The Democratic Party is still licking its wounds after being badly beaten by Donald Trump and his MAGA movement in the 2024 election. Here are some examples of how they are processing their defeat.
Kamala Harris’s campaign is still sending out emails each day asking for money. Her campaign raised 1.5 billion dollars and was still defeated by Donald Trump and the Republicans. On Monday, they sent out the following email:
One question for you: Will you share your support of Joe Biden?
We’re putting together a card for President Biden filled with messages of gratitude from his top supporters. Will you be the next person to sign?
Please sign our official card thanking President Joe Biden for his support for our campaign and the American people. It would mean the world to him to see your signature.
We’d love to tell President Biden that you added your name today.
Thank you and Happy Holidays!
Team Harris-Walz
We’re putting together a card for President Biden filled with messages of gratitude from his top supporters. Will you be the next person to sign?
The progressive Democrats in Congress appear to have a strategy for trying to stop the incoming Trump administration from further assaulting American democracy and gutting the social safety net to line the pockets of the kleptocrats and plutocrats: 1) cooperate with President Trump when they can find areas of common concern to advance the cause of working-people and 2) attempt to shame Trump as a hypocrite when he deviates from his promises about plans to help working-class Americans.
It is abundantly clear in these weeks after Trump’s victory that the Democratic Party (and pro-democracy Americans as a group) is still struggling through the stages of grief.
As I wrote in a previous essay, this strategy for stopping Trump is tragicomic. The progressive Democrats and other members of the party need to study history to learn from what happens when the Left, progressives and centrists/institutionalists in a failing democracy attempt to triangulate or otherwise cooperate with autocrats and insurgent authoritarians.
And what of the “liberal” news media and the so-called Resistance? They are still shellshocked from the 2024 election as the political world they thought existed where Harris would win because the American people and the nation are so “exceptional” and “the institutions” and “democracy!” encountered reality as it currently exists. The epistemic collapse is great. It is also painful to watch.
In total, Harris and the Democrats’ strategy of “hope” and being “joyful warriors” and calling the MAGA people “weird” and other names in a self-serving exercise of liberal schadenfreude was no answer for the raw fury and rage at the system, the elites and the status quo that has come to typify America (and other liberal democracies around the world) in this era.
Politico offers this account of what some of the Democratic Party’s leaders have been doing since they returned to their respective states:
At a Hilton hotel outside of Phoenix, where Christmas carols piped into the lobby, state Democratic chairs gathered for their annual winter meeting. They weren’t frantic like they had been after Trump’s first stunning victory. They were exhausted. Even after Trump tapped the likes of Kash Patel and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to staff his government, they still weren’t ready to demonstrate in the streets or tune into liberal networks.
But they were inching toward the anger phase of the grieving cycle as they huddled in ballrooms and traded theories about what went wrong. They pointed fingers at what they cast as overpaid consultants, expressed despair that working-class voters of all stripes had abandoned them, and lamented that they had lectured voters instead of listening to them.
“We need to win back the House, not fund consultants who want to buy a new house!” said Ken Martin, president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, in a speech to hundreds of attendants.
Waiting for pizza after hours of meetings, Judson Scanlon, political director of a PAC that produced “White Dudes for Harris” hats, fessed up to being one of the Democrats who has stopped watching MSNBC after Trump returned to power.
“Since 2016, all we’ve heard about is the crazy crap that this guy is doing when he’s president and when he’s not,” said Scanlon. “I’m fed up with that.”
Politico continues, “In speeches, none of the DNC chair hopefuls made the case that Democrats should undergo a sweeping shift in their worldview. Unlike in some progressive parts of the Democratic ecosystem, no one argued that Trump’s win proved that they need to adopt a bold, concrete promise like Medicare for All — or, from the other end of the party’s spectrum, that they must urgently move to the center on transgender issues. Instead, most sold themselves as competent managers and pitched technical solutions….
As Democrats tried to figure out a path forward, there was a quiet sense among some here that they wouldn’t be out of power for long. It was a stark contrast from people elsewhere in their party who are worried that a realignment could rob them of power for years.”
