Devastated Democrats grapple with Kamala Harris’ loss

Democrats called for a full party accounting Wednesday as they tried to pick up the pieces of their shattered organization a day after Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to former President Donald Trump.

Interviews with more than a dozen campaign aides, strategists, elected officials and Democrats on the battlefield revealed a party consumed by rage, grief, finger-pointing and self-reflection. Many were given anonymity so they could talk honestly about inner dynamics while emotions were still raw.

They said they see a party drifting away from its former identity as protectors of the left behind to represent the party elites. They questioned the campaign’s decision to focus on reaching out to “soft” Republicans when they had their own problems with base voters.

Some spoke of revamping the party’s views on immigration and called for tougher enforcement at the border. They saw the growing support for Trump in metropolitan areas as a backlash from early policies under President Joe Biden’s administration that allowed migrants to pour into blue states, where they were often housed and financially supported even as working-class residents struggled to receive services.

“This is a realignment. Our country has moved to the right. It’s not center left. Our party has to grapple with that and find its footing in that world,” said Rep. Nikki Budzinski, an Illinois Democrat. who won by double digits in a purple district after campaigning heavily for the economy.“It takes time. Finger pointing is not worth it at all. This was a message. The voters spoke to us. It would be a disservice to us not to hear it.”

Of course, that was not a universal view, which underscores that there is a massive internal struggle brewing.

Late. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., issued a statement blasting “big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party.”

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party that has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he said Wednesday. “First it was the white working class, and now it’s also Latino and black workers. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

Blame it on Biden

The finger-pointing was in full force on Wednesday. Many Democrats blamed Biden for not dropping out sooner, while acknowledging that it was the party all along that allowed him to seek a second term, essentially clearing the primary for him.

Harris, they said, inherited a campaign in which the fundamental negatives of a nation on the wrong track were baked in. Some blamed the influence of Obama-era consultants and strategists, who play a major role in messaging and who, according to one longtime Democrat close to the Biden team, were “stuck in 2009.”

A Harris ally said Democrats as a party will have to count on making a “martyr” out of Trump by impeaching him twice, bringing a series of state and federal prosecutions against him and creating a House Select Committee on the 6 .January who spent weeks attacking him. him on prime time TV.

“People had to choose who was going to go after him,” Harris allies said of prosecutors and Democrats. “There can’t be eight cases against him. It’s just not strategic because you want to make him a martyr. And guess what? You made him a martyr. Everyone is suing him. All state attorneys are investigating him. Every Democrat who has the authority to investigate is investigating Trump. We made ourselves look like a joke.”

Some of what went wrong can be traced to the unraveling of the coalition that ushered Biden into office in 2020, a person close to Biden said. The president claimed victory over Trump after beating out an expansive primary field that had drifted too far to the left. But as Biden moved into the Oval Office, top aides pushed him toward policies that drifted from the moderate persona, such as issuing sweeping student debt relief, loosening restrictions at the border and pulling the permit for the Keystone Pipeline.

Bring in the new guard

Many Democrats also called for a purge of the old guard operatives who have run the last several campaigns.

“The team that’s there, it’s time for them to retire. We need a completely different strategy,” said one Democrat who was part of the re-election effort. “The day of Obama and his genius is over. They have been left behind. They are out of touch with the American people. The Democratic Party is out of touch.”

Campaign aides and allies directed much of the angst at campaign chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon, who they complained ran a shop with the hand of an autocrat. According to three senior campaign officials, they saw her as loyal to Biden and never allowed Harris to really take the break from him that she needed to win.

O’Malley Dillon, they said, tainted information with only a narrow circle of advisers and kept other senior officials off email chains and updates. That sidelined many of the aides who knew Harris the longest — and the best, they said.

That led to what some believed were serious mistakes, like Harris’ remark on “The View.” In the interview, she was asked what she would do differently than Biden. Harris said she couldn’t think of anything.

The message directly contradicted what they believed to be a crucial message that the vice president would be an agent of change. Republicans jumped on the remark and ran it in ads.

