Democrats begin soul-searching – and finger-pointing – after devastating loss

It’s the inflation, stupid.

As divided and demoralized Democrats sift through the ashes of the 2024 election map, most agree on two points: Vice President Kamala Harris was fighting strong headwinds when it came to how voters felt about the cost of living. And her inability to convince enough voters that she could do a better job than Donald Trump on the economy cost her the election.

Two-thirds of voters rated the economy poorly, according to exit polls. President-elect Trump won them by 70% to 28%. Nearly half of all voters said their family’s financial situation was worse today than four years ago – and they backed Mr. Trump by 81% to 17%.

And less-well-off voters were more likely to swing to Mr. Trump. In 2020, he lost voters who made less than $50,000 by 10 points. This year, according to exit polls, he lost them by just 1 point. He lost voters who make between $50,000 and $100,000 by 15 points in 2020 – and won them this election. The only group that moved toward Ms. Harris was voters who make six-figure incomes. She won them by 5 points this year, after President Joe Biden lost them by 12 points in 2020.

Democrats are uniformly alarmed that working-class voters who once made up the core of the Democratic base continued to abandon the party in droves. But they don’t agree on why that happened, with some pointing to a failure to focus enough on pocketbook issues and “soaking the rich,” while others slammed tin-eared and sometimes condescending messaging from a professional class dominated by white college graduates.

“Working-class voters vote more on their perceived economic self-interest than abstract debates over things like democracy,” says Jeff Hauser, a Democratic strategist and former spokesperson for the AFL-CIO, the largest union federation in the United States. “Unfortunately, Democrats ran a campaign that in their national message was predominantly about abstract concerns like democracy, and less about the economy.”

The big disagreement among Democrats isn’t about the national headwinds. It’s whether Ms. Harris and the party could have made major strategic decisions in the race’s closing months to prevail anyway. Some are griping that the party didn’t message effectively enough on the economy, and took for granted Hispanic voters until it was too late. They are also debating whether they fundamentally have too many college-educated liberal white people who come off as insincere when talking to blue-collar voters of all ethnic backgrounds.

“I think we’ve done a lot to demonstrate that we’re a party largely of white elites,” says Democratic strategist Andy Barr, who pointed to issues like student loan forgiveness as a way to alienate blue-collar voters.

“Most people in this country don’t go to college, and we sort of act as if they do. Most Latinos in this country aren’t fixated on immigration policy, and we sort of act as if they are,” he says. “We’re running campaigns that sort of serve us and our interests, and not the people we say we’re running to represent.”

One former Biden White House strategist, who asked that they not be named in order to speak candidly, said the party needs to do some deep soul-searching about why Latinos and working-class voters of all stripes decided that Mr. Trump was their best bet economically.

“Democrats are going to need to take some time to analyze, to rethink the way we engage voters, and talk about policies, and talk about our accomplishments,” they said. “The party does need to tackle that issue head-on. It’s probably the most important thing for the rebirth of the Democratic Party.”

Democrats may simply have forgotten Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. People prioritize basic needs first – finances, stability, safety – and subordinate everything else if those primary issues aren’t addressed. Inflation, illegal immigration, and crime, all of which spiked in the first few years of the Biden-Harris administration coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic (before dipping over the past year), were more salient and immediate to many voters than issues like protecting democracy or abortion access. Nearly one-third of voters who believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases voted for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump even won some voters who admitted they didn’t like him and worried about his policy views. By a 10-point margin, voters said he’s “too extreme,” while a narrow majority of voters said Ms. Harris wasn’t; of the 53% of voters who hold an unfavorable view of him, 9% voted for him anyway.

Strong economy, but high prices

The unemployment rate is hovering at historic lows, and the stock market has boomed. But rent and groceries are still expensive – and that hurts a lot more for voters with limited means.

Some leading figures on the left are now saying Democrats lost because they didn’t do enough to fix it.

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said in a postelection statement. “First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

But around the globe, voters have punished incumbent parties on the left, right, and center for inflation – which was fueled by pandemic-driven supply chain interruptions and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as massive government spending that many countries undertook to keep their economies afloat during the depths of the COVID-19 shutdown and its aftermath.

A Financial Times analysis found that in all 10 developed countries that have held elections this year, the governing party did worse than in the previous race – the first time this has ever happened. In fact, Democrats saw their vote share drop by a smaller amount than other ruling parties.

Still, U.S. voters clearly weren’t happy with the state of things. A majority, 59%, disapproved of Mr. Biden, including 45% who strongly disapproved. Ms. Harris, as his vice president, had an albatross around her neck the whole campaign.

