Thanksgiving Day, on Thursday, bloomed gloomy and cold over Washington DC. Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, spent part of their festive morning volunteering at the DC Central Kitchen, a social movement that provided 69,000 meals to people in the city.
Mike Curtain, who hosted the vice-presidential visit, told local television that 38 per cent of Washington city residents were classed as “food insecure” after two years of inflation hikes. As Harris spent her morning preparing collard greens, the thought may have struck her that a volunteer kitchen shift had brought her up close and personal with one of the key factors in her failed election campaign: the punitive cost of living.
As Harris spent time in the capital, Joe Biden made an appearance at a fire station in Nantucket to give thanks for, among other things, “a peaceful transition of the presidency”. Asked about president-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to impose stiff tariffs on neighbours Canada and Mexico, Biden said: “I hope he rethinks it. I think it’s a counterproductive thing to do. We’re surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, and two allies, Mexico and Canada. The last thing we need to do is begin to screw up those relationships. I want to make sure this transition goes smoothly. All the talk about what [Trump] may do or not do, I think there may be an internal reckoning on his part, so it remains to be seen.”
For Democrats, there must have been something poignant about both ceremonial appearances, which carried with them a rainstorm of what-ifs. Since the sweeping Republican win on November 5th, reports of a generalised and unattributed anger at Biden for remaining in the race for as long as he did have given way to a more considered period of self-examination.
The explanations for why the party was unable to persuade the American majority that a Harris presidency represented a better choice than a second Trump term has begun in earnest. On Tuesday the leading staffers on Harris’s campaign – Jen O’Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks and Stephanie Cutter – gave their first account of what happened in a 90-minute episode of Pod Save America, the influential podcast hosted by former Barack Obama administration staffers.
It emerged that their internal polling had never found Harris to be ahead in the race – which chimed with the candidate’s constant message that she and Tim Walz were “the underdogs”. But they also conceded that nothing had led them to the conclusion, on voting day, that Trump was about to land such a comprehensive win. “We were dealing with ferocious headwinds and I think people’s instinct was to give the Republicans and even Donald Trump another chance. So we had a complicated puzzle to put together here in terms of the voters,” Plouffe said.
In what is a raw time in Democratic circles, the tone and content was subject to immediate internal party blowback and scathing criticism from interested observers, with Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state politician and CNN commentator describing it as “disappointing at best”.
“Hearing their lack of self-awareness, their lack of self-reflection, the inability to figure out a way to win this race simply, providing messaging and saying that we are up when you don’t believe this to be true, I just find to be disappointing,” he said. “And Pod Save America has been relatively disappointing because they were supposed to be our ecosystem to compete with the right-wing Ben Shapiros.
“We were supposed to have this information chamber that was Pod Save but instead they have become this cocoon where challenging them becomes a hissy fit back and forth and their messaging has not been one that has been able to prove successful with those same voters that Donald Trump did well with. So, I think everyone needs to take a moment of self-reflection, including myself, to figure out how we can get better for 2025.”
It was a sharp observation that identifies the post-election portrait of a Democratic Party not only adrift and aloof and alienated from the vast swathes of its traditional working class base, but also so beset with internal anxieties that it has become mired in its own patchwork of liberal ideologies.
Harris herself reflected on the race in a Zoom call arranged to thank the army of volunteer workers who had knocked on millions of doors. One statistic, released a week before the election, boasted that the Dems had knocked on almost one million doors in Pennsylvania alone. But it wasn’t enough to prevent Biden’s home state from voting for Trump and from replacing long-term Democratic senator Bob Casey with Republican Dan McCormick.
“All that work you did that was about engaging with other people, with perfect strangers, that has a lasting effect. It reminds people that there are leaders like you who care and who will bring us together,” Harris said. She praised the efforts that raised $1.4 billion (€1.3 billion) from grassroots supporters alone – the most in presidential history, with nearly eight million donors contributing an average of $56 “to our people-powered campaign”.
There was no serious reflection on why that people power did not translate to numbers in the voting booths: she finished with seven million fewer votes than Biden received in 2020. The video call was, Democratic National Committee finance team member Lindy Li said, “self-congratulatory” in tone with “no postmortem as to how we blew through two billion dollars in just 100 days. And, to be perfectly clear, it wasn’t just one billion to the campaign, it was another billion to the Super Pac and millions were spent on greedy consultants, celebrities, private jets, ice-cream, $450,00 was spent on the [Las Vegas] Sphere – putting your face on a giant ball? How is that supposed to be helpful? All of these things – we have to be accountable for that and I feel that all of these consultants are going to just fail upwards time and time again and move on to the next thing”.
Earlier this week, CNN’s reporter Donie O’Sullivan, whose terrific campaign reporting from all corners and sections of US society would have told the Democrats everything the top-dollar consultants could not, interviewed Hasan Piker, a left-leaning Democratic supporter in the Sanders/AOC fan club and a social media star with over three million mainly young male followers.
“Well, I think that they need to change their policies,” Piker said of the Democratic dilemma. “What will solve this problem is if the Democratic Party actually adopts real left-wing economic populist messaging instead of purposely avoiding that stuff because they are terrified of upsetting their corporate donors. I think Trump speaks to male insecurities better and I think that Trump speaks to the anger that people have, whereas the other side of the political spectrum does not speak to that anger at all.”
During her video call on Tuesday, Harris continued to promote the ideals on which she had campaigned with Walz and argued that the campaign, while not ending in victory, would leave a legacy.
“A fight for freedom and opportunity, a fight for the dignity of all people did not end on November 5th, a fight for a future in which all people receive the promise of America ... no. A fight that is about the ideals of our nation, the ideals that reflect the promise of America: that fight is not over,” Harris said.
It’s a noble idea. But the emerging cast of Donald Trump’s new cabinet is proof that the fight is thoroughly over at least for the next two years as the Democrats try to regroup ahead of the midterm elections. They will continue to sift through the debris of a presidential season in which they crammed two campaigns into one: Biden’s doomed second run and then Harris’s lightning attempt, which failed because it presented neither a radical new choice nor a clear, persuasive message. And it leaves the party at an impasse: without a clear figurehead or clearly identifiable presidential candidate for 2028 and, more immediately, a dread knowledge that it has been outwitted by a more nimble, streetwise and cynical Trump-engineered Republican campaign. Again.
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