“While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent and former Democratic primary candidate.
Democrats spent billions of dollars warning American voters that Donald Trump posed an imminent threat to democracy, that his economic policies would benefit only his wealthy friends, that he was literally a fascist.
In the end, voters didn’t care — or if they did, it didn’t matter.
And now, after Kamala Harris’ decisive loss, Democrats enter a second Trump presidency with no clear leader, no clear plan and no agreement on what caused them to be so wrong about the 2024 election.
“I think there needs to be a cleaning of the house, there needs to be a new generation of leaders that emerge,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., among the few Democrats with presidential ambitions to address the party’s future on Wednesday. “There needs to be new thinking, new ideas and a new direction. And, you know, the establishment produced a disaster.”
With votes still being counted, Trump was on track to become the first Republican in two decades to win the popular vote, although the scope of his Electoral College victory was likely to fall short of President Barack Obama’s 2008 performance in which he won 365 electoral votes.
Trump picked up a small but significant share of younger voters, Black voters and Hispanic voters, many of whom were feeling down about the economy, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide. The Republican president-elect also made progress among voters without a college degree.
Most of the elected Democrats who are most often mentioned as 2028 presidential prospects — including the governors of California, Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania — declined to weigh in when asked. Others canceled scheduled interviews.
The few progressives willing to speak publicly offered different explanations. Relatively few were blaming President Joe Biden for backtracking on his promise not to run for reelection, which blocked the party from picking a replacement in a traditional primary.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent and former Democratic primary candidate, had warned Harris before Election Day that she was focusing too much on flipping Republican votes and not enough on pocketbook issues. He issued a statement excoriating party leadership.
“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,” he said.
