In the end, most voters did want to go back.
Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats pounded away at a message of turning the page on former President Donald Trump and his brand of politics, promoting former aides who questioned his commitment to democracy and producing their own plans to combat things like price gouging and high home costs.
Wednesday morning, though, they were reckoning with a stunning sweep by Trump, who as the now-president-elect, appeared set for a swing-state sweep and left Democrats wondering how it all went so wrong.
“Complete, unmitigated disaster,” Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis said when asked about the results. “That was a wholesale repudiation of the Democratic message, the Democratic strategy, Harris’ candidacy. There is no way to sugarcoat what an abject disaster this was.”
Trump’s victory was thorough. He was projected to win or on pace to take all seven swing states up for grabs, while cutting down his margins in blue states from Minnesota to Virginia to New York. He lost women by 10 points after losing them by 15 in 2020, even after fury erupted over the scrapping of constitutional abortion protections. And he cut Harris’ margin among Latino voters to 8 points after losing them by 33 points four years ago.
Democrats, still licking their wounds as they spoke to ABC News Wednesday, had a laundry list of prescriptions for the party’s woes, both strategically in how the 2024 race was waged and more fundamentally in how the party is perceived coast to coast and the state of its coalition.
Harris took over in a particularly hectic series of events, taking over as Democrats’ nominee from Joe Biden after the president’s ruinous June debate poured jet fuel on concerns over his age and fitness for office.
Many expressed dismay and frustration, distressed that Harris’ historic candidacy and the party brand overall held insufficient appeal to win over voters who instead backed a twice-impeached former president convicted of 34 felonies whose closing message was so unfocused that it included riffing on a famous golfer’s genitalia.
Logistically, most pointed out the compressed timeline. In a country where elections have begun to run nearly two years long, Harris had about 100 days, leading some to point the finger at Biden for staying in the race as long as he did over the summer — or even running for reelection at all.
“He never should’ve” run for reelection, said Jim Kessler, the founder of the center-left think tank Third Way. “Democrats and the Biden White House did not do a good enough job listening to the people, and they were saying loud and clear, ‘your age is a concern.’ And they chose to ignore that. They were also saying, the border’s a concern, and so is crime. And they got to the right place on all of those things, including Biden’s age. But it took them too long.”
Harris and Biden for weeks before the election touted policies they said would help Americans deal with rising costs and hammered Trump for essentially killing a bipartisan bill that would’ve strengthened border enforcement.
But for months before that, the White House had insisted that the economy was strong, noting low unemployment numbers and the stock market while batting down worries over things like grocery costs, and was frustrated over the inability to stem the rise in unauthorized border crossings before leaning on executive orders that echoed those Trump himself had enacted.
Trump and his allies went to work to paint Harris as out of touch on even more issues, blanketing the airwaves with ads highlighting Harris’ policies from her 2019 run, including one underscoring her support for surgeries for transgender inmates, with a narrator saying that she was “for they/them” while Trump is “for you.”
All the while, Harris, a loyal No. 2, appeared uncomfortable distancing herself from her boss.
Later in the race, she insisted that her administration would not be a “continuation” of Biden’s and that she would appoint a Republican to her Cabinet, which Biden hadn’t done. But a viral clip on ABC’s “The View” in which she said she couldn’t think of anything substantively she’d do differently helped cement the existing link she had to a president whose approval rating was historically low enough to sink his party in a presidential race.
“Clearly, voters thought the country was on the wrong track, and she became the status quo candidate,” said veteran Democratic strategist James Carville. “And the history of status quo candidates…is not good.”
Some Democrats boiled it down to a phrase that Carville himself made famous: it’s the economy, stupid.
A Gallup poll conducted in September 2020 — the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic — found that Americans said they were better off than they were four years ago by a 22-point margin. The same poll conducted last September fond that Americans believed they were worse off than they were four years ago by a 13-point margin — a 35-point swing.
“It’s the inflation, stupid, right?” said one source familiar with the Harris campaign’s thinking. “At the end of the day, the biggest driver of people’s voting behavior is their economic self-interest, and they felt, by a wide margin, that they were doing pretty well under Donald Trump and that they were not doing well under the current administration. Not to say that other stuff wasn’t important, but it was all superseded by their own economic conditions.”
Beyond her association with Biden, Harris also leaned into one of his favorite arguments against Trump — that he posed a threat to democracy.
She had shunted the theme early in her campaign, instead working to introduce herself in an atmosphere of “joy.” But as old administration aides like John Kelly rebuked him as undemocratic, she pounced on a message that Democrats ultimately said felt unconnected to voters’ everyday struggles.
“Democrats often make the mistake of focusing on long term problems at a time when voters have immediate concerns. And democracy seems like a long-term issue, and it’s not quite tangible. But gas prices, grocery prices, border crossings, a sense that crime is rising, those you feel every day,” Kessler said.
Some Democrats saw deeper troubles.
Gone were the days when Democrats appealed to working and middle-class Americans they said. In their place were rallies with Beyonce and concerts with Bruce Springsteen, while Democrats, in critics’ telling, lectured voters on why the party was right on the issues instead of empathizing with their underlying concerns.
In short, philosophizing rather than fighting.
“It was the economy, was inflation, it was concerned about the border, and those were, for the most part, the top two issues,” Kofinis said. “We had no strategy in order to address that. And as a result, we just fed that alienation. Then in classic Democratic presidential campaign strategy that was eerily reminiscent to 2016, we embrace celebrities and the elites to somehow influence and dictate to the average voter how they should vote.”
“I joined the Democratic Party because I wanted to fight NAFTA trade deals. I joined the Democratic Party because I wanted to drain the swamp in Washington, D.C. I joined the Democratic Party because I was tired of seeing my tax dollars go to foreign wars while my community was crumbling. That sounds like Donald Trump today. We have to take that message back,” added Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha.
For Republicans, everything went right this election.
Rather than deepen opposition, Trump’s controversies and legal struggles deepened loyalties among his base. Rather than gin Democratic turnout, abortion ballot measures appeared to offer voters an off-ramp to fight for reproductive autonomy while separately registering their discontent with the current administration. And instead of running against a candidate who offered a fresh vision from the current White House, Trump faced the second-highest ranking official in it.
Now, the struggle will be continuing the success.
Trump’s romp has the wind at Republicans’ backs, and, should the GOP take the House of Representatives, he’ll have at least two years to cement a string of accomplishments with a pliant Congress. But term limits bar Trump from running again, and replicating his coalition is easier said than done.
“That’s what’s going to be very, very difficult,” said GOP pollster Robert Blizzard, who worked on the 2024 presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — one of several Republicans who ran for the White House adopting Trump’s pugilistic style only to be overwhelmingly rejected by primary voters this year.
Yet in recognition of the gravitation pull that Trump has on the country’s politics, even some Democrats said their path back to electoral success lies in part on the president-elect.
Voters “are hoping to get a repeat of the economy that they liked in his first term. If they get that, the path back for Democrats in 2028 is going to be quite difficult. But if his tariffs drive up inflation and his recklessness really demonstrates to voters that he does not have the special sauce on the economy that many think that he does, that will create a real opening,” said the source familiar with the Harris campaign’s thinking.
“It’s tough, but it’s just the reality of Trump in many ways.”
