Strategists, pundits and campaign operatives have years to dissect the 2024 election, but Democratic lawmakers have only a matter of weeks to get their act together before Donald Trump returns to power.
In the days since Kamala Harris’ resounding defeat, there’s been little consensus among Democratic lawmakers on how they ought to shift the party’s identity and how best to take on the second Trump administration’s agenda.
“I would be lying if I said that strategy is fully baked at this point,” California Rep. Jared Huffman told NOTUS. “But I certainly am talking to colleagues who have great ideas and who have begun gaming out some of these scenarios.”
In the time remaining before Trump’s inauguration, Huffman cautioned against devolving into Democratic infighting, warning that the focus needs to be on a president-elect who intends to “push the limits of the Constitution and the sensibilities of the American people like nothing we’ve ever seen.”
“None of us have the luxury of time to wallow in despair or engage in weeks of finger-pointing and blame casting,” Huffman said.
That hasn’t stopped Democrats writ large from excoriating their party and arguing for all kinds of messaging shifts. But the overarching explanations for the Democratic Party’s 2024 failures seem to fall into two camps: economic and cultural.
For progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the disappointing election was about not delivering tangible economic results.
She called the Democratic Party’s inability to deliver a $15 minimum wage a “fundamental misalignment of mission” and said the party’s positioning with “corporate interests” prevented it from accurately and effectively messaging against inflation.
“Instead of saying things like, ‘By the way, Kroger or CVS or Rite Aid or Exxon Mobil are price gouging you,’ we get, ‘We’re combating inflation,’” Ocasio-Cortez said, calling it a “passive-voice perspective.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders offered a similarly scathing rebuke of the economic messaging and benefits, saying Democrats had fully left behind low- and middle-class Americans.
“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 in a statement.
“Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?” he said. “Probably not.”
(White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre hit back at Sanders’ assessment, pointing to low unemployment and the president’s staunch support for labor unions. “This is a president that cares, certainly, about the people who do get forgotten, the people who are not able to make ends meet,” she said.)
But it’s not just the most liberal Democrats making the case that the party is falling short on the economy.
Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy argued the current Democratic tent has become too insular and centered on the desires of high-income Americans over the disaffected voters who Trump brought aboard in droves this election.
“If we actually were fighting billionaires, if we were actually engaging in true populist ideas, it would hurt our coalition, which these days is higher income people who don’t want the status quo upset,” Murphy said in a video posted to social media Sunday night.
“We cannot win if we don’t build a bigger tent, and in order to build that bigger tent, we likely have to have economic populism as that tent pole,” Murphy said.
And yet, Murphy also saw how some cultural issues were holding back Democrats. He said the party needed to broaden its coalition to include “people who do not agree with us on 100% of our core social-cultural issues, as well as other hot-button topics like guns and climate.”
More moderate Democrats, like New York Democrat Tom Suozzi, were even more clear-eyed about the cultural issues of the party. He said he’s tried to steer his fellow Democrats away from a range of social issues, including “political correctness” and support for transgender women’s participation in sports.
“Americans have made their voice clear: Democrats need to focus more on issues Americans care about, like wages and benefits, and less on being politically correct,” Suozzi said in a statement.
“Many Americans are simply afraid of ‘the Left’ more than they are afraid of what President Trump will do,” he continued. “We cannot get wrapped around the axle by our base and resistance politics.”
But plenty of other Democrats saw the problems not falling neatly into one bucket.
Progressive Rep. Greg Casar told NOTUS that Democrats should resist sitting too long in either camp, even though he agreed with the throughline offered by most of his Democratic colleagues in recent days: Working-class Americans need to be the focus of the party’s messaging going forward.
“I know that there’s going to be plenty of voices that are more progressive or more conservative saying this is a moment for the party to be more progressive or more moderate,” Casar said. “I think that it’s the moment for the party to listen to working-class voters.”
Casar pinned Trump’s return on a failure to reach disaffected voters in the current political environment, where people wanted a hard break from the current administration.
“After the first Trump election, we saw outrage, and now in the second Trump election, I think there is a moment of introspection,” Casar said. “We battled him back, for the short term, but we didn’t make the kinds of changes in the party brands that we needed to defeat Trumpism in the long term.”
He also said Democrats needed to break out from the traditional media ecosystem to reach voters who are upset that “the political system isn’t working for them.”
“You can’t bring a policy platform to a gunfight,” he said. “We’re at a moment of mass propaganda, where you have the world’s wealthiest man buying up communications platforms.”
Yet another progressive lawmaker, Rep. Summer Lee, also said Democrats needed to meet voters where they are.
“Sometimes you need to be out of the hall of Congress. You need to be away from your staff and your consultants,” Lee said.
“You need to be back at your union halls, you got to be back in your church basements, back at your PTO meetings,” Lee said. “Or whatever it is that people who are farther away from whatever unreality that we live on Capitol Hill and Pennsylvania Avenue are.”
Still, Lee also had a more unexpected message. She said Democrats needed to think through what kind of party they were presenting to voters, particularly when the policy messaging seems so tenuous at times.
“We just can’t be the party of racial justice and mass deportations,” she told NOTUS.
Nearly a week after Trump’s victory, Democrats don’t have a consensus on what they need to change, but there is general agreement that something needs to be adjusted. Even with a narrow popular vote loss — Harris is expected to lose to Trump by about 2.3 million votes, or 48.4% to 49.9% — the Democratic Party’s reaction has vastly differed from the GOP’s reaction in 2020. That year, Trump lost by 7 million votes — 81.3 million votes for Joe Biden (51.3%) and 74.2 million votes for Trump (46.9%) — and Republicans proceeded to change hardly anything about their party. Or even their presidential candidate.
Democrats, meanwhile, are practically beside themselves as they chart out a path forward.
One Senate aide told NOTUS that people cried during a staff call the morning after the race was called for Trump early Wednesday morning.
“No one has a good idea of what to do,” the aide said. “We’re all shocked. Democrats are having very tough conversations right now.”
Democrats said they were still clinging to hope that they could eke out a narrow majority in the House and deny Trump a Republican trifecta. But that possibility seems to be increasingly narrowing, with Republicans having 214 seats to Democrats’ 204 as of Monday night, with 17 races yet to be called.
All the same, though, Republicans will have difficulty passing legislation through the House when it’s such a narrow majority.
What is clear right now is that Democrats — and much of the national public — won’t be mustering the same “resistance”-style tactics that helped Democrats push back against Trump’s first years in office.
Rep. Adam Schiff, who played up his role as an impeachment manager and Trump antagonist throughout his Senate campaign, did not mention the president-elect once during his victory speech last week.
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi similarly declined to mention Trump by name in her postelection statement. (No member of current House Democratic leadership responded to requests for comment for this story.)
But part of the reservations to speak may be about finding some common ground with a man and a party that just won the popular vote.
Rep. Ami Bera, a centrist California Democrat, told NOTUS last week that the priority for Democrats in the near future should be looking to work across the aisle.
“Let’s look for places where we can actually address border security, where we can address the cost of groceries, gasoline and other things,” he said. “I think we, as a party — a Democratic Party — should stop and take a look at this election and try to understand what the American public has shown us.”
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Mark Alfred and Samuel Larreal are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.