Democrats are pointing fingers after voters handed Vice President Kamala Harris a decisive blow at the ballot box.
President-elect Donald Trump secured a resounding victory at the Electoral College, became the first GOP presidential candidate to win the popular vote since 2004, and flipped at least four battleground states red to defeat Harris and win a second term in the White House following the election.
The outcome, which Trump declared would “forever be remembered as the day the American people regained control of their country,” stunned Harris’s allies, with Democrats swiftly issuing a wide range of explanations for their dismal performance.
Top strategist Democratic strategist David Axelrod blamed Harris’s loss on racism and sexism. Here are a few more of the reasons why the Democratic Party believes it lost what it described as “the most important election of our lifetime.”
Joe Biden
Harris ran an abbreviated campaign after her boss, President Joe Biden, dropped his bid for reelection in late July. Some Democrats are angry that Biden, who has repeatedly exhibited visible signs of aging and mental deterioration over the past few years, tried to clinch a second term in the first place, arguing that he stole valuable campaign time from Harris and ultimately pulled the plug on her presidential ambitions.
“Part of the reason why a lot of Democrats are very angry at Joe Biden tonight, because they feel that the decision to run again when he was 80 years old was very reckless and a very risky decision” Axios correspondent Alex Thompson noted while speaking on a CNN panel reacting to Trump’s victory.
“He took a big gamble and he lost,” Thompson continued.
A lot of Democrats are very angry at Joe Biden today.
They feel his decision to run again when he was 80 years old was very reckless.
He took a big gamble and he lost.
With @kasie @finneyk @MrShermichael and co.
pic.twitter.com/OwMZXmSvGB— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) November 6, 2024
But other Democrats blamed party leadership, which mounted a pressure campaign urging Biden to withdraw from his reelection campaign after his disastrous first presidential debate with Trump.
Biden ultimately heeded internal pressure from Democratic colleagues and dropped his bid for reelection on July 21.
Some critics, including Trump, have said the move amounted to a coup, as Harris ultimately swiftly ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket despite never having won a primary as the presidential candidate.
Democrats also opened up on the criticism following her bruising loss to Trump, with an MSNBC host saying, “I do have an indictment of some of the strategy.” She continued to say that the pressure campaign amounted to “a very public stab fest, a proverbial stabbing.”
Bob Brady, who is the chairman of the Philadelphia Democratic Party, also suggested Biden should have remained the Democratic presidential nominee; he criticized Harris for how she conducted her campaign in Pennsylvania.
“They didn’t show us any respect. I never talked to the lady, and she’s the candidate” he told the Philadephia Inquirer.
Other Democrats pointed to the difficulty Harris ran into as she painted herself as an agent of change on the campaign trail despite having served as the No. 2 member of the Biden administration for over three years.
“We ran the best campaign we could, considering Joe Biden was president,” one Harris aide told Politico. “Joe Biden is the singular reason Kamala Harris and Democrats lost.”
Tim Walz
With Harris losing the race to Trump largely because he won Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes, some Democrats are expressing regret that she picked Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) to be her vice presidential running mate over the battleground state’s popular chief executive, Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA).
Walz had several gaffes while on the campaign trail, including revelations that he “misspoke” about being in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre and misrepresenting his military record.
Lindy Li, who is a member of the DNC National Finance Committee and Pennsylvania commissioner, told Fox News that she was “not sure how much Tim Walz contributed to the ticket” after the Harris campaign was faced with the task of “cleaning up” his “laundry list.”
She added that “a lot of people are saying” Harris should have picked Shapiro, saying “Frankly, people have been saying that for months.”
Some Republicans have suggested that Harris declined to snag Shapiro as her running mate because she was afraid his Jewish ethnicity would turn off far-left pro-Palestinian factions in the Democratic coalition.
“Her attempts to pretend that Tim Walz is some magical, unimaginable, unspeakably great candidate over the very popular governor of the one swing state she absolutely, 100% needs to win are failing,” conservative Jewish commentator Ben Shapiro told the New York Post last month. “That’s not why. She didn’t pick him because he’s a pro-Israel Jew and that’s just unacceptable to her pro-Hamas base.”
