By CatholicVote | Created at 2024-11-16 04:54:32 | Updated at 2024-11-23 08:13:24
1 week ago
This article is the first of a two-part analysis of the various missteps on hte part of the Kamala Harris campaign and the Democratic Party at large which contributed to President-elect Donald Trump’s sweeping win in the 2024 election.
Going into election night 2024, many Democrats were hopeful about the chances of their presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Early on November 5, hours before the first returns came in, a chorus of polling experts declared that the race was “neck-and-neck,” with some even giving Harris the edge.
Some confident Democrats pointed to a survey by a renowned Iowa pollster that had Harris up in the red state by three points (the candidate would lose it by over 13).
Others listened to a liberal professor many media outlets compared to Renaissance astrologer Nostradamus, whose “13 Keys” model had assured a Harris win was inevitable.
Controversially anointed by Democratic elites at the last minute via an early August “virtual roll call,” Harris had replaced President Joe Biden as the party’s candidate almost immediately after Biden had dropped out of the race and endorsed her on July 21.
Harris was handed the nomination despite the fact that Biden – and not she – all but swept the Democratic primaries, winning over 14 million votes against only long-shot opposition.
>> 2024 ELECTION: TRUMP DEFEATS HARRIS IN A ROMP <<
However, this did not stop the vice president and her polarizing running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz from running aggressively on the talking point that the Republican Party and its nominee Donald Trump are a so-called “threat to democracy.”
That approach proved ineffective when Trump ran the table in all seven battleground states, defeating Harris in a rout.
As Trump completed what has been hailed as the greatest comeback story in American political history, he also became the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years and captured a Republican record of 46% of the Latino vote.
Furthermore, Trump’s resounding win completely upended the Democrats’ “Obama coalition.” In addition to Latinos, Trump significantly improved his performance with young men, black voters, Asian-Americans, Arab-Americans, Muslim voters, and American Indians – all formerly reliably Democratic voting blocs.
>> INSIDE THE NUMBERS: THE UNLIKELY GROUPS THAT PROPELLED TRUMP TO A SWEEPING WIN <<
The president-elect also tore down the blue wall for the second time, taking the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – which had voted Democratic in every presidential election from 1992 to 2012, and again in 2020.
Some well-known Democrats were quick to blame racism or sexism for the American voters’ thorough rejection of the Harris-Walz ticket.
Others instead looked inward – at the many reasons the party and its priorities were dramatically out of touch with the American people, opening an avenue for Trump’s epic comeback.
The people vs. elites
On the Sunday after Election Day, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-CT, made a series of posts to X (formerly Twitter) in which he stressed the “need to rebuild the left” in a more populist direction – similar to the Trump-Vance ticket’s winning message.
“Tuesday was a cataclysm, let’s not kid ourselves,” the Democratic senator said in a video message. “This is not a moment for small changes or reforms. This is a moment for a fundamental rebuild of the left.”
“First of all, we are not listening to the people we claim to represent,” Murphy continued:
We claim to be the party of the working class, the party of poor people. And yet we let interest groups and think tanks tell us what those people need. That’s why we end up with these relatively small-ball solutions.
“Americans are exhausted by a neoliberal economic order that has consolidated power in the hands of the few,” the Democrat added, “that has forced them to become global citizens instead of having some unique local identity or a true sense of being an American citizen.”
Spent last week licking wounds. Now it's time to get to work.
Some thoughts on the path forward. In short, we need to rebuild the left. No band aids.
Admit that our policies don't connect with people emotionally. Stop being so afraid of populist fights. Build a bigger tent. pic.twitter.com/MPNn2mAEFJ
“People feel isolated, they feel impotent, they feel deeply anxious,” he noted. “Democrats spend no time actually matching policies to the way that people feel.”
Murphy stated that while he disagrees with Trump’s border security policy, it spoke “to a legitimate feeling that people have.”
The senator emphasized that his party needs to understand that Trump’s Republican Party starts “by examining the way that people are actually feeling, and then matching policies to the way that they’re feeling.”
“Now that’s something that the Harris campaign did not do,” the senator said. “And frankly, when leaders in our party like Bernie Sanders do it, they largely get shamed or shunned as dangerous populists.”
Murphy speculated that Democrats may resist populist messaging because if their party embraced economic populism “it would hurt our coalition, which these days tends to be higher-income people who don’t want the status quo fundamentally upset.”