One challenge was that many of Democrats’ economic achievements were tucked into sprawling packages, with benefits that were only going to emerge in the long run or were already being phased out. The bipartisan infrastructure bill is just getting shovel-ready projects going. The Biden administration passed a hard cap on out-of-pocket Medicare spending – which will save money for a lot of older adults – but it doesn’t kick in until 2025. The $3,600 child tax credits that were included in their 2021 pandemic relief package helped pull millions of children out of poverty, but expired after one year – which left families feeling, rightly, like they suddenly had less money now.

Even President Biden acknowledged that on Thursday, saying the “vast majority” of the good economic work his administration had done for the economy won’t be felt for years, with policies and projects “only now just really kicking in.”

The Biden factor: “a deep hole”

And even if there were an economic record to sell, many Democrats gripe that they didn’t have a candidate who could sell it for the past few years. As President Biden became more visibly frail, his staff limited his public appearances, turning down even traditional layups like the pre-Super Bowl interview. His disastrous June debate eventually forced him out of the race, leaving Ms. Harris just 107 days to build a presidential campaign and define herself to voters.

David Plouffe, Ms. Harris’ top adviser, posted on the social media platform X that the campaign had “dug out of a deep hole” – an implicit criticism of Mr. Biden.

There are some signs that the Harris campaign’s ad messaging and ground game actually did make a difference – even though it wasn’t enough. She lost far less ground compared with in the 2020 election in the swing states where she campaigned than she did in the rest of the country. Milwaukee County, which includes the city and some inner suburbs, was the rare place where Mr. Trump only improved on his 2020 margins by 1 point. Mecklenburg County, North Carolina (Charlotte), moved just 2 points to the right, as did Fulton County, Georgia, which includes much of Atlanta.

But the shift toward Mr. Trump was much more dramatic in some major metro areas that the campaigns didn’t seriously contest.

Miami-Dade County moved 19 points toward Mr. Trump, who became the first Republican presidential candidate to carry it since 1988. In New York City, where most of the vote has been counted as of Thursday, Ms. Harris was winning by a 38-point margin, down from Mr. Biden’s 54-point margin four years ago. Cook County, Illinois (Chicago), shifted 11 points toward Mr. Trump.

Some of Ms. Harris’ approach had similar problems as Mr. Biden’s. Her pledge to incentivize homebuilders to increase housing supply, for instance, was long-term and abstract – and wouldn’t do anything for people whose rent has spiked in recent years. And some Democrats expressed frustration that her campaign hadn’t stuck with populist messaging that Mr. Trump was a lackey for big business. She spent much of the end of the race focused on Mr. Trump as a threat to democracy, including in her closing argument speech on the National Mall.

Mr. Trump’s economic messaging seemed to be particularly successful with Hispanic voters. Exit polls showed Mr. Trump carrying 45% of the Hispanic vote nationally, a 13-point jump from his 2020 performance and the high-water mark for any Republican presidential candidate in more than a half-century. The only other Republican who has topped 40% of the Hispanic vote since the TV networks began conducting exit polls in 1972 was George W. Bush in 2004.

Attack ad on transgender treatments

It’s impossible to know how this race would have played out if Mr. Biden had decided not to run after the 2022 midterms and allowed Democrats to hold a primary for the nomination. Few Democrats would have struggled as much to get distance from the Biden administration as his No. 2. On the other hand, a primary could have led to a repeat of the 2019 contest, in which Democratic candidates were forced to the left on a bevy of issues by activist groups – and where some of Ms. Harris’ most damaging comments, which were later resurrected in attack ads by the Trump campaign, were made.

The Trump campaign spent the most money on an ad showing a clip of Ms. Harris promising to provide incarcerated transgender people access to gender-affirming care treatments. Democrats acknowledge that ad, and a follow-up ad featuring popular Black radio host Charlemagne tha God slamming her for the comments on his show, did serious damage to her, convincing some swing voters that she was “dangerously liberal,” as the ad said. According to an analysis shared by Ms. Harris’ leading super PAC with The New York Times, that spot shifted the race 2.7 percentage points toward Mr. Trump after viewers watched it. The tagline “Kamala Harris is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you,” emphasized that she was focused on the wrong issues.

While Mr. Trump appeared on scores of podcasts with large audiences of young men, Ms. Harris largely avoided them. Multiple Democrats faulted Ms. Harris for not accepting popular podcast host Joe Rogan’s invitation to come to his Austin, Texas, studio for an interview. Mr. Rogan, who leans right but holds fairly heterodox political views, interviewed Mr. Trump and endorsed him on the election’s eve.

Democrats don’t all agree on what went wrong – and whether Ms. Harris really stood a chance at fixing things. But they all agree that something needs to change.

“There are a lot of folks that look at how Democrats are portrayed, and say, ‘They care about all these other things, but they don’t care about what’s going on in my life,’” says Democratic strategist Rodell Mollineau. “There is a large chasm between what Democrats in Washington, D.C., think they are and what they stand for, and what the American people perceive them to be and what they stand for – and that’s what we have to address.”