Democrats are confronting a painful reckoning after Kamala Harris’s crushing defeat by Donald Trump in the recent U.S. presidential election, as initial shock morphs into anger and finger-pointing.
The outcome, which included a sweeping Republican “red wave” in the Senate, has left party lawmakers and strategists scrambling for explanations and accountability.
Despite the disappointing result, President Joe Biden has found himself more squarely in the crosshairs of blame than Harris, who many agree performed commendably given her limited time to campaign.
The election night setback has exposed deep fractures within the party, with different factions presenting varied interpretations of the loss, each rooted in their ideological perspectives.
Progressive senator Bernie Sanders ignited the blame game with a sharp statement condemning the party’s drift from its working-class base.
“A party that has forsaken the working class should not be surprised to find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sanders remarked, laying down the gauntlet for a party-wide soul-searching.
His critique drew swift backlash from Democratic National Committee chairman, Jaime Harrison, who rejected Sanders’s assessment as “straight up BS,” countering with a detailed list of Biden’s policies aimed at supporting low-income families.
The intraparty debate took another turn with New York congressman Ritchie Torres’s criticism of what he described as “smug political correctness” on the left.
Torres argued that Trump’s campaign was bolstered by activist-driven slogans like ‘Defund the Police’ and terms such as ‘Latinx,’ which, he claimed, alienated key voter demographics. “Trump had no greater friend than rhetoric that distanced voters,” Torres said.
Harris has escaped the harshest criticism, as she is regarded as having had insufficient time to campaign thanks to Biden’s initial insistence on running again at 81, despite having promised to be a bridge to the next generation.
The aging president’s sluggishness in bowing out after a disastrous debate performance against Trump deepened the challenge, as Harris had to start her campaign in July as a relative unknown despite being the vice president.
Billionaire former Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg, who feels that Biden’s campaign should never have got as far as the June 27 debate, attacked the president’s team in a commentary for Bloomberg for covering up his shortcomings “until they became undeniable on live TV.”
Other Democrats blamed the ongoing economic reverberations of the coronavirus pandemic, which caused governments to fall across the globe amid anger over soaring inflation.
Biden himself heaped praise on his vice president in a televised White House address Thursday.
“She gave her whole heart and effort, and she and her entire team should be proud of the campaign they ran,” he told the nation.
While there is little she could have done about post-pandemic price hikes, many congressional Democrats told reporters behind the scenes that Harris’s team overestimated abortion access as an election winner and dropped the ball on the economy.
Another criticism is that Harris failed to distance herself from Biden once she was handed the torch, despite his approval ratings being underwater at 40 per cent.
This was exemplified in her answer that “not a thing comes to mind” when she was asked on a daytime talk show how she might have governed differently from her boss.
Other critics say she picked the wrong running mate in Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
But evidence that Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania would have been any more effective in helping Harris win the predominantly white, working-class Rust Belt is threadbare.
Harris has also been criticized for not being clearer in disavowing unpopular leftist views she held in 2019 and explaining transparently why she tacked so dramatically to the centre.
Under this theory, Harris’s outreach to Republicans, and the assurance that “my values have not changed,” were not enough to reassure voters that they were really seeing the real woman and understood what made her tick.
Yet for all the talk of the need to learn lessons, some Democrats were keen for the bloodletting to be over so that the focus could return to opposing Trump.
“Listen, I’m all in for the messaging/strategy biopsy. Need to build a bigger tent; use economic populism as the tentpole; be less judgmental and exclusionary,” Chris Murphy, a US senator from Connecticut, posted on X.
“But folks, (Trump) might not be lying about the roundups and political prosecutions. Job one is to get ready for that.”