Democratic Finger-Pointing Begins After Brutal Election Night

Democrats’ massive losses in the 2024 elections sparked a wave of finger-pointing within the party about its campaign strategy, messaging and President Joe Biden’s initial decision to seek reelection. 

Donald Trump did better in every single county in the country than he did in the 2016 or 2020 elections. He won not only the Electoral College vote on Tuesday but also the popular vote, the first Republican to do so in 20 years. He made tremendous gains with young Americans and Latinos, which could be a historic realignment among two core Democratic voting groups.

In Congress, Republicans flipped control of the Senate and may even hold on to the House, giving them a trifecta with massive implications for the country. 

The single biggest contributing factor to the Republican’s victories may have been high consumer prices. Democrats ran on proposals seeking to lower costs, including a ban on price-gouging. In the end, Americans largely voted with their pocketbook in rejecting Biden’s administration, including Harris, who made almost no efforts to separate herself from his brand.

“The American people felt sharply the economic damage that was a result of inflation,” Senator Chris Coons (Democrat, Delaware), a top Biden ally, said Wednesday when asked by CNN if the president erred by seeking reelection last year at the age of 81.

Coons noted that Democrats faced headwinds resulting from the Covid years that ousted other incumbents around the globe: “I think there is a populist and an anti-incumbent wave because of the impact of the pandemic and recovery,” he said. 

But the progressive wing of the party argued that Democrats should have hugged the left more in terms of policy and tactics instead of making appeals to disaffected Republicans, including former Rep. Liz Cheney. 

“If the Republic survives, there needs to be a reckoning in the Democratic Party,” Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, wrote in a post on X. “Campaigning [with] billionaires and Liz Cheney instead of holding a single earned media event in front of the HQ of a corporate price gouger or campaigning side-by-side w/ populist fighters shows rot.”

Justice Democrats, another progressive group aligned with the so-called “squad” House members Rashida Tlaib (Democrat, Michigan), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Democrat, New York), and Cori Bush (Democrat, Missouri) similarly called for “a new era” in the Democratic Party and criticised Democratic leaders for cozying up to corporate America. 

“Leaders in Congress like the Squad have shown us another way of doing politics is possible and represent the promise of uniting our fractured nation and represent the promise of uniting our fractured nation into a multiracial democracy where everyone thrives and no one is left behind,” the group said in a statement. 

Former Sen. Claire McCaskill (Democrat, Missouri), meanwhile, floated another reason why Harris struggled on Tuesday, particularly in the rural areas of Virginia: the vice president’s gender and ethnicity. 

“I think we need to start saying out loud, what is different between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris?” McCaskill asked Tuesday on MSNBC. “One is a woman of color and the other is a white man that everybody was really comfortable with, that were moderates and knew him well and had known him for decades.”

And Symone Sanders, a former Biden adviser who now hosts a show on MSNBC, lamented the way Democrats pushed Biden out of the 2024 race after his bad debate with Trump earlier this summer. She also complained about his absence on the campaign trail, particularly in his home state of Pennsylvania. 

“It is probably not the best idea that Democrats orchestrated a very public stab-fest ― a proverbial stabbing in the front of the sitting president of the United States of America ― and then didn’t use him in the hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania.”

Biden did campaign in Scranton late in the race, but he had a limited role in aiding Harris’ campaign, largely due to his low approval numbers and fear of making matters even worse for the vice president. 

Some Democrats felt Biden should have dropped out of the race sooner and given his replacement more time to run, per Axios reporter Alex Thompson, but former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, who endorsed Biden, said he didn’t believe it would have made a difference.  

“I don’t think there’s any candidate ― no matter when they started,” Duncan said Tuesday on MSNBC. “It doesn’t matter who came in. The right choice was putting in Kamala Harris when they did. These numbers would be exponentially worse if Joe Biden was the candidate.”