The Democrats are nearly three weeks removed from their first popular vote defeat in a presidential contest in two decades and are riven about how to avoid a similar defeat in four years.
President-elect Donald Trump pulled off one of the most impressive and historic political comebacks in U.S. history, pulling House and Senate candidates along with him as the country appears to be veering rightward. President Joe Biden listened to the historians telling him that he could be the next Franklin Delano Roosevelt and misunderstood the “mandate” voters gave him in 2020 not to be Trump.
His party took advantage of its control of the House and the smallest possible Senate majority it could have captured, relying on Vice President Kamala Harris to cast the tiebreaking votes on massive spending bills. Democrats paired their big spending with embraces of identity politics and gender extremism that voters rejected this cycle.
When they weren’t talking about “transitory” inflation and trying to mainstream transgender athletes competing against biological women, Harris and other Democrats focused on pushing a message that Trump was a fascist and his return to the White House would usher in the end of the republic.
DEMOCRATS SEARCH FOR ANSWERS AS BARACK OBAMA’S INFLUENCE WANES
While most Democrats are united in the understanding another four years of “resistance” rhetoric and charging headlong into the left wing’s most progressive policy ideas is a recipe for defeat in the 2026 midterm elections, the handful of elected officials and leaders who have dared to speak out about how the party needs to change have been shouted down and threatened with ostracism.
Speaking with reporters, the handful of successful Democrats who won their competitive contests tried to lay out a path forward. Sen.-elect Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) didn’t mince her words when she said her party needs to rethink not just its messaging but where its identity lies.
“It’s not just what you’re saying but from what place you are talking about those issues,” Slotkin said. “I think No. 2 is, personally, I think that identity politics needs to go the way of the dodo. People need to be looked at as independent Americans, whatever group they’re from.”
Those words were an eerie reflection of a warning Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) gave Democrats four years ago when they won the White House but failed to make huge gains in other contests after spending months touting the benefits of defunding the police and socialism.
“We want to talk about funding social services and ensuring good engagement in community policing. Let’s talk about what we are for,” Spanberger said at the time. “And we need to not ever use the words ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again. Because while people think it doesn’t matter, it does matter. And we lost good members because of it.”
Transgender transition
Democrats largely abandoned their “defund the police” messaging this time around. But Republicans dashed to remind voters about another 2020-era position most Democrats hadn’t abandoned — the issue of transgender female athletes competing against biological women in sports and a broader embrace of forcing a unanimous view on the contentious topic.
One of Trump’s most successful campaign ads revolved around Harris’s 2019 positions saying she would approve of taxpayer-funded transition surgeries for illegal immigrants who were in prison. His message that Harris was for “they/them” and Trump was for “you” hit home to the tune of pushing the race 2.7 percentage points in his favor.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) tried to verbalize his problem with his party’s position and might wind up getting driven out of the House for it.
“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Moulton said days after the election concluded. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
The backlash was swift as Democrats lined up to separate themselves from Moulton’s comments and cling closer to the policy he was trying to move away from.
Massachusetts Democratic Party Chairman Steve Kerrigan said Moulton’s words “do not represent the broad view of our party,” and a school system in Moulton’s district rejected his message “in the strongest possible terms.”
Moulton’s own campaign manager, Kyle Davis, quit working for the congressman and demanded he resign his seat immediately.
The demand was an easy one to make as Moulton ran unopposed in Massachusetts’s deep-blue 6th Congressional District.
Moulton is fighting on one side of a battle that takes place in every party following a loss, Vic Fingerhut, a longtime Democratic strategist with ties going back to Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 campaign, told the Washington Examiner. When taking stock of how to reorient and change the playbook, parties are torn between the ideological members who want to focus on what the party can do and the political members who acknowledge that “if you want to help people, you got to win elections.”
“By making these issues the major issues, you’re going to lose. You’re not going to be able to help anybody,” Fingerhut said.
Always the economy
Muddy messaging about transgender issues was only a part of the recipe for disaster cooked up by Democrats, though.
While Trump’s “they/them” ad was hugely successful, Democrats barely talked about transgender issues on the campaign trail and failed to communicate a clear message about economics — the top issue voters said they were concerned about this cycle.
It didn’t take long for those on the Left to stand up and shout that an insistence on running a campaign talking about Trump and culture war issues rather than appealing to working-class voters was never going to be a success.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who is an independent but caucuses with the Democrats and nearly won the party’s presidential nomination in 2016, tore into the party for abandoning its bedrock voters.
