AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein
Kamala Harris lost to President-elect Donald J. Trump in a landslide on election night. Tensions between the vice president and Joe Biden’s camps have been simmering for weeks. It’s now an all-out war as both sides use their media contacts to leak damning information about the other. The blame game and the second Democratic Party Civil War—the first one pushed Biden out—will be nasty. What went wrong? That will be the central theme of the postmortems of a campaign that was indeed confident of victory, only to be left gutted, burned, and wholly ruined on election night.
Right now, Trump reigns supreme. It was a MAGA landslide, as he made gains with every voter demographic in the country. Every state, except Washington, saw a shift to the right. He won one in three voters of color—just a brutal repudiation of the elite, regional, and myopic Democratic Party who thought abortion would be their primary wave to victory. You knew the issues in this cycle; the Democrats didn’t. It wasn’t saving democracy or reproductive rights but the economy and immigration.
CNN’s Harry Enten broke down the MAGA tsunami, but The Washington Post’s lengthy piece about how the Kamala train derailed is just as entertaining as it is brutal. Not that you didn’t know this, but the Democrats’ Trump derangement syndrome crept into the messaging, where it cannibalized precious time and energy that should have been devoted to Kamala defining herself and her agenda as she untethered herself from the Biden White House. Yes, Kamala didn’t have the intelligence to pull this off, but it doesn’t help when your staff is way too engulfed in social media activity than reaching working-class voters.
The article points out, again, what you already knew: the lack of significant labor union endorsements was a red flag as it showed substantial amounts of the Teamsters’ rank-and-file, for example, were going to vote for Trump. Currently, the Trump movement mirrors Obama’s winning ’08 coalition more. It’s a multiracial working-class party—that’s very hard to beat, especially when the Democrats’ base is now too small to win national contests. There aren’t enough celebrities and snobby college-educated whites to put candidates over the top. The Kamala operation ran a campaign that reeked of the political class, and voters punished them dearly for it. We’ve said this before: the backbone of the Democrats, working-class voters, has dissolved. More accurately, it’s been removed by the woke, far-left loons who have weaseled their way into the top echelons of party fundraising, communications, and strategy. Now, the Left is paralyzed (via WaPo):
…a consensus has already emerged that the party failed to understand the average voter and their concerns — and focused too much on Trump, according to interviews with more than two dozen campaign aides, advisers, strategists and others, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid opinions about the party’s loss.
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Some Biden loyalists, meanwhile, fault the Obama-era technocrats, who they say first sniped at Biden from the outside — hobbling his candidacy — only to join the Harris campaign and cast themselves as saviors, armed with good data but a poor understanding of American anger in this moment. And others still have cast some blame on O’Malley Dillon, who they argue was a micromanager and whose team failed to win over voters on issues they cared about most, like immigration and the economy.
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Another group has begun to question a key assumption of many party strategists during the Biden years — that the central force in American politics was the backlash to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and the rejection of MAGA politics.
“It’s very simple: If you try to win elections by talking to the elites of this country, you’re going to get your ass kicked — there are not enough Beyonces, Oprahs or Hollywood elites to elect anyone,” said Chris Kofinis, former chief of staff to Sen. Joe Manchin III (I-West Virginia). “Trump is not the disease. He is the symptom. The disease is political, cultural, and economic elites who keep telling the public what they should think, feel and believe — and guess what they told them on Tuesday: Go to hell.”
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Two days after the election, OpenLabs, a Democratic data firm, produced a “first look” analysis of the results, obtained by The Washington Post. They found the biggest swings away from Harris were in areas with larger populations of Asian American and Hispanic voters. They also found that counties with bigger shares of Muslim and Jewish voters also swung toward Trump. Two Trump advisers said they could not believe that they were able, for example, to beat Harris in Dearborn, Michigan.
“Obviously this is a major reckoning for the Democratic Party in terms of, particularly as it relates to young men, Black and Hispanic voters and rural voters,” said Jef Pollock, a Biden and Harris campaign pollster. “If the economy were perceived by voters as swimming, things might be different. But for now, it’s clear these voters I’m talking about — particularly young men, Black men, Hispanic men, and rural White voters — do not see the Democrats as addressing their everyday needs, and that’s something we need to think about holistically.”
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Adam Jentleson, a Democratic strategist who served as chief of staff to Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania), similarly criticized the Democratic Party for having prioritized “coalition management” — essentially kowtowing to far-left interest groups — over “the smart and effective practice of politics for many, many years.”
The challenge of inflation, Jentleson said, became insurmountable in an environment where large swaths of the country had come to believe that Democrats “are preoccupied with the narrow interests of college-educated elite activists more than everyday working people.”
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The election results, Democrats concede, demonstrate the voters were willing to overlook Trump’s character — and the Democratic Party suffered because they focused too much on bashing Trump, and not on how they would improve voters’ lives.
In other moments, Harris’s campaign found itself caught flat-footed. When she visited the southern border in late September, for instance, she and her aides had no idea that the same afternoon a top official at ICE would release damaging immigration numbers to a Republican congressman. Her team was shocked when the numbers emerged as she was in transit to the border, advisers said.
More broadly, some aides attributed the shift away from Harris in reliably blue states like New York, New Jersey and Illinois as a repudiation of the party’s handling of immigration. Many of those states have seen an influx of migrants, some bused by Republican governors, and Democrats in major cities have struggled to respond.
When some of the major unions did not endorse Harris, it was a red flag, advisers said, not because the unions endorsements on their face would matter that much — but that leadership clearly knew their members were inclined to vote for Trump in large margins.
It was a trainwreck of errors. Liz Cheney being elevated to top GOP-defector surrogate was another blunder. Though there were sprinklings of Harris advisers bashing Biden, who ironically became a top surrogate for Trump: He called Trump voters garbage during Kamala’s DC rally, which cannibalized her earned media moment, wore a MAGA hat in Pennsylvania, and said Trump should be “locked up…politically.” All of these had devastating impacts on the messaging of the Harris camp. Counting Biden, Democratic donors shoveled out $2 billion to get blown out by Trump. Money can’t polish unqualified candidates. And the fact that January 6 never resonated with voters should have been good enough for liberal pollsters to know that maybe the ‘threat to democracy’ nonsense was a loser.
Staff also criticized the strategy of negatively defining Trump. They created “The Three Us: Unhinged, unstable, and unchecked.” Some noted that no one will remember that. Moreover, Trump has already been president—it doesn’t sell.
The misreading of the electorate, the abysmal media strategy, and the inability to communicate with working people and sink deeper into the liberal echo chamber dominated by an ‘orange man…bad’ theme led to this abject slaughter. Kamala lost the popular vote and got swept in all seven swing states.
Based on liberal reactions to this loss, they still don’t get how Trump drove over them in a Komatsu tractor.
