The Democratic Party faces a long road out of electoral darkness
At 2.25am, Donald Trump brought the whole clan on stage to claim victory and promise the next four years will be The Golden Age of America.
So what? Not for the Democratic Party it won’t be. More like a season of darkness and a long walk in the wilderness.
This defeat is worse than 2016 when Trump beat Hillary Clinton by a hair’s breadth – just 77,000 votes across three crucial states. This time, there was clear daylight for Trump in those same battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Worse than that, Trump even won the popular vote, piling up more than 71 million votes to Kamala Harris’s 66 million across the US. So the defeat is the Democratic Party’s worst since the back-to-back-to-back landslides of the 1980s which started with Reagan and ended with Bush Snr in the White House. It was a very long road back to power.
Defeat brings clarity. The Democratic finger-pointing began immediately:
- Biden should have gone earlier. He should have been pushed to step down at the back end of 2023, long before the crisis triggered by his disastrous TV debate with Trump in June. Democrats had been too polite to tell him he needed to go.
- Harris was the wrong candidate. Few in the party felt she had been a good vice president, but with only six weeks to the Democratic Convention, she was anointed as the nominee when Biden stepped down. There would have been time – just – for an accelerated contest where talented governors like Wes Moore, Gretchen Whitmer, Andy Beshear or Josh Shapiro might have been tested.
“Winning something gives a candidate momentum,” one senior Democrat told us.
- They had the wrong message. Abortion rights and the real threat Trump poses to democracy were emotive and urgent issues, but it is always the economy that matters most – and people feel worse off, in spite of a decent recovery in growth and jobs numbers.
The trouble is, some Democrats just don’t think Harris, the incumbent vice president, was credible on the economy with voters who were not feeling very secure.
Trump ought to beat himself. How can a twice-impeached, convicted felon who still faces charges of trying to subvert the last election be fit to challenge again? And then run with an overtly racist and misogynist campaign and still win? And yet, Harris just ended up sounding indignant when she argued that Trump was a threat to democracy.
But it wasn’t all Kamala’s fault:
- Democrats have a communication problem with working class voters. Something that began as a problem with white working class voters at least a decade ago has spread now to Latino and Black communities.
- Harris struggled with anything unscripted, but she brought a hopeful energy to a campaign that had barely 100 days to make an impact.
- The stumbling 81-year-old Biden would surely have lost by even greater margins and given young voters an excuse to stay home.
Racism and misogyny held Harris back.
- Sexist Black men were called out by Barack Obama because they were “not feeling the idea of having a woman as president”. Polling during the campaign showed one in four young Black men backed Trump. And exit polls yesterday suggested they stuck with him – Trump doubled his support amongst Black men in the tight race for North Carolina.
- Trump successfully courted the manosphere – of podcasts, YouTubers, crypto-dudes, TikTokers and both public and private online groups, where there is an anti-feminist backlash among bearded bros who rage against a world they think wants to emasculate them. JD Vance was speaking their language by referring to “childless cat ladies” and Trump – guided by his youngest son Barron – sat for interviews with Joe Rogan and more.
- If Harris’s focus on abortion rights energised young women, it had the opposite effect with the very online guys targeted by Trump.
What’s more… The party can win by losing. Some of its members see a chance to make it less about identity politics and more about competence. Trump ended his campaign claiming: “Harris and Biden broke it. Trump will fix it.” Let’s see what he breaks in the next four years.