“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 said the day after the election. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”
That message was repeated by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), a Sanders acolyte who leads the Congressional Progressive Caucus in the House. She said her party wasn’t just wounded but completely broken.
“The Democratic Party needs to be rebuilt,” Jayapal said. “We have become a party of elites, whether we abandoned working-class people, whether they abandoned us, whether it’s some combination of all of the above.”
Neither Sanders nor Jayapal have come in for the same kind of drubbing Moulton took for speaking up about what they saw as failures this cycle. However, Democrats leaning farther into the big spending proposals that the pair support might have only exacerbated the economic problems Harris faced.
Record-high inflation two years ago, which was inflamed by Biden’s American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act that Harris was a tiebreaking vote for, was something the vice president struggled to separate herself from. She repeatedly said she wouldn’t have done anything different than her boss, and piling billions or trillions of more dollars on top of those partisan spending proposals might have appeased the party’s left flank while driving even more voters into Trump’s arms.
Democrats should spend more time focusing on bread-and-butter, kitchen-table issues than fighting a culture war that ends up distracting them from their more popular positions, Fingerhut said.
“Democrats have to be careful of their framing of the discussion,” he told the Washington Examiner. “The direction to go is not cultural issues. … Whether it’s guns, defunding the police, whether it’s transgender or even gender issues for a long time, I think Democrats are playing on Republican turf. And regardless of what one’s moral stance is, I think it’s not very effective politics.”
Reaching across the aisle
Not every Democrat’s first inclination has been to punch left. Some of the party’s rising stars and media stalwarts have moved toward Trump and his early plans, and they might be paying for it.
Gov. Jared Polis (D-CO) was a name that appeared on most way-too-early short lists of possible 2028 presidential candidates. He’s a popular governor from a blue, Western state that even Republicans find difficult to criticize.
He has joined forces with Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) to lead Governors Safeguarding Democracy, a “nonpartisan alliance of governors that works together to uphold and fortify American democracy,” made up primarily of Democrats focused on thwarting Trump.
But all of his credentials crumbled into ash when he praised Trump’s decision to appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the next leader of the Department of Health and Human Services.
“I’m excited by the news that the President-Elect will appoint [RFK Jr.],” Polis said in a lengthy statement on X. “He helped us defeat vaccine mandates in Colorado in 2019 and will help make America healthy again by shaking up HHS and FDA.”
Democrats started piling on Polis almost immediately, with elected officials and pundits on the Left expressing their disappointment and concern about the governor offering support for Kennedy or Trump.
Gov. Josh Green (D-HI) said Polis’s embrace of Kennedy was going to scare parents while Keith Olbermann said he should resign.
Even the staunchest “Resistance” heroes aren’t immune from backlash if they offer a fig leaf to keep lines of communication with Trump open rather than siloing themselves off for the next four years.
Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mike Brzezinski shocked their viewers when they announced they had made the trek down to Florida to speak with Trump. The pair were clear they “didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues and we told him so.”
However, the apparent capitulation was enough to infuriate viewers, who turned off the influential breakfast show, and their colleagues alike.
Journalism professor and media critic Jeff Jarvis said the couple had betrayed their “colleagues, democracy, and us all. It is a disgusting show of obeisance in advance.”
The soul of the party
As much as voters gave Trump and Republicans a mandate to address an economic situation they feel is eroding their ability to live comfortably, they told Democrats most people aren’t buying what is being sold.
Fingerhut said Democrats need to decide whether their outlier position on transgender issues, in particular, is going to be their primary focus going forward, though he suggested it can get put on the “back burner” while they figure out how to win elections again.
Elected Democrats who have spoken up or reached out have been told to sit down and get back in line.
Others, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), have tried to sift through their own constituents to uncover what would propel someone to check a box for her and Trump on the same ballot. It turned out that voters saw Ocasio-Cortez and Trump had more in common than she might have realized.
“I feel like you both are outsiders compared to the rest of DC, and less ‘establishment,’” one of her voters said.
DEMOCRATS WEIGH CHANGE IN STRATEGY TO AVOID MIDTERM AND 2028 DEFEATS
Democrats didn’t like what voters told them on election night, and they don’t seem to like hearing what they have to say to each other in the fallout.
If they want to avoid defeat and become a reasonable party again, they will have to learn how to listen to each other, and their voters, again.