While the Harris campaign has denied the claims, at least some of her allies clearly regret not picking the Pennsylvania governor over Walz.
“I know a lot of people are probably wondering tonight what would have happened had Shapiro been on the ticket,” Li noted. “And not only in terms of Pennsylvania. He’s famously a moderate. So that would have signaled to the American people that she is not the San Francisco liberal that Trump said she was.”
Third-party candidates
Harris lost the battleground state of Michigan, in part, because third-party candidate Jill Stein took a significant chunk of the Arab-American vote in Dearborn.
“Trump won Dearborn, Michigan 42-36 with 18% voting for Jill Stein,” political strategist and pollster Frank Luntz noted in a post to X.
With Michigan holding the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, Harris faced deep backlash from the community during her campaign because she refused to break with Biden’s policy on the war in Gaza.
While Trump won the endorsements of key leaders in the swing state’s Arab community, Stein’s candidacy may have thrust the nail in the coffin for Harris’s prospects in Michigan.
In addition to Stein, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s third-party candidacy and ultimate decision to suspend his campaign and endorse Trump likely gave the former president critical votes he needed to push him over the edge in battleground states.
Kennedy garnered roughly 15% of support from the U.S. electorate at the height of his campaign and urged his supporters to back Trump after he dropped his bid for the White House.
While there is no data out yet on what percentage of his supporters followed his lead, “Trump could not have won without Kennedy’s supporters,” one Kennedy surrogate said in a post to X.
The wrong talking points
Harris made abortion access her campaign’s top issue in a bid to reach female voters. Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) told the New York Times that he didn’t have concerns about losing the presidential election due to a lack of emphasis on voters’ concerns about immigration policy.
But it was Trump’s message on immigration and the economy that ultimately resonated with voters across gender and racial lines at the ballot box.
Exit polls showed that despite the Harris campaign’s strategy to make the election a referendum on abortion access in a bid to shore up female support, the vice president failed to make significant inroads with female voters, data Democrats bemoaned.
The news comes as an Associated Press survey confirmed that the two issues were top of mind for voters across the spectrum as they cast their ballots during the 2024 elections. The analysis further revealed that Trump’s messaging strategy served to win over Hispanic and black voters, who form key components of the Democratic coalition.
During a panel discussion following Harris’s defeat, CNN political commentator Scott Jennings argued that the Democratic Party’s move to sideline immigration and economic issues was a mistake.
Jennings said that he believed the election results represented “a mandate to do what you said you were going to do: get the economy working again for regular working-class Americans, fix immigration, try to get crime under control, try to reduce the chaos in the world.”
NEW: Entire CNN panel sits in silence as Scott Jennings rips apart the Democrats and the media, says Donald Trump's win is the "revenge of the regular ole working class American."
"This is a mandate to do what you said you were gonna do. Get the economy working again for… pic.twitter.com/K8UqayxoxO
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 6, 2024
“I’m interpreting the results tonight as the revenge of the working-class American, the anonymous American who has been crushed, insulted, condescended to,” Jennings said.
Meanwhile, Sen. George Helmy (D-NJ) warned his party that “we are losing the economic message” in comments to Punchbowl News.
Failed media strategy
Political pundits also pointed to the party’s unwillingness to utilize social media platforms such as X and “running campaigns the old-fashioned way” as reasons for crushing losses on Election Day.
“Twitter played a huge part in Democrats refusal to understand their own unpopularity,” one New York Times reporter said in a post to the platform.
Another Texas Democrat noted, “Most voters get their news through social media, and on social platforms, we are getting washed.”
My takeaway from the results.
It looks like America has shifted right… a lot. Some of this has to do with frustrations over inflation, sure, but I think there’s more here.
Democrats have been running campaigns the old-fashioned way, and I think we need to acknowledge that…
— Micah Erfan (@micah_erfan) November 6, 2024
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“Since 2015, Republicans have been building up their infrastructure to control the airwaves, and right now, they do. Their content gets more impressions on nearly every platform, and on YouTube and Spotify, it’s not even close,” the Democrat continued in a post to X.
Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump often favored frequent appearances on nontraditional venues over interviews on legacy media. Meanwhile, Harris rarely showed up on either platform, ramping up her media presence only in the final days of her campaign.
