Devastated
Democrats Play the Blame Game, and Stare at a Dark Future
In
interviews, lawmakers and strategists tried to explain Kamala Harris’s defeat,
pointing to misinformation, the Gaza war, a toxic Democratic brand and the
party’s approach to transgender issues.
Vice
President Kamala Harris performed worse than President Biden did four years ago
across the country, in cities, suburbs and rural towns.
Reid J.
Epstein Lisa Lerer Nicholas Nehamas
By Reid J.
EpsteinLisa Lerer and Nicholas Nehamas
Reid J.
Epstein reported from Madison, Wis., Lisa Lerer from New York and Nicholas
Nehamas from Washington.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/us/politics/democrats-kamala-harris.html
Nov. 7, 2024
Updated
11:43 a.m. ET
A depressed
and demoralized Democratic Party is beginning the painful slog into a largely
powerless future, as its leaders grapple with how deeply they underestimated
Donald J. Trump’s resurgent hold on the nation.
The
nationwide repudiation of the party stunned many Democrats who had expressed a
“nauseous” confidence about their chances in the final weeks of the race. As
they sifted through the wreckage of their defeats, they found no easy answers
as to why voters so decisively rejected their candidates.
In more than
two dozen interviews, lawmakers, strategists and officials offered a litany of
explanations for Vice President Kamala Harris’s failure — and just about all of
them fit neatly into their preconceived notions of how to win in politics.
The quiet
criticism, on phone calls, in group chats and during morose team meetings, was
a behind-the-scenes preview of the intraparty battle to come, with Democrats
quickly falling into the ideological rifts that have defined their party for
much of the Trump era.
What was
indisputable was how badly Democrats did. They lost the White House,
surrendered control of the Senate and appeared headed to defeat in the House.
They performed worse than four years ago in cities and suburbs, rural towns and
college towns. An early New York Times analysis of the results found the vast
majority of the nation’s more than 3,100 counties swinging rightward since
President Biden won in 2020.
The results
showed that the Harris campaign, and Democrats more broadly, had failed to find
an effective message against Mr. Trump and his down-ballot allies or to address
voters’ unhappiness about the direction of the nation under Mr. Biden. The
issues the party chose to emphasize — abortion rights and the protection of
democracy — did not resonate as much as the economy and immigration, which
Americans often highlighted as among their most pressing concerns.
Many
Democrats were considering how to navigate a dark future, with the party unable
to stop Mr. Trump from carrying out a right-wing transformation of American
government. Others turned inward, searching for why the nation rejected them.
They spoke
about misinformation and the struggle to communicate the party’s vision in a
diminished news environment inundated with right-wing propaganda. They conceded
that Ms. Harris had paid a price for not breaking from Mr. Biden’s support of
Israel in the war in Gaza, which angered Arab American voters in Michigan. Some
felt their party had moved too far to the left on social issues like
transgender rights. Others argued that as Democrats had shifted rightward on
economic issues, they had left behind the interests of the working class.
They
lamented a Democratic Party brand that has become toxic in many parts of the
country. Several noted that the independent Senate candidate in Nebraska ran 14
percentage points ahead of Ms. Harris in the state.
And many
said they were struggling to process the scale of their loss, describing their
feelings as a mix of shock, mourning and panic over what might come in a second
Trump administration.
“I am pretty
devastated and worried,” said Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas, who
served as a co-chair for the Harris campaign. “There’s real, imminent danger
for people here. There is real danger here ahead for Americans — including many
Americans who voted for Trump.”
Not everyone
was quite as mournful.
Senator
Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the longtime progressive standard-bearer, blamed
what he called a party-wide emphasis on identity politics at the expense of
focusing on the economic concerns of working-class voters.
“It’s not
just Kamala,” he said. “It’s a Democratic Party which increasingly has become a
party of identity politics, rather than understanding that the vast majority of
people in this country are working class. This trend of workers leaving the
Democratic Party started with whites, and it has accelerated to Latinos and
Blacks.”
Mr. Sanders,
a political independent who has long criticized the influence of the party’s
biggest donors and veteran operatives, offered a pessimistic forecast: “Whether
or not the Democratic Party has the capability, given who funds it and its
dependency on well-paid consultants, whether it has the capability of
transforming itself, remains to be seen.”
Mr. Sanders
was hardly the only one who diagnosed the party’s problem as being too beholden
to the needs of its identity groups. Mr. Trump spent tens of millions of
dollars on anti-transgender television advertising, which went unanswered by
the Harris campaign and its allies.
Representative
Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, who was one of two dozen Democrats who sought
the party’s presidential nomination in 2020, suggested the party should shift
its approach to transgender issues.
