Shattered Democrats grapple with Kamala Harris’ loss

Democrats called for a full party reckoning on Wednesday, as they attempted to pick up the pieces of their shattered organization a day after Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to former President Donald Trump. 

Interviews with more than a dozen campaign aides, strategists, elected officials and battleground state Democrats revealed a party consumed by fury, sorrow, finger-pointing and self-reflection. Many were granted anonymity so they could speak frankly about internal dynamics while emotions were still raw. 

They said they see a party that drifted far from its onetime identity as the protectors of those left behind, to represent the party elites. They questioned the campaign’s decision to focus on reaching out to “soft” Republicans when they had their own issues with base voters.

Some spoke of revamping the party’s outlook on immigration, calling for stricter enforcement on the border. They saw the rising support for Trump in metro areas as a backlash from early policies during President Joe Biden’s administration that enabled migrants to flood into blue states, where they were often housed and financially supported even as working-class residents struggled to receive services.

“This is a realignment. Our country has moved to the right. It’s not center left. Our party needs to grapple with it and find its footing in that world,” said Rep. Nikki Budzinski, an Illinois Democrat who won by double digits in a purple district after campaigning heavily on the economy. “It takes time. Finger-pointing is not worth it at all. This was a message. The voters were speaking to us. It would be to our detriment to not hear it.” 

Of course, that wasn’t a universal view, underscoring that there is a massive internal struggle looming.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., put out a statement blasting “big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party.”

“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,” he said Wednesday. “First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

Blame for Biden  

The finger-pointing was in full force Wednesday. Many Democrats blamed Biden for not dropping out sooner, while acknowledging that it was the party all along that enabled his ability to seek a second term, essentially clearing the primary for him.

Harris, they said, inherited a campaign where the fundamental negatives of a nation on the wrong track were baked in. Some blamed the influence of the Obama-era consultants and strategists who play an outsize role in messaging and who, according to one longtime Democrat close to the Biden team, were “stuck in 2009.” 

One Harris ally said Democrats as a party will need to reckon with creating a “martyr” out of Trump by impeaching him twice, bringing a number of state and federal prosecutions against him, and creating a Jan. 6 House Select Committee that spent weeks attacking him on prime-time television. 

“People needed to pick who was going to go after him,” the Harris ally said of prosecutors and Democrats. “There can’t be eight cases against him. That’s just not strategic because you’re going to make him a martyr. And guess what? You made him a martyr. Everybody is suing him. Every attorney general is investigating him. Every Democrat that has the authority to investigate, is investigating Trump. We made ourselves look like a joke.” 

Some of what went wrong can be traced to the dismantling of the coalition that ushered Biden into office in 2020, said a person close to Biden. The president claimed victory over Trump after beating out an expansive primary field that had moved too far to the left. But once Biden moved into the Oval Office, top aides pushed him toward policies that drifted from that moderate persona, like issuing wide-scale student debt relief, loosening restrictions at the border and pulling the permit to the Keystone Pipeline. 

Bring in the new guard

Many Democrats were also calling for a clearing out of the old guard operatives who have run the last several campaigns. 

“The team that’s there, it’s time for them to retire. We need a whole different strategy,” said one Democrat who was part of the re-election effort. “The day of Obama and his geniuses are over. They’ve been left behind. They are out of touch with the American people. The Democratic Party is out of touch.”

Campaign aides and allies directed much of the angst at the campaign’s chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, whom they complained ran a shop with the hand of an autocrat. According to three senior campaign officials, they saw her as loyal to Biden, never allowing Harris to truly make the break from him that she needed to win. 

O’Malley Dillon, they said, siloed off information with just a tight circle of advisers, keeping other senior officials off email chains and updates. That sidelined many of the aides who knew Harris the longest — and the best, they said.

It led to what some felt were grave mistakes, like Harris’ remark on “The View.” In the interview, she was asked what she would do differently than Biden. Harris said she couldn’t think of anything. 

The message was in direct conflict with what they thought was a crucial message that the vice president would be a change agent. Republicans jumped on the remark and ran it in ads. 