10/ Those are hard things for the left.
A firm break with neoliberalism.
Listen to poor and rural people, men in crisis. Don't decide for them.
Pick fights. Embrace populism.
Build a big tent. Be less judgmental.
But we are beyond small fixes.
Murphy also highlighted that for Democrats to win in the future, they must “build a bigger tent” that includes people with more socially conservative views.
“Allow into the tent people that do not agree with us on 100% of our core social, cultural issues, as well as other hot-button topics like guns or climate,” he specified. “I think we’d be better off fighting out discussions around some of those very difficult social and cultural issues inside our tent instead of pushing everybody who disagrees with us outside.”
Murphy’s post-election remarks represented a sharp change of tune from four days before the November 5 vote, when he advanced Harris’ narrative that Trump and his supporters presented a “threat to democracy.”
At the time, the senator even repeated on X the debunked claim that Trump said former Congresswoman “Liz Cheney should face a firing squad.”
There is a straight line from
giving immunity to the mob that stormed the Capitol;
to threatening his political opponents with military action;
to saying Liz Cheney should face a firing squad.
Trump is making it 💯 clear violence will be a major part of his presidency.
As CatholicVote noted, Trump had in reality criticized Cheney’s hawkish stance on foreign policy, making “the point that if Cheney were to serve in a combat role herself, she might not be as eager to send American troops to battle.”
Murphy is not the first federal Democrat lawmaker with a thoroughly socially liberal voting record to insist that the party must moderate on cultural issues following Harris’ loss.
Fellow New Englander Rep. Seth Moulton, D-MA, made headlines last week after he told The New York Times that “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face.”
Specifically when it came to the topic of women’s sports, Moulton said: “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
>> DEM REP DOUBLES DOWN ON REVERSING COURSE ON MEN IN WOMEN’S SPORTS <<
The congressman stood by the comments after an LGBTQ activist called for his resignation.
CatholicVote reported that Moulton’s “about-face came after years of asserting that keeping men out of women’s sports was a violation of ‘transgender rights.’”
Even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, a prominent figure in the Democratic Party’s hard-left faction, recently implied that the party’s messaging was out of touch with American voters.
“Democrats very often in their messaging, they speak in terms and in concepts and not in the second person,” the leftist lawmaker told MSNBC hostess Joy Reid in a recent interview.
Ocasio-Cortez was specifically referring to a viral Trump campaign ad portraying Harris as too far to the left on “transgenderism.”
In the ad – which experts say played a role in securing Trump’s win – a young male narrator says: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
Ocasio-Cortez told Reid: “Political races are not about one candidate versus another candidate. It is a race to convince a person about who cares about you more.”
The wrong issues
Various analysts from across the political spectrum underscored that the Democratic Party in 2024 completely misread the priorities of the American public, contributing to voters’ overwhelming perception that the party was out of touch with their concerns.
Pollster Frank Luntz told CNN this week that the Harris-Walz campaign was not “listening to the American people” about what issues were most important to swing voters.
Luntz agreed with hostess Brianna Keilar’s comment that Harris’ 2019 stance supporting taxpayer-funded “transgender” surgeries for prison inmates – which was highlighted in the same Trump ad that Ocasio-Cotez mentioned – played a role in sinking the candidate’s campaign.
The Trump ad’s rejection of Harris’ pro-“trans” comments “was something that was really finding an audience,” Keilar noted. “And yet [the Harris campaign] thought it wasn’t.”
Luntz replied: “Someone needs to go back to the polling to understand what they were thinking.”
He pointed out that Harris’ position in the polls “peaked at exactly when she turned on Trump.”
>> SEPTEMBER: CNN SEGMENT SCRUTINIZES HARRIS’ 2019 STANCE ON ‘TRANSGENDER’ SURGERIES <<
UnHerd D.C. Correspondent Emily Jashinsky made the same observation during a Monday appearance on journalist Megyn Kelly’s podcast.
“When you look at the RCP (Real Clear Politics) national average of polling, where you saw Kamala Harris start to dip was on October 23,” said Jashinsky, adding that Harris’ numbers “never recovered.”
She explained that this was the day after The Atlantic published a hit piece quoting John Kelly, who served as White House Chief of Staff during Trump’s first term but is now a vocal opponent of the president-elect.
