Supporters sit after Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a concession speech for the 2024 presidential election on the campus of Howard University in Washington, on Nov. 6.Ben Curtis/The Associated Press
When the Republican Party suffered an embarrassing loss in 2012, it conducted a comprehensive study to plot a fresh way forward. Its leadership completely ignored the recommendations, and the GOP won two of the next three elections, returning Donald Trump to the presidency Tuesday.
That’s not the Democrats’ way. When they have a catastrophic election performance, they retreat into a well-rehearsed four stages of mourning: regret, review, recrimination and a thorough recasting of the party’s profile.
Here they go again. They are so adept at seeking to recover from defeat – a process of introspection and self-flagellation that they perfected in the period when they lost five of the six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988 – that they don’t even have to retreat to the friendly confines of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to conduct a postmortem. The election isn’t even a week in the past and already the process is well under way.
The regrets began around midnight Tuesday when it became clear that Mr. Trump had triumphed. The recriminations have been ricocheting from cable networks to social media.
These are the elements: It’s Joe Biden’s fault for not announcing earlier that he wouldn’t seek a second term. It’s the White House’s fault because administration staffers hid the extent of the President’s decline. It’s the press’s fault for not probing into Mr. Biden’s mental acuity. It’s the party leadership’s fault because it settled too easily on Kamala Harris without permitting an alternative nominee to emerge. It’s her fault for selecting a lacklustre running mate. It’s the campaign strategists’ fault because they didn’t address the principal issues of the campaign.
Now that they have that out of the way, the recasting of the strategy has begun. Here are some of the proposals already in fierce collision.
Return to the party’s roots
This is the theory of Senator Bernie Sanders, who technically isn’t even a Democrat; he’s a Vermont independent, though on Capitol Hill he caucuses with the Democrats, and when he runs for president, he does so in Democratic primaries. He argues that the Democrats lost the support of blue-collar Americans, the bedrock of the party since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, because they spoke to elites and not to working Americans.
The statistics bear out the idea that blue-collar workers have migrated to the Republicans. The rhetoric of the Democratic Party reflects the interests and perceptions of the college-educated, the suburban and many of the wealthy – formerly the visible base of the Republicans, who under Mr. Trump, himself well educated and wealthy, managed to prosper without them.
The Sanders view, buttressed by House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York: The Democrats lost the workers because they stopped talking and looking like a workers’ party. No matter that the heroes of those one-time Democrats were Mr. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, wealthy Harvard graduates whose first glimpses of factories were on campaign tours.
Abandon the woke talk
The only people still using that term are those who deplore some elements of what once were its precepts: compassion for the LGBTQ community; a re-evaluation of the country’s history, with a special focus on slavery and gender discrimination; and a strong commitment to the emerging issues of freedom and tolerance that gave the party energy in the 1960s and the Obama years.
The advocates of repudiating “wokeness” are arguing that the party suffered substantial damage from one of the signature television ads of the 2024 campaign, the one that had the kicker line, “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” They argue the party cannot be vulnerable to an attack like that again
Reclaim the party’s role as a progressive, anti-discrimination force
This is the notion that dared not speak its name in November but has not vanished. It likely will return in full throat by mid-winter, after the Trump administration is in place, the crusade against immigrants is in progress and the 47th president’s first budget is released.
The twin towers of this view: First, since 1928, the party always has been the voice of immigrants and the repository of their votes once they’ve become assimilated. And second, the party can’t ethically or strategically relinquish its heritage as the bullhorn for the extension of freedom and the crusader against discrimination that since 1964 has been its glory and its identity.
Run, don’t walk, toward the centre
This is the lesson from the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign, which prevailed by aiming at the political centre – a strategy now being urged once again by James Carville, the former Clinton adviser who was the author of the “It’s the economy, stupid” mantra that helped defeat George H.W. Bush.
Deep in a funk, seemingly incapable of battling the Republicans of Ronald Reagan and Mr. Bush, moderates in the party coalesced in a group called the Democratic Leadership Council, which argued, “America is at a turning point, and so is the Democratic Party.” The party steered from the frontiers of the left. It spoke amiably, not caustically, about the financial centres of the country, and urged economic prudence.
Rev. Jesse Jackson derided the DLC, which included a younger Mr. Biden, as the “Democrats for the Leisure Class.” At times, some of its leading figures, including Mr. Clinton, sounded a bit like Dwight Eisenhower. But the party recovered its footing.
“It’s probably time for a new DLC, outside of Washington, led by the governors,” Alvin From, who founded the original organization in 1985, said in an interview over the weekend. “But the first thing is hard reality therapy to realize the hole we’re in, then to show new faces and market-test an agenda.”
Epilogue: That 2012 GOP “Growth and Opportunity Project” study called for outreach to women, Black people and Hispanics. All but one of the 17 candidates for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination disregarded its findings. That single outlier is president-elect of the United States.