One of the officials said longtime Harris aides weren’t included in prepping Harris before that interview. 

“She makes that mistake on ‘The View.’ And she makes that mistake on ‘The View’ because they told her, ‘be loyal,’” a senior campaign official said. 

A source with knowledge of campaign dynamics pushed back on the notion that O’Malley Dillon brushed aside any of Harris’ team members, saying that throughout the contest, O’Malley Dillon held daily meetings with Harris’ two chiefs of staff, Lorraine Voles and Sheila Nix.

One Harris aide called for more diversity among decision-makers, pointing to a far too-white leadership makeup of Harris’ campaign and Biden’s former campaign. The campaign did have campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez and former Rep. Cedric Richmond as a senior adviser, among others.

“There was a huge gap in leadership of color, up and down the system that I think played to some of these blind spots,” the person said. “I just want to see more honesty and a little less whiteness … I think that if we are able to kind of look within ourselves and see the talent that is already there, then there can be a new generation of leadership. But it’s going to be tough. This feels like a decade loss. This is really bad, and we have to decide where we’re going to go from here. We have to restructure the whole thing.”

The aide believed Democrats would still have lost if Biden was the candidate and that the party should have worked to ensure Biden didn’t run for re-election.

“How the hell did we not deal with this problem? He’s 80 years old. He was supposed to be a one-termer. The man could barely speak and actually be coherent,” the person said. “It was too late, and we knew we had a Biden problem this time last year. The party knew it and people truly were not honest about how out of touch he was and how his age was really playing with America.”

Ultimately, a Democratic lawmaker said, the party needs to reassess its leadership both in office and behind the scenes.

“There needs to be a real reckoning for the establishment about what went wrong,” the lawmaker said. “Longtime operatives and older leaders frankly need to step aside and allow for new ideas and a rebuilding of the Democratic Party with much more vision, substance and inspiration.” 

Vermont Sen. Peter Welch, the first Democratic senator to call on Biden to bow out — who said he doesn’t regret it — said there is a mandate that Democrats work with Republicans right now. But he didn’t have an answer for who in the party would be the next leader.

“To be determined, I couldn’t point to anyone,” Welch said. “It’s a vacuum. Bring back James Carville.”

‘Trying to please everybody’

Several Democrats scoffed at any discussion about 2028, but governors like Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and JB Pritzker in Illinois are among those on the short list as potential next-generation White House contenders.

Adam Jentleson, a former top Senate Democratic aide, said Trump’s clear victory shows Democrats have a “fundamental brand problem” that likely no campaign could have solved in three months.

The party has prioritized coalition management and keeping all of the myriad interest groups in its orbit happy instead of focusing first on winning elections, he said, which limits candidates’ flexibility and pushes them to adopt unpopular positions, like the ones Harris embraced during her first presidential run in 2019 and spent most of her 2024 campaign trying to run away from.

“We have fallen into this habit of trying to please everybody and then, only after we’ve pleased everybody, take what’s left and try to craft into it into a winning strategy,” he said. “We have to be a lot better about setting boundaries with the groups and taking the exigencies of politics seriously.”

If and when thermostatic backlash to Trump kicks in, he said Democrats need to be careful about channeling it into winning instead of pushing the boundaries of acceptable politics like during Trump’s first term.

“The question is going to be what do you with that energy,” he said. “Do we do what we did last time and squander it on progressive edgelord politics, or do we capture it to actually fight back and change policy?”

Wade Randlett, a Harris supporter and longtime Democratic fundraiser from California, voiced optimism about the party’s prospects down the road. Next up is the midterm election in 2026, when Trump’s record will be an issue that’s front and center for voters.

“Trump is going to do bat-s— crazy stuff over the next two years and we’re going to run a referendum campaign in the 2026 midterms about the bat-s— crazy stuff.”

“When we get to 2028,” he continued, “we have to have a much better, clearer compelling case, with candidates who can make noncollege educated people feel the way Joe Biden did. Which is, he’s middle-class Joe. He gets your life. And he thinks about your life. We’ve gotta have someone who can do that.”