Kelly had alleged to the left-leaning publication that Trump once said: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”
Harris leaned heavily into these claims, making a heavily scrutinized three-minute speech from outside her mansion on October 23 in which she echoed Kelly’s words that Trump “falls into the general definition of fascist” and that he “invoked” Hitler.
“There was a world in which Kamala Harris could’ve been banging the table talking about immigration, talking about inflation, distancing herself from Joe Biden,” Jashinsky said, “and not running on January 6, not running on fascism.”
>> OCTOBER 23: HARRIS CALLS TRUMP A ‘FASCIST’ CITING WELL-KNOWN TRUMP OPPONENT <<
During the same podcast, Washington Free Beacon Editor-in-Chief Eliana Johnson told Kelly: “The Democratic Party spent the last four years telling voters that the issues that were most important to them, which were the economy and immigration,” were not problems.
“You just can’t win elections that way,” Johnson stressed. “By telling voters that the things that they perceive as problems aren’t problems.”
On Sunday’s episode of his show, CNN host Fareed Zakaria outlined that Harris’ Democratic Party “blew it by making three big mistakes” during the election cycle, all related to either ignoring or overemphasizing certain issues.
“The first big error was the Biden administration’s blindness to the collapse of the immigration system and the chaos at the border,” Zakaria said. “Instead of shutting it down, liberals branded anyone protesting as heartless and racist.”
The political left “missed a massive shift in American public opinion” in favor of increased border security “in just a few years.”
Multiple polls have shown in particular that significantly more Latinos – a group instrumental in Trump’s decisive win – favor stricter immigration policies than they did in past years.
>> CNN EXIT POLL: TRUMP WON THE HISPANIC CATHOLIC VOTE <<
Zakaria went on to argue that the Democrats’ “second error was an overzealous misuse of law to punish Trump.”
Democrats’ targeting of Trump in court, popularly referred to as “lawfare,” gave “the impression that the legal system was being weaponized to get Trump.”
It also confirmed to Trump voters “that overeducated urban liberals were hypocrites, happy to bend rules and norms when it suited their purposes.”
Zakaria pointed out that a stunning 58% of 2024 voters who indicated “democracy in the U.S. is threatened” backed Trump, per a CNN exit poll – in spite of Harris and her party’s aggressive messaging that it was the Republican candidate who presented a “threat to democracy.”
“Lawfare turned Trump from being a loser into a victim,” the Zakaria noted. “And as his indictments grew, his campaign contributions surged and his poll numbers solidified.”
The Democrats’ third mistake, Zakaria said, was their embrace of identity politics that “alienated many mainstream voters.”
>> PARENTS OF MINOR KIDS VOTED FOR TRUMP BY WIDE MARGIN <<
“There’s an irony in claiming to be pro-Latino by insisting that people use the term ‘Latinx’, only to discover that Latinos themselves think the word is weird,” he said.
This approach made Democrats’ “miss, for example, that working-class Latinos were moving toward Trump, perhaps because they were socially conservative … or even agreed with his hardline stance on immigration.”
Like his CNN colleague Keilar, Zakaria also acknowledged that Trump’s viral “Kamala is for they/them” ad was effective.
Zakaria stressed that the political left’s “entire focus on identity has morphed into something deeply illiberal: judging people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.”
New York Times columnist Ezra Klein also implied that Democrats lost many voters due to ignoring issues important to Americans during an appearance this week on “Pod Save America,” a popular left-wing podcast co-hosted by four former members of the Obama administration.
“The thing that surprised me least about the election was the sharp red shift in these big cities,” Klein said, specifically naming Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City.
“Because if you just talk to anybody who lives in them they are furious,” he explained.
Klein said that the “rage” he hears from fellow New Yorkers over the city’s migrant crisis “does show that what was going on at the border was much worse I think than Democrats were letting themselves accept.”
“The sense of disorder rising,” he added. “Not just crime but homeless encampments, trash on the streets, people jumping turnstiles in subways, crazy people on the streets… you just talk to people and they’re mad about it.”
As CatholicVote previously reported, a post-election poll by Democratic-affiliated research initiative Blueprint asked voters to indicate what reasons played a role in their decision not to back Harris.
Out of 25 reasons listed in the poll, the three that ranked the highest were “Inflation was too high under the Biden-Harris Administration,” “Too many immigrants illegally crossed the border under the Biden-Harris Administration,” and “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.”
