As Democrats regroup following Tuesday’s staggering defeat, it is time for some soul-searching. Step one must be to study what worked for Donald Trump and the GOP.
Maybe, for example, the Democratic Party should consider more racism, more misogyny, more coups, more stealing of national secrets, more kowtowing to our enemies, more plans to suspend the Constitution, more concentration camps. Maybe we should not just imitate Trump, but we should exceed him. Let’s not just be dictator on day one, let’s be dictators every day. Let’s not just threaten to turn the military against our rivals, let’s use nukes.
I write in dark jest—but also aware that the American electorate has sent a loud-and-clear message. The worse Trump and his followers became, the more laws they broke, the more inviolable foundations of our democracy they threatened to obliterate, the more foul and odious they became in their language and behavior, the better they did at the polls. Twice-impeached, felony-convicted, hate-rally Trump did far better than the guy who ran in 2016.
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Maybe we need to find our own gangster candidates. Do you think New York Mayor Eric Adams might want to try a run for president? Come to think of it, he’s probably not criminal enough and of course, he’s Black and that certainly does not fit in the Trump playbook. Maybe there is a penitentiary somewhere in which we can start a candidate development program. Surely there is an Aryan Nation lifer willing to go Democrat in exchange for early release.
Perhaps, we should be focused not on the candidate but on the campaign strategy. Why didn’t we have the street smarts to outsource all of our ground game to someone who didn’t know anything about campaigning? Why weren’t we smart enough to have partially empty arenas as a signature of the last weeks of our campaign? Why didn’t we serially offend each of the core groups we tried to win over?
After all, Trump and his surrogates said he would round up millions of illegal immigrants and that Puerto Rico was an island of garbage and he did better than ever with Latino men. He was even more racist than usual, and did not lose ground with Black men. He was more misogynist than ever, crowing about being responsible for the repeal of Roe v. Wade and he even picked a running mate with a Handmaid’s Tale worldview and he did just fine with white women.
Campaign speeches? Who needs ’em? Incoherent, visibly mentally deteriorating Trump did even better than the semi-coherent sleazoid Trump of years gone by. Event content? That’s for the libs. Just stand on the stage and move your arms around like fat, aging, dyspeptic T-Rex and that’ll drive up turn out to record levels.
Clearly, there is much that Democrats can learn from Trump’s so-shocking-I-feel-kinda-sick triumph. But we shouldn’t stop at merely aping Trump. We need to take a good hard look at ourselves.
Finding an energetic, attractive candidate with decades of public service experience, charisma, charm and a deep commitment to voters was clearly a mistake. Presenting concrete plans for making America better was obviously an inferior strategy to having a former president who achieved nothing in his first term run an entire campaign that was, like Seinfeld, about nothing.
Offering the campaign as a natural continuation of the most successful single term presidency in American history was obviously cuckoo for Coco Puffs. Mobilizing more volunteers than any campaign in recent history was overkill. Raising boatloads more money than the other guy? What were we thinking?
While the entirety of the above is a nearly perfect balance of snark and truth (if I do say so myself), there is a more serious question lurking beneath it all. By many measures, Democrats thought they did everything right and Trump did everything wrong. But they lost. A gutting loss that echoes but in many ways is worst than the political and psychological blow associated with Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016. Serious questions are raised and defensive responses like the above though cathartic are not helpful.
Already within the White House and the Harris campaign and across the upper echelons of the Democratic Party retrospective analysis has begun. Questions senior Democrats are asking include: Was there too much emphasis on virtual outreach to voters rather than in-person door-to-door retail politics? Was there not enough money spent or emphasis on reaching Latino voters?
Was the effort to reach Black men too little too late? Was it a mistake to focus on winning cross-over voters who might find the Liz Cheney narrative compelling rather than on mobilizing core Democratic constituencies? Was the hundred or so day truncated campaign of Harris just too little time (and by extension should Joe Biden have made the transition decision long before)?
A major set of core questions are tied to how Democrats could better have connected with the economic concerns of the electorate. Needless to say there are also the second guessers. It is rumored that initially President Obama was pushing for a ticket that included Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.
Would a primary process that addressed such choices have helped? Would they have had strengths Harris would not? That may seem like useless Monday morning quarterbacking, but make no mistake about it—all eyes are now turning to 2028, an election year in which Trump is constitutionally prohibited from running.
Whitmer, Shapiro, California’s Gavin Newsom, Tennessee’s Andy Beshear, Maryland’s Wes Moore, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg are among those who are already seen as being at the head of the line of potential candidates.
The last point gets to another core question. Is there anything at all that Harris could have done that would have worked? Or was this election, given the mood of the electorate—one in which change from the status quo was the foremost desire of voters—always going to mean that any one associated with the Biden administration would have an uphill struggle?
Lessons about how to win are not the only ones that Democrats need to be learning in the wake of Tuesday’s debacle. They also need to study ways—and there are many GOP examples—of how to be an effective opposition party to Trump.
Can they, should they, play hardball using Senate prerogatives like holding nominations or using the filibuster, for example, to gain influence with the White House and with Republicans or to block nominations to key jobs that they find troubling? Given the fractious record of GOP House members are there strategies they can use to wield influence there? And what can be done at the state level to isolate and protect “blue states” from MAGA initiatives?
Finally, there is one more area that it is clear that all in Washington need to do better and that is listening—to the other party, to critics within their own party, to voters. The failures on Election Day and many within Washington over the past few years are grounded in a failure to hear and try to understand the view of the opposition.
It won’t be easy in the current environment. But perhaps no other area requires more improvement for Democrats going forward or, for that matter, for everyone in Washington regardless of party affiliation.
