too Trump-like, given the experience so far has been that imitators in the Republican movement “usually lose”.
“The bombast comes across as disingenuous in other people whereas it comes across as genuine from him. A JD Vance might be more where they turn.”
Howard is keen to see if the president-elect, having won the popular vote for the first time, can reverse one potentially telling stat from his previous stint in office. “Most presidents take office with some modicum of a rise in public support; people feel good after the inauguration,” he says. “It did not happen in 2016, and we’ll have to see if it happens in 2025.”
If it does, it will give those trying to reanimate the Democratic Party another challenge to overcome. If he doesn’t, the amateur pathologists should have another case to examine.
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