Democrats say they need a fresh start after President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive victory over Vice President Harris, which saw him sweep the swing states, narrow Democratic margins in various blue states and win over key parts of the electorate.
Strategists and operatives say the Harris campaign relied too much on an old playbook that isn’t working in 2024.
They rely too much on data and their ground game.
Their messaging is ineffective.
And they use surrogates like Beyonce and Bruce Springsteen as a crutch that ends up backfiring by making Democrats look like the party of the elite.
“We have to burn the house down and begin anew,” said one prominent Democratic strategist who has worked on recent presidential campaigns.
“We had a warning in 2016 that this wasn’t working, we had another chance in 2020 to realize Trump wasn’t going away and was only growing his base, and we ignored it and pretended this was a midterm election.”
As Democrats perform the autopsy of Harris’s campaign and piecing together what went wrong, they are quickly concluding that their party apparatus and strategies are dated or non-functional.
Democratic messaging across the board “also needs to be thrown out a window,” one strategist said, pointing to Trump and Republicans’ ability to better understand the mood of the electorate.
Democrats in recent years have lost their way, the strategist added, appealing to “New York Times elites” while snubbing working class voters who traditionally supported Democrats.
The party, the strategist said, “needs to stop holding rallies with Beyonce and caring about a Taylor Swift endorsement” because it only exacerbates the narrative that they’ve become the party of Hollywood.
“It’s getting stale at this point,” the strategist said.
Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha, who served as a senior adviser on Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, said the messaging was a fundamental flaw in the presidential race.
“It starts with the reason Donald Trump won,” Rocha said. “Donald Trump won because people thought he over Harris could make their lives better, based on his message. And his message was the reason I joined the Democratic Party in 1990 as a 20-year-old factory worker.
“We have to return to the party of the workers and better label the Republican Party as the party of bosses, while we become the party of workers.
“At its core, the party has to rebrand and restructure as the party of the common man and woman,” he added.
Republicans have been effective at meeting voters where they are, Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons added.
“We have to realize the old days are gone,” Simmons said. “We live in a reality TV America that people experience in short clips on social media. And so we have to communicate with people with the transparency, the rapid fire and dramatic effect that people are used to.”
In rebuilding the party and its messaging, Simmons said Democrats have to realize that “it’s not really a left-right debate.”
“It’s an outsider versus insider debate,” he said. “Trump has been very successful at positioning himself as the champion of the people who are left out.”
A day after the election, Sanders (I-Vt.) also railed against 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,” Sanders wrote in a post on X. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.
“And they’re right,” Sanders concluded.
Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison called the Sanders comment “straight up BS.”
“Biden was the most pro-worker President of my life time – saved Union pensions, created millions of good paying jobs and even marched in a picket line and some MVP’s plans would have fundamentally transformed the quality of life and close the racial wealth gap for working people across the country,” Harrison wrote in a post on X. “Form the child tax credits, to 25K for a down payment for a house to Medicare covering the costs of senior health care in their homes. There are a lot of post election takes and this one ain’t a good one.”
To be sure, there are Democrats who maintain that Harris ran a solid campaign during a window of roughly 100 days and she lost through no fault of her own.
“Harris was behind the 8 ball,” said Democratic strategist Joel Payne. “She was saddled with the baggage of an unpopular incumbent administration and had a very short amount of time to shift public opinion.
“But she managed to put together a compelling and fresh campaign that rejuvenated a lot of base Democrats…No campaign is perfect, but hers was very good under the circumstances,” he said.
At the same time, other Democrats said there needs to be more thought put into their organizing efforts in the future, with a renewed focus on year-round organizing, not just door knocking in the final months of the campaign.
Steve Schale, a political strategist who ran Obama’s Florida operation during the former president’s 2008 race, pointed to the approach former Democratic Chair Howard Dean took for laying the groundwork for the 2008 campaign.
“We absolutely need to get back to the basics of organizing,” Schale said. “The DNC needs to be the central hub for organizing and as we look for the next chair, I’d be in favor of a field general who focused the DNC work on building real permanent grassroots infrastructure, in more than just a handful of states. We need to expand who and where we are talking to voters.
“Let the candidates talk to voters,” Schale added. “Let the party expand voter registration and turn them out.”
Since Harris’s loss, droves of party strategists and operatives have begun to point fingers, tossing blame at Biden and other party principals on cable news, social media posts, and op-ed pages.
But in an interview on CNN Wednesday, Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky was blunt, saying she was speaking some “hard truths” to members of her party: “This is not Joe Biden’s fault. It’s not Kamala Harris’s fault. It’s not Barack Obama’s fault. It is the fault of the Democratic Party not knowing how to communicate effectively to voters. We are not the party of common sense, which is the message that voters sent to us.
Roginsky pointed to the use of pronouns after names, and the term “Latinx,” as examples.
“When we address Latino voters as LatinX, for instance, because that’s the politically correct thing to do, it makes them think we don’t even live on the same planet as they do,” she said. “We constantly try to parse out different ways of speaking to different cohorts because our focus groups, our polling, shows that so and so appeals to such and such. That’s not how normal people think. It’s not common sense. And we need to start being the party of common sense again.”
Rocha echoed those sentiments, saying that blame should be placed on Biden or Harris.
“It’s the party that needs realignment,” he said. “If you do the same thing over and over again, and expect different results, it’s the definition of insanity.”
