Today’s notice: Democrats are in the wilderness. You probably won’t be seeing pink hats this year. The suburbs are red again. And this is your brain after election night.
The Reckoning
As a rudderless Democratic Party searches for reasons that its electoral hopes collapsed Tuesday night, there’s a consistent theme that keeps cropping up, one that Democrats have been whispering about for months.
Joe Biden should have ended his reelection bid sooner — maybe even before it started.
“Biden should have stepped down long before he did,” one Democratic lawmaker told NOTUS. “He could have been a transformational figure.”
Democratic megadonor John Morgan — who supported Biden’s campaign until days before it wrapped — said that “obviously in hindsight” the president should have quit sooner.
“Had Biden played his role as a ‘transition president’ and allowed the party a full campaign cycle to get energized about his successor, to build a real headline-grabbing and voter-energizing process around passing the generational torch,” Democratic strategist Max Burns told NOTUS, “who knows.”
Of course, Biden bowing out of the campaign in July isn’t the only issue Democrats are fighting about. By midday Wednesday, the internal finger-pointing had reached a fever pitch.
“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,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
As a senior Democratic aide put it more bluntly to NOTUS: “My 500-word piece on why would be the word inflation 500 times.”
The Pink Hats Probably Aren’t Coming Back
After Donald Trump’s first election in 2016, the #Resistance — a group made up of (mostly) women united against Trump — was everywhere: They marched together across the country in protest, they knitted pink pussy hats, they made niche government bureaucrats who #resisted Trump into household names. A central theme of this election was the idea that the #Resistance was everywhere, voting as a silent majority.
But as the scale of the collapse of the Democratic coalition became clear, one of those women elected as part of the #Resistance class of 2018 (now long out of office) texted us her take on what comes next. She expected a backlash to the #Resistance and said that politicians who had built a brand on how bad Trump was would struggle in future elections. The rage of some women at the GOP nominee, though real and deeply motivating to them, did not translate to a Kamala Harris performance with women voters that matched Joe Biden’s.
Progressive women also don’t sound ready to unite as they did in 2016.
“When you look at the way some of the white women voted, I don’t think this is time for Women’s March 2.0,” said Linda Sarsour, one of the former leaders of the Women’s March movement. Of the next steps for the Democratic Party, she said, “it’s no longer a women’s thing. I don’t believe that’s the way we’re going to reenergize.”
There were some #Resistance moments: Eugene Vindman, a #Resistance House candidate, is now a Rep.-elect. And Rachel O’Leary Carmona, the current executive director of Women’s March, told NOTUS that women want to “begin protest movements as soon as possible.” However, most Democrats are pointing fingers: Not at Trump but at each other.
—Evan McMorris-Santoro
Front Page
- Texas Democrats Are Anxious They’ve Lost Too Many Times: Will the money run dry?
- Dems Didn’t Want to Believe They Had a Problem With Black Men: Then Trump won.
- Rural Leaders Say the Harris Campaign Was Too Slow to Reach Crucial Voters: “It just wasn’t enough,” one organizer said.
- An Unconstrained Trump Likely Won’t Face Much Pushback From Congress: Trump’s biggest detractors are gone.
- Democrats Can’t Rely on Abortion to Win Elections: “It’s undeniable that it wasn’t enough…” one Democratic strategist told NOTUS.
- McConnell Refuses to Say If He’d Vote to Confirm Musk and RFK Jr.: The two Trump allies want to make big changes to how the federal government regulates industries.
Revenge of the ’Burbs
As political obsessives dissect what went wrong for Harris last night, there’s a data point that keeps cropping up: While Democrats turned out voters in cities, they did not pull their weight in the suburbs.
Conventional wisdom has long held that the farther you get from a city center, the fewer Democratic voters you’ll find. Still, on Tuesday night it was clear that the suburbs have reddened. And to the people who keep a close eye on the particulars of such movements, the margins were eye-popping.
“It’s a huge surprise,” said Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at the centrist Democratic group Third Way. “We made a play that we were going to counteract [Trump’s] gains with non-college men, with men of color, by leaning into the suburbs, by getting those college-educated voters. And it just didn’t work.”
Take this statistic: Exit polls found Harris losing the suburbs by 2 percentage points to Trump, 50% to 48%. Four years ago, exit polls found that Biden had won suburban voters nationally by 2 percentage points, 50% to 48%.
An Election Can Do a Lot to a Person
“The morale of the campaign is higher than it’s been in a very long time, and probably since the primary. It doesn’t ever get talked about, the depth and breadth of our ground game.”
That’s what Matt Hurley, a Mark Robinson campaign adviser, told NOTUS’ Calen Razor the week before the election. After voters firmly rejected the disgraced North Carolina governor’s candidate, Hurley was singing a slightly different tune.
“We were realistic coming into today about what paths were available to us,” he told Calen. “And we could see that those paths were being foreclosed on pretty early.”
Hurley is not the only operative doing a full 180. Former Rep. Bob Brady, a pillar of Philadelphia politics, told NOTUS last week that after he “taught them” and “screamed at them,” the Harris campaign was on strong footing.
“In the last two weeks, they came around,” he said. “They’re starting to work with us. We got all the signs we needed.”
By midday Wednesday, he had told The Philadelphia Inquirer that the Harris campaign “didn’t show us any respect.”
Not Us
We know NOTUS reporters can’t cover it all. Here’s some other great hits by… not us.
- The 2024 Election Buried Barack Obama’s Coalition by David Weigel for Semafor
- Voters Wanted Lower Prices at Any Cost by Annie Lowrey for The Atlantic
- Why Latino Voters Shifted Republican to Help Elect Donald Trump by Jackie Valley and Sarah Matusek for The Christian Science Monitor
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