“Democrats
spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally
honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Mr. Moulton said. “I have two
little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male
or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say
that.”
But
Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the chair of the Congressional
Progressive Caucus, said Democrats should not give in to prejudice and
misinformation. She compared the fight for transgender rights to the struggle
over gay marriage, in which public opinion shifted quickly.
“We need to
create space for people’s fears and let them get to know people,” said Ms.
Jayapal, who described herself as “the proud mom of a daughter who happens to
be trans.”
“And we need to counter the idea that my daughter is a
threat to anyone else’s children,” she said.
And then
there was the blame for Mr. Biden.
Even before
he announced his run for re-election, Democrats were whispering that the
president, now 81, was too old to seek re-election, and polls confirmed that
voters had serious reservations.
Democrats
who were worried at the time now say Ms. Harris never really had a chance.
“The
dynamics of this race were baked in before Kamala Harris became a candidate,”
said Julián Castro, the former housing secretary who also ran for president in
2020. “She was dealt a bad hand. She was trying to get elected in the shadow of
a president who was unpopular and who the public had overwhelmingly been saying
should not run for re-election and took too long to step aside.”
Even David
Plouffe, a veteran Democratic strategist whom Ms. Harris brought into her
operation after Mr. Biden dropped out, seemed to suggest that the president had
put her in a difficult position.
“We dug out
of a deep hole but not enough,” Mr.
Plouffe wrote on X.
Mr. Biden’s
defenders said it was not his fault.
Senator
Chris Coons of Delaware, a top Biden ally, said he did not think the president
had been a drag on Ms. Harris. She ran “a terrific campaign,” he added.
“There’s a
couple of groups in the United States, young men and Latino voters, that just
did not respond in a positive way to our candidate and our message and our
record,” he said. “We had a gap that we didn’t close.”
For her
part, Ms. Harris delivered a concession speech that urged supporters to remain
vigilant about the present and optimistic about the future, and to keep
fighting for their values. She did not point fingers or cast blame.
“I am so
proud of the race we ran, and the way we ran it,” she said. “Hear me when I
say, the light of America’s promise will always burn bright. As long as we
never give up. And as long as we keep fighting.”
On Thursday,
Mr. Biden addressed the nation from the Rose Garden, urging his supporters to
remain optimistic and tenacious.
“Setbacks
are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable,” he said. “We all get knocked
down, but the measure of our character, as my dad would say, is how quickly we
get back up.”
As they
reflected on the fallout, Democratic officials compared notes about where this
Election Day ranked on their list of horrible experiences.
Matt
Bennett, the executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, a
centrist think tank, said the party had not faced a crisis as severe since the
1980s, when Democrats lost three straight presidential races in landslides.
To regain
their grip on power, Democrats must embrace a more moderate approach, he
argued. But that will not be easy, Mr. Bennett warned, since the party is
facing a leadership vacuum with Mr. Biden weakened and Ms. Harris defeated.
“The one way
to beat a right-wing populist is through the center,” Mr. Bennett said. “You
must become the party that is more pragmatic, reasonable and more sane. That’s
where we have to go.”
A leadership
vacuum
Mini
Timmaraju, the chief executive of Reproductive Freedom for All, said Democrats
must develop a long-term plan to directly confront the sexism — both within
their party and the nation — that hampered Ms. Harris and Hillary Clinton, the
only women to win a major party’s presidential nomination.
“We can’t
keep brushing it under the rug,” she said. “The narrative cannot be, ‘Kamala
Harris somehow failed.’ There’s a bigger failure here and we have to figure it
out and reckon with it.”
With Mr.
Biden and Ms. Harris now political lame ducks, the Senate majority gone and
without a likely House speaker in the party, Democrats in 2025 will find
themselves short on clear leaders, as they did after Mr. Trump won in 2016.
The next
decision party leaders face is whom to choose as the next leader of the
Democratic National Committee, a post that was largely ceremonial with Mr.
Biden in office but will include far more responsibilities and power without
White House officials calling the shots.
Jaime
Harrison, the party’s chairman since Mr. Biden installed him in the post four
years ago, has said for months that he will not seek another term. A new
election is set to take place early next year.
Reid J.
Epstein covers campaigns and elections from Washington. Before joining The
Times in 2019, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Newsday and The
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. More about Reid J. Epstein
Lisa Lerer
is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has
covered American politics for nearly two decades. More about Lisa Lerer
Nicholas
Nehamas is a Times political reporter covering the presidential campaign of
Vice President Kamala Harris. More about Nicholas Nehamas
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário