As they continue to reel from President-elect Donald Trump‘s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, dejected Democrats have not mustered up the same resistance to Trump’s second term as eight years ago.
Trump secured 312 Electoral College votes in his comeback win to the White House, besting his 306 votes in 2016 when he stunned the nation in an upset victory over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Trump also won the popular vote, swept all seven battleground states, and made inroads among minority voters, puncturing the coalition of voters Democrats have long relied on to win elections. The GOP maintained control of the House and flipped the Senate, giving their party trifecta governing power along with a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court.
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In the immediate aftermath of the election, many Democratic activists took to social media to reject any form of protest or march against Trump. Other Democrats, typically wealthy celebrities, simply packed up and left the nation. Some Democratic leaders stepped down from leadership roles in the wake of an election blowout.
Harris admonished her supporters to reject despair during her concession speech at her alma mater, Howard University, in Washington, D.C.
“Hear me when I say the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting,” Harris said.
But Democrats aren’t signaling they’ll put up the same pink-hatted fight as before.
“I do plan on working to ensure Democrats are heard, but honestly, I’m still too despondent at the moment and have unsubscribed to almost every source of news,” said Kassel Coover, a Pennsylvania Democrat who volunteered for Harris’s campaign.
Coover is focusing on “self-preservation” after the “disheartening” election, yet she added, “Maybe January, once he’s sworn in, we’ll get to work.”
Finger-pointing from elected Democrats was swift after Harris’s loss, and some Democrats seem content with tuning out the Trump years for the next four years or possibly in 2026, if the House flips control.
“Democrats are shell-shocked,” Democratic strategist Brad Bannon said. “I think most Democrats thought that Harris was going to win … they’re kind of in a coma right now.”
Sharonda Huffman, a Democratic National Committee delegate from Baltimore County, Maryland, had a more optimistic outlook about her party members.
“I don’t feel like (there’s) no energy,” Huffman said. “It has to be a little bit more strategic. And some people just need a break. And sometimes it’s probably best to regroup and rethink.”
Furious Democrats lamented President Joe Biden’s decision to seek reelection despite his advanced age and low approval numbers and then withdrawing when it was too late for a primary election. Others, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), blasted Democrats over party elitism.
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“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,” Sanders wrote in a statement one day after the election.
The Women’s March is still gearing up to protest Trump’s election on Jan. 18, two days before his inauguration. However, it appears unlikely that the number of participants will reach more than 500,000 people who attended in 2017, which is the largest single-day protest in the nation.
“I’ve already made clear that I’m not marching in a pink hat or blue bracelet- I personally don’t think the March should happen- take the money that will be sunk in that march and redirect it into Black Women’s orgs doing work!” said Jotaka Eaddy, the founder of a black women’s group that raised nearly $3 million in support of Harris’s campaign.
The Women’s March did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for a statement about this year’s event.
Democratic donor and adviser Dmitri Mehlhorn wrote in a letter that “the fight is done” and he was “heading back to the private sector” in the days after the election.
Lisa Gring-Pemble, an associate professor at George Mason University, pointed to historical trends that show political progress is not an overnight phenomenon despite Trump blocking a second Democratic woman from the White House.
“Social movements take centuries,” Gring-Pemble said. “And it takes changing social perceptions. It’s going to take work to figure out the complexities of the voters and what they need to hear and how messages are adapted to different voters. It’s going to take building broad-based coalitions across sex, gender, race, ethnicity, class.”
“It’s 150 years before the first woman runs for president, and then one is actually nominated by the Democratic Party, and that’s Hillary Clinton,” Gring-Pemble cited as an example of the slow pace of political progress from Victoria Woodhull’s run in the 1870s to Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
Organizers of the progressive group Indivisible pushed back against a narrative that Democrats were giving up on the fight against Trump. Indivisible was formed after Trump’s first election when a small group of former congressional staffers shared a crowdsourced anti-Trump guide.
One day after the election, 11,000 people gathered on an Indivisible debrief call, and roughly a week later, 44,000 joined another Indivisible call with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to discuss the release of the group’s new guide and strategic plan.
“We’re gonna fight Trump in the courts,” Warren said on the call. “If he breaks the law, we’re going to be there. I understand he may win a lot of those fights. I get it that he owns the Supreme Court, but you can slow him down, and that’s not nothing.”
Ezra Levin, Indivisible’s co-founder and co-executive director, said people were depressed and cycling through the stages of grief in response to Trump’s win.
“But I think what you will see in the coming weeks and months is that more and more people start to come to the conclusion that if they don’t do something, Trump 2.0 is going to be a lot worse than Trump 1.0,” Levin said. “And if we don’t stop what we can, stall what we can’t stop, and limit the harm of this administration and this Congress, we’re going to be in a much worse position.”
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There are some Democratic leaders in solidly blue states, such as Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL), Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY), Gov. Maura Healey (D-MA), and Gov. Jared Polis (D-CO), who have all indicated they will use their powers to flout any actions from Trump they deem a threat to Democracy.
Newsom traveled to Washington, D.C., last week, where he met with the Biden administration on how to protect California’s climate policies that Trump is sure to target. Pritzker and Polis are the co-chairmen of Governors Safeguarding Democracy, an initiative aimed at countering Trump.
Bannon, the Democratic strategist, suggested that Trump’s controversial Cabinet nominees, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Human and Health Services secretary, could reenergize Democratic enthusiasm to take on Trump.
“Democrats won’t get revved up until after the first of the year, because I think what will spark the Democrats is the fight in the Senate over his Cabinet confirmations,” he said. “The outrage is building.”
A spokesperson for the DNC also pointed to the Cabinet nominations as an inroad for resistance in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
“Donald Trump is proving once again how dangerous he is by appointing his MAGA loyalists and extremists to his Cabinet who will enact his unpopular and dangerous Project 2025 agenda as soon as he takes office,” said Abhi Rahman, the DNC’s deputy communications director. “The DNC will continue to hold him and these MAGA extremists accountable every time they hurt working families across the country. There is no break for us — we are fighting for the rights and freedoms of every American.”
But ultimately, Democrats concede that they’ll have to shed the perception they are out-of-touch elitists.
“The message has to change. So I think this is the opportunity to regroup and rethink,” said Huffman, the Maryland delegate.
“I think that Democrats need to take a long, hard look at themselves and see what is it that 76 million people overwhelmingly went for Trump,” added Coover, the Pennsylvania Democrat. “What are the issues that we’re not addressing that they think that Trump will take care of? We can’t be pushing the same old policies, the same old things.”
