U.S. Vice President Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris waves at supporters as she walks off stage after speaking at Howard University in Washington, DC, on Nov. 6.BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images
If there is one constant in American politics, it is that the losing party in any election typically fails to internalize the lessons of its defeat, while the winner tends to exaggerate the meaning of the mandate voters have given it. This time is unlikely to be any different.
American voters may have delivered an emphatic verdict this week on the Democratic Party’s overindulgence in identity politics and lack of focus on working-class concerns. But that does not mean they want economic autarky or unchecked Republican rule.
After taking all seven of the most hotly contested battleground states and winning the popular vote, president-elect Donald Trump insisted voters had handed him an “an unprecedented and powerful mandate.” But he will have the shortest political honeymoon on record if he misinterprets his victory as a licence to indulge his worst instincts.
Still, Democrats should not count on Trump 2.0 being enough of a train wreck to revive their own fortunes. They need to take a long hard look at why so many Americans chose Mr. Trump over Kamala Harris, despite everything they dislike about him. They need to admit that he spoke more directly – and, well, honestly – to their concerns than she did.
Yet, in the aftermath of their party’s meltdown at the polls, too many Democrats have chosen to point fingers at voters and each other rather than look in the mirror. Too many have sought to blame Ms. Harris’s loss on racism and sexism rather than admit the role that their candidate’s indecipherable word salads, flat-footedness in interviews and scarcely credible pivot to the political centre played in her defeat.
“Democrats need to be mature, and they need to be honest. And they need to say, ‘Yes, there is misogyny, but it’s not just misogyny from white men,’ ” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough insisted on Wednesday. “It’s misogyny from Hispanic men, it’s misogyny from Black men … who do not want a woman leading them.”
Mr. Trump’s inroads among minority male voters – he beat Ms. Harris 55 per cent to 43 per cent among Latino men and increased his support among Black men to 21 per cent – had more to do with their perception of the Republican nominee as a “businessman” focused on the economy than any latent or overt sexism on their part. It was not Ms. Harris’s gender that bothered them, but rather her past political life as a champion of the progressive left.
Within hours of the polls closing – as a red wave washed over the Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that had been the focus of Ms. Harris’s campaign strategy – her defenders were already blaming her loss on an enfeebled President Joe Biden’s “arrogance” and refusal to withdraw from the presidential race earlier.
A White House aide pushed back against such criticism, even suggesting that Democrats would have had a better election result had Mr. Biden remained at the top of the ticket. “Twice our party leaders, in 2016 and 2024, pushed aside Biden for someone who would generate more enthusiasm and twice we lost,” the aide told CNN.
Bernie Sanders came closer to getting it right. “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,” the Vermont Senator said in a Wednesday statement.
He could have added that the party that once ruled the U.S. Rust Belt thanks to its relentless focus on worker rights and kitchen-table concerns, and on good jobs and good pensions, somehow lost its moorings and became the party of safe spaces and trigger warnings, of gender-neutral pronouns and bathrooms, of open borders and defund the police, of critical race theory and reparations, of #MeToo and DEI, of wokeism and AOC, of illiberal liberals and cancel culture, of electric-vehicle mandates and bicycle lanes – of essentially everything that interests urban progressives, but which average Americans consider eccentric, self-indulgent and foreign to their everyday lives.
A stronger Democratic candidate than Ms. Harris – one with experience in swing-state politics rather than a California progressive who had not won a contested primary – might have been able to overcome the deep well of dissatisfaction toward the party’s drift into identity politics and the righteous tone of its talking heads to beat Mr. Trump. Perhaps not.
Still, as the race for the 2028 presidential nomination begins, Democrats need to re-examine their priorities. Mr. Trump’s base of MAGA zealots, white working-class voters and (now) minority men is a narrow one by historical standards. Millions of non-MAGA Americans nevertheless voted for Mr. Trump because they could not put their faith in a somewhat mysterious Democratic candidate who insisted her “values” had not changed, even though she claimed to no longer advocate most of the progressive policies she once stood for.