One of the officials said longtime Harris aides were not included in the preparation of Harris before that interview.

“She’s making that mistake on ‘The View.’ And she’s making that mistake on ‘The View’ because they told her, ‘be loyal,'” said a senior campaign official.

A source familiar with the dynamics of the campaign pushed back on the idea that O’Malley Dillon overruled any of Harris’ team members, saying that throughout the contest O’Malley Dillon held daily meetings with Harris’ two chiefs of staff, Lorraine Voles and Sheila Nix.

A Harris aide called for more diversity among decision-makers, pointing to an overly white leadership makeup of Harris’ campaign and Biden’s previous campaign. The campaign had, among others, campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez and former Rep. Cedric Richmond as Senior Advisor.

“There was a big gap in leadership of color, up and down the system, that I think played some of these blind spots,” the person said. “I just want to see more honesty and a little less whiteness … I think if we’re able to kind of look inside ourselves and see the talent that’s already there, then there can be a new generation of leadership. But it will be hard. It feels like a decade lost. It’s really bad and we have to decide where to go from here. We have to restructure the whole thing.”

The aide believed that Democrats still would have lost if Biden were the nominee and that the party should have worked to ensure that Biden did not run for re-election.

“How the hell haven’t we dealt with this problem? He’s 80 years old. He was supposed to be a disposable man. The man could barely speak and actually be coherent,” the person said. “It was too late and we knew we had a Biden problem this time last year. The party knew it, and people really weren’t honest about how out of touch he was and how his age really played with America.”

Ultimately, one Democratic lawmaker said, the party must reassess its leadership both in office and behind the scenes.

“There needs to be a real accounting to the establishment of what went wrong,” the lawmaker said. “Long-time operatives and senior leaders frankly need to step aside and allow for new ideas and a rebuilding of the Democratic Party with much more vision, substance and inspiration.”

Vermont Sen. Peter Welch, the first Democratic senator to call on Biden to bow out — who said he has no regrets — said there is a mandate for Democrats to work with Republicans right now. But he had no answer as to who in the party should become the next leader.

“To be sure, I couldn’t point to anyone,” Welch said. “It’s a vacuum. Bring back James Carville.”

‘Trying to please everyone’

Several Democrats scoffed at any discussion of 2028, but governors such as Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and JB Pritzker of Illinois are among those on the short list as potential next-generation candidates for the White House.

Adam Jentleson, a former Democratic Senate aide, said Trump’s clear victory shows Democrats have a “fundamental brand problem” that probably no campaign could have solved in three months.

The party has prioritized coalition management and keeping all the myriad interest groups in its orbit happy rather than focusing first on winning elections, he said, limiting candidates’ flexibility and pushing them to take unpopular positions like those Harris embraced during his first run for president in 2019 and spent most of his 2024 campaign trying to run away.

“We’ve fallen into this habit of trying to please everyone and then, only after we’ve pleased everyone, take what’s left and try to create a winning strategy,” he said. “We must be much better at setting boundaries with the groups and taking the political demands seriously.”

If and when thermostatic backlash to Trump starts, he said Democrats need to be careful to channel it into winning rather than pushing the boundaries of acceptable politics like during Trump’s first term.

“The question becomes what you do with that energy,” he said. “Do we do what we did last time and waste it on progressive edgelord politics, or do we capture it to actually fight back and change policy?”

Wade Randlett, a Harris supporter and longtime Democratic fundraiser from California, expressed optimism about the party’s prospects down the road. Next up is the 2026 midterm elections, where Trump’s record will be an issue front and center for voters.

“Trump is going to do bat-s— crazy things over the next two years, and we’re going to run a referendum campaign in the 2026 midterms on bat— crazy things.”

“When we get to 2028,” he continued, “we’re going to have a much better and more compelling case with candidates who can make non-college-educated people feel the way Joe Biden did. That is, he’s middle-class Joe. He gets your life. And he thinks about your life. We have to have someone who can do that.”