Several elected Democrats sounded off on their party’s failure to present a coherent economic message to voters on Sunday as the post-mortem begins for the left in the wake of Kamala Harris’s stunning defeat.
Though their warning is already meeting some resistance, Democrats including Chris Murphy, Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders offered stern critiques of their party’s accelerated losses with working-class voters of all races, especially men, as well as other constituencies once considered core parts of the Obama coalition, like Latino voters.
Khanna and Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats in the Senate and twice ran for president with the backing of a political movement that included some of those very same constituencies, were on the Sunday news show circuit this weekend.
“Bottom line, if you’re an average working person out there, do you really think that the Democratic party is going to the mat… and fighting for you? I think the overwhelming answer is no. And that is what it’s got to change,” Sanders said on Sunday, adding: “It’s not messaging… It’s a fundamental understanding of saying, look, the Biden administration has done a lot of good things, period. We should all be proud of that, but it has to be put in the broad context of the reality of the American economy today.”
Khanna, a California congressman representing the tech hub of Silicon Valley, tweeted on Saturday that his party “failed to present a compelling economic vision for the working class”.
In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation, the congressman expanded on his thoughts about the election. He blamed his party as a whole for becoming too insular: too willing to “cancel” people for opposing points of view, and more specifically this cycle unwilling to listen to a base of voters, mostly younger people, who were disgusted with the Biden-Harris administration’s position on Gaza.
“I think she would have certainly won Michigan if there was more of a reckoning” of the “failures” of the Biden administration’s policies in the region, Khanna told Margaret Brennan. “Beyond Michigan, this really was a concern for a lot of young people and a lot of progressives [around the country].”
Their concerns were shared by Murphy, another Senate Democrat. He laid out his diagnosis for the party’s defeat in a Twitter thread on Sunday with one distinct remedy: abandon neoliberalism.
“The left has never fully grappled with the wreckage of fifty years of neoliberalism, which has left legions of Americans adrift as local places are hollowed out, rapacious profit seeking cannibalizes the common good, and unchecked new technology separates and isolates us,” wrote Murphy, who represents the northeastern blue bastion of Connecticut.
The problems, he continued, were obvious: stagnant economic mobility for many Americans and an erosion of social life.
But he went on to argue that the only way to shake up that dynamic was with real solutions that challenged the rich donors who support Democrats — wealthy interests who he said Democrats lacked the stomach to really challenge.
“[W]hen progressives like Bernie aggressively go after the elites that hold people down, they are shunned as dangerous populists,” wrote Murphy. “We cannot be afraid of fights - especially with the economic elites who have profited off neoliberalism...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.”
It was as clear of a rebuke of the Democratic Party’s leadership as any remotely mainstream figures have made since the 2016 primary, a traumatizing battle which left scars in the party that never healed and made many wary of a intra-party fight for the nomination this year. But it’s one that comes as Kamala Harris, having run a campaign that delighted #NeverTrump conservative pundits, failed to turn out voters who previously voted for Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. She is now $20m in debt and sitting in the loser’s column while Republicans appear poised to control both chambers of Congress and the presidency.
And while Harris and Biden’s assorted spheres of influence in the Democratic Party have turned their fire against each other, it’s become clear that something went terribly wrong for the party. A stunning revelation was dropped by former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, host of Pod Save America, on his show Friday: Favreau told listeners that internal Biden campaign polling in the summer of 2024 showed the incumbent president losing re-election to his opponent by a truly stagggering margin. Donald Trump, in the Biden campaign’s own internal poll, was supposedly set to win 400 of the 538 Electoral College votes.
For comparison: Donald Trump swept all seven of a group of swing states thought to be in play this cycle: Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolian, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Even with Harris failing to win a single one, Trump was 88 electoral votes behind where the Biden campaign’s internal polling supposedly said that hypothetical matchup would have turned out.
DNC chair Jaime Harrison has already announced that he will not seek another term as his party’s leader early next year. With Harris and Biden gone, the party’s leadership is hollowed out; Chuck Schumer, the incoming Senate minority leader, is now set to be the most prominent Democrat in leadership nationwide, followed by House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. Neither has a significant national following of any kind.
