Democrats are pointing fingers and scrambling for answers over what went wrong with their message on the economy after a resounding loss by Vice President Harris to President-elect Trump that saw her fall in every single swing state.
Harris’s loss was a bad one that extended to the Senate, where the GOP has picked up three seats and hopes to win a fourth in Pennsylvania. Several other Democrats in the Senate skated through tight races.
In the House, the party is scrambling to win the majority. If Republicans hold their majority, it will give the GOP unified power of the executive and legislative branches and allow Trump a chance to reshape a host of policies — a nightmare for Democrats.
The depths of the loss can also be seen in some of the margins in deep-blue states. In New Jersey, Harris only won by around 5 points after President Biden took the state by 16 points in 2020. Illinois has voted for Democratic presidential candidates by double digits in every such election since the 1990s. Harris looks like she will win it by 8 points.
The searing loss has exposed Democratic divisions, with leading progressives arguing their party lost its voice and failed to offer a message that resonated with working-class voters who abandoned the party.
They say Harris and the party at large lost its voice on the economy, the single more important issue in the fight with Trump.
While the Republican offered simple messages that appeared to resonate with the electorate — tariffs, tariffs, and tariffs, coupled with a message that Biden and Harris had broken the economy and Trump would fix it — Harris’s message was muddled.
“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,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Wednesday in a blistering statement.
“First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well,” he added.
But Jaime Harrison, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, called the remarks by Sanders “straight up BS.”
“Biden was the most-pro worker President of my life time- saved Union pensions, created millions of good paying jobs and even marched in a picket line and some of MVP’s plans would have fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial wealth gap for working people across this country,” he wrote in a post on the social platform X.
“From the child tax credits, to 25k for a down payment for a house to Medicare covering the cost of senior health care in their homes. There are a lot of post election takes and this one ain’t a good one.”
Democratic strategist Melissa DeRosa on Thursday told anchor Marni Hughes on “NewsNation Live” that the Democratic Party “lost the script” at some point in the race.
“I think that we are talking to ourselves in places like MSNBC and NPR and The New York Times and we have completely lost touch with the working men and women, which is ironic given that the Democratic Party is the party of the labor movement,” she said.
“We’ve got to get back to basics, and I think following this election we’ve got to do a lot more listening, and a lot of that starts with understanding that while the Dow Jones can be off the charts, inflation was crushing American families and real wages were not rising.”
Harris ran on an array of proposals centered on showcasing her willingness to work to bring prices down.
She pledged to reinstate a child tax credit, she offered a plan to go after price gouging by large companies, and she said she would work to build homes to take down housing prices.
She at times adopted Trump positions, such as a proposal to eliminate taxes on tips, and at other times saw Trump co-opt Democratic policies, like the child tax credit.
But her campaign also focused even more prominently on abortion rights and Trump’s threat to democracy, a theme underscored by her campaign trips with former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.).
She also struggled to differentiate herself from Biden’s record, at one point telling the hosts of “The View” that she couldn’t think of a thing she would have done differently from Biden.
Trump’s arguments on the campaign trail may have resonated with workers who have seen low wage growth over the past several decades.
Trump for years has blamed that situation on the negative impacts of free-trade deals supported by both parties, saying it hollowed out the U.S. industrial base. Those antiglobalization arguments were shared by progressives.
Sanders pointed to wage stagnation in his angry response aimed at Democrats.
Inflation-adjusted weekly wages for the average American worker “are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago,” he said Wednesday.
Biden and Harris both sought to reassure Americans in their handling of the economy by pointing to strong top-line numbers, such as the 4.1 percent jobless rate in October and the steady growth of the U.S. economy under their watch.
But neither the White House nor campaign found a way to overcome voter frustration about inflation after prices rose more than 20 percent since Biden took office.
“It is not the overall economy, but inflation,” Cornell University economist Kaushik Basu wrote in a commentary. “We know from history that inflation can damage the party in power. … Unlike other economic variables, people do not need official statistics to see inflation.”
Many Democrats fumed throughout the election that voters were not giving them enough credit for their handling of the economy, nor their plans to fight inflation.
“Many attitudes of voters can be summed up that it’s easier to be angry than it is to be informed,” Democratic strategist Antjuan Seawright told The Hill in an interview.
Strategists and pundits across the political spectrum, however, say Harris’s loss to Trump suggests a fundamental issue with the Democratic Party’s approach to the economy.
Progressive group Way to Win, which focuses on advancing diversity and multiracial democracy, said Democrats have to open their eyes to a new reality.
“There’s simply no denying that we are playing on a new landscape where none of the old rules apply, and Democrats must start entirely from scratch to meet this emerging era in American history,” Way to Win President Tory Gavito said in a statement.
Matthew Klink, a California-based communications strategist for conservative causes, told The Hill that Democrats need “a refresh” after three straight elections in which their presidential candidate was aligned with the party elite.
“Democrats haven’t really had a small-d democratic process to select their candidate in a long time,” Klink said. “[Hillary Clinton] was selected by Barack Obama. Joe Biden was really handed the nomination because they were worried Bernie Sanders was going to take it.”
“In this case, Kamala Harris was given the nomination because Biden backed out, and they realized they didn’t have time to do a proper process.”
Commentators in the financial sector expressed more surprise in the aftermath of the election about the decisiveness of Trump’s victory than about the victory itself.
“I doubt there will be much surprise that Trump has won. Perhaps the bigger shock is the margin of victory,” Mark Dowding, BlueBay chief investment officer at RBC asset management, said in a statement. “This wasn’t a particularly close election compared to 2016 or 2020 and it would appear Harris has been thrashed. Trump has won the popular vote.”