None of this sounds very inspired or compelling. The Democratic Party’s leadership appears committed to their belief that Harris ran a (near) perfect campaign and that tweaks to the party’s messaging are all that is needed to reenergize its base and take back power in the next election cycle.
The New York Times offers this peek into the thinking of the Trump and Harris camps on the latter’s supposedly flawless campaign:
After every presidential election, the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School invites campaign strategists for both general-election candidates — as well as key staff members from losing primary campaigns — to unload about what happened. The discussions, which take place on panels moderated by journalists, can get heated, as they did in 2016. Maybe some years the event feels cathartic. This year, though, the big word was flawless.
Sheila Nix, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign chief of staff, used it on Thursday as each campaign outlined over dinner what had been its main strategy, saying Ms. Harris “ran a pretty flawless campaign.” And then Chris LaCivita, one of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign managers, lobbed the word back at Team Biden/Harris during one of the panels today.
“Flawless execution,” he sarcastically interjected, after Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the chair of the Biden and then the Harris campaign, labored to answer a question about the fateful debate that ended President Biden’s campaign.
LaCivita’s interruption got at a central tension in the aftermath of the election, one that has grated on Democrats outside the room and became a target of mockery from the Trump staff members inside it. For a campaign that lost, the Biden-Harris team has been reluctant to admit to specific mistakes — and that pattern continued today. They admitted they had lost, but their diagnosis was more about the mood of the country than tactical errors on their part. The ultimate answer may be a combination of both factors.
Here is some plain talk and uncomfortable realpolitik for establishment Democrats: If Harris had run a perfect campaign she would have won. Period. Such hubris by the Democratic Party’s leaders and other insiders will likely only bring more defeats for the party (and by extension American democracy and civil society) in this national and global moment of authoritarian populism.
In his recent essay “The Face of the Democratic Party”, Robert Kuttner ponders:
It’s hard to think of a time when the Democratic Party was more bereft of real leaders. As the losing presidential candidate, Kamala Harris is not held in warm regard, and her continuing fundraising efforts have added to the irritation. Joe Biden, who accomplished more than his critics give him credit for, is going out on a low note.
Usually, the chair of the Democratic National Committee is a technocrat and not the face of the party. But this time could be different.
A number of names have been mentioned in the press coverage and in self-promotion, but it’s clear that the two finalists will be Ken Martin, 51, Minnesota party chair, and his neighbor, Ben Wikler, 43, who chairs the Wisconsin state party. Both are excellent party-builders, both are substantive progressives, and both have earned wide respect. The election is set for February 1….
Since the DNC and the DSCC work in close concert, expects sparks to fly whether the new DNC chair is Martin or Wikler. One possibility, still premature, is that one could be chair and the other executive director. If ever there were a moment for both a strong Democratic Party and a compelling face of the party, it’s now.
As I asked in an essay here at Salon on Sunday, “Where is the fierce urgency of now?” from the Democratic Party’s leadership. There is a long-overdue reckoning with what the party is versus how it is perceived by the American people. What about the party’s many millions of base voters who chose to stay home and not support Harris and Walz in the 2024 election and those other voters who were compelled, for whatever reason, to join Trump’s rainbow coalition of rage, fury, nihilism and resentment?
Even more importantly, where is the fierce urgency of now from the Democrats, the so-called Resistance or the mainstream news media (the supposed “guardians of democracy”) about Trump and the MAGA Republican Party’s shock and awe campaign against American democracy? The Democratic Party’s leadership (and the “liberal” news media and the party’s other surrogates) need to start with an honest self-assessment — what is described in professional sports as “self-scouting” — if they want to defeat Trump and the MAGA Republicans in 2026 and beyond.
It is abundantly clear in these weeks after Trump’s victory that the Democratic Party (and pro-democracy Americans as a group) is still struggling through the stages of grief. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party, the American people and their democracy and civil society do not have the luxury of lingering in grief, they need to quickly move on to healthy action because time is not on their side. Donald Trump, in his own way, continues to be the most honest politician in America today (if not perhaps all of American history). On Sunday, he told NBC’s Kristen Welker, “We’re not playing games.”
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