Democrat anger as blame game begins over Kamala Harris’s devastating loss
Democrats and political talking heads have initiated the circular firing squad as they search to blame anyone else for Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election.
Vice-president Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party lost the White House, lost the Senate, and still may lose the House. The Supreme Court has a conservative majority that handed Trump a presidential “get out of jail free” card for almost anything he does in office between 2025 and 2028.
So, who is to blame?
Some Democrats think swapping Joe Biden for Harris was their deadly mistake. Others have blamed Biden himself, saying he took far too long to drop out. Progressives point to the Biden administration's stance on Israel and the Harris campaign's attempts to appeal to moderates and anti-Trump Republicans.
Maybe it's not a single person, but the issues themselves; some analysts have argued that Americans resonated with Trump's stances — however sometimes disturbing — on immigration, on the economy, on foreign wars.
Here are the leading scapegoats Democrats and analysts are trying to serve up to enraged liberal voters:
Harris and the Democratic Party
The vice-president has never had a showing as a strong national candidate. She lost her primary race in 2020, and took the reins from Biden without a primary or any other input from actual voters. Harris was appointed the 2024 Democratic Party presidential candidate; she was not elected to that role.
Harris's campaign hung its hopes on voters from marginalized backgrounds and women — including Republican women concerned about their abortion rights — to come through for her on election night. But that does not appear to have panned out, with Black men and Hispanic voters moving toward Trump.
Others, like progressive U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, argued Harris and the rest of Democratic Party leadership has continued to ignore the concerns of working-class voters, who have been strained by inflation and may not have personally felt the impacts of the Biden administration’s longer-term investments in U.S. manufacturing.
“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,” the Vermont senator, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, wrote in a statement on Wednesday.
“First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well,” he continued. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.”
Harris also tried to appeal to moderates and suburbanites, running on platforms of criminal crackdowns and bolstering the military — typically Republican stomping grounds — to little effect. The campaign highlighted former Congresswoman Liz Cheney after she and her war-profiteering father decided to back Harris. The move likely did little to sway moderates and a lot to disgust progressives.
Harris's campaign was insistent that she was picking up new voters and that the race would be close; a recent poll out of Iowa only helped bolster that idea.
A Democratic National Committee official, speaking anonymously, told Reuters that they were fielding angry calls from party members on election night.
"They feel lied to by the campaign," the official said.
Harris may also have been too close to a Biden Administration that did little to stand against Israel's rampant and unchecked killing of Palestinians in Gaza. Despite comments she made indicating she might have taken a tougher stance on Israel, it does not appear to have moved many Democrats critical of the Biden administration's response to the continuing crisis.
Politico argued that it was Harris's inability to make a clean break from Biden that ultimately doomed her presidential hopes, claiming she could not both back the work of the Biden Administration and convince voters that she would effect significant change if she took power.
Joe Biden and the Democratic Party
Bill Ackman, a longtime Democratic donor who backed Trump in 2024, accused the party of lying to voters about Joe Biden's mental fitness.
"The party lied to the American people about the cognitive health and fitness of the president," he said, and pointed out that there was no primary held to replace him. He said the party needed a "complete reboot," according to Reuters.
Biden's decision to step away from the race in July came on the heels of immense pressure from within the party and a disastrous debate with Trump earlier in the campaign. But that left Harris with only three months to sell her vision to a deeply divided nation.
At least one Harris campaign staffer complained that the ghost of the former administration chopped her off at the knees.
“We ran the best campaign we could, considering Joe Biden was president,” the Harris aide told Politico on condition of anonymity. “Joe Biden is the singular reason Kamala Harris and Democrats lost tonight.”
Tim Walz and Progressives
It wouldn't be a Democratic loss without the party's centrist members punching left. Democratic National Committee official Lindy Li told Fox News that Harris picking Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate over Minnesota Governor Tim Walz may have been enough to push her over the line.
"People are wondering tonight what would have happened had Shapiro been on the ticket. And not only in terms of Pennsylvania," she said, not explaining who "people" were.
She then suggested that Walz was too progressive, and that picking a moderate like Shapiro — who has been vocal in his support for Israel as it continues to tear apart Gaza — would have shown she wasn't a "San Francisco liberal."
"But she went with someone actually to her Left. In the eyes of the American people, Walz was the governor who oversaw the protests," she said, referencing the fact that Walz was the governor of Minnesota during the George Floyd demonstrations.
Israel
The Biden Administration’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza was a continuous concern for analysts monitoring the election. The fear was that Biden allowing Israel to slaughter Palestinians unchecked would alienate progressive, Muslim, Arabic, and other voters with family, friends, or loved ones in the region.
On Wednesday, the Uncommitted National Movement, which describes itself as anti-war, pro-peace, and pro-Palestine, issued a statement laying the blame for the 2024 election results directly on the Biden Administration’s response to Gaza.
"The outcome of this election is not a reflection of Donald Trump's appeal; it is a sobering reminder that the Democratic Party has lost touch with the very communities that once fueled it's progress. This defeat is not simply about policies or candidates; it underscores a deeper disconnection from our values and our people," the group said in its statement.
It went on to say that for "Arab and Muslim Americans, this election was profoundly personal."
"Many have watched in anguish as American-supplied Israeli bombs have fallen on loved ones in Palestine and Lebanon. Our calls for understanding and action from Democratic leaders have too often been met with silence," the group wrote. "For many in our communities, Biden's legacy is now defined by war and grief rather than hope."
The organization then noted that the vacuum left by the Democrats allowed Trump to "lie" and position himself as "a 'pro-peace' alternative — an illusion that has emerged from our party's failure to see us."
According to a poll conducted byThe Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research between October 11-14, more than half of Democratic respondents blame Israel “a lot” for escalating violence in the Middle East.
Approximately 60 percent of Democratic respondents said Israel bears “a lot” of responsibility for the war, compared to only about one-quarter of Republicans, according to Jewish News Service.
The voters themselves
Some pundits have blamed the voters who Democrats assumed they had on lock for failing to show up for Harris.
MSNBC's Joy Reid blamed white women, chastising them for not making "their numbers" while discussing Harris's loss in North Carolina.
"In the end, they didn't make their numbers. We have to be blunt about why, black voters came through for Harris, white women voters did not," Reid said.
It isn’t quite that simple. While white women may have voted in fewer numbers than the party had hoped, many Black voters — particularly Black men — abandoned the party for Trump.
According to exit polls, Trump only won eight percent of Black voters in 2020, but that share increased to 13 percent in 2024. He also gained with Hispanic voters, where his support rose from 32 percent in 2020 to 45 per cent in 2024.
That revelation led to MSNBC's Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough to blame misogyny for Harris's loss.
“Democrats need to be mature, and they need to be honest. And they need to say ‘Yes, there is misogyny, but it’s not just misogyny from white men," he said. “It’s misogyny from Hispanic men, it’s misogyny from black men — things we’ve all been talking about — who do not want a woman leading them.”