The meeting was billed as an opportunity for the voters of Saginaw, Michigan to ask elected Democrats difficult questions about why Donald Trump, and not Kamala Harris, is moving into the White House on Monday.
Vincent Oriedo, a biotechnology scientist, had just such a question. What lessons have been learned, he asked, from Harris’s defeat in this vital swing county in a crucial battleground state that voted for Joe Biden four years ago, and how are the Democrats applying them?
As the town hall with Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, and the local representative in the state legislature, Amos O’Neal, came to an end, Oriedo said he was disappointed with their answers, which amounted to bland statements about politicians “listening” to the voters.
“They did not answer the question,” he said.
“It tells me that they haven’t learned the lessons and they have their inner state of denial. I’ve been paying careful attention to the influencers within the Democratic party. Their discussions have centred around, ‘If only we messaged better, if only we had a better candidate, if only we did all these superficial things.’ There is really a lack of understanding that they are losing their base, losing constituencies they are taking for granted.”
Trump’s decisive victory in Saginaw, a bellwether county that he won in 2016 and then lost four years later, came as a shock to the local Democratic party but not to many of its supporters.
Community leaders in some of the poorest parts of Saginaw, where voter turnout dropped, repeatedly warned that the Harris campaign’s focus on attacking Trump as unfit for office and winning the support of middle class white women, particularly over abortion rights, was alienating a large part of the Democratic constituency simply struggling to pay the bills and looking for economic reform.
Carly Hammond, a Saginaw city councillor and former trade union organiser who campaigned for Harris, said she sees little evidence the Democratic party has learned the lessons of her defeat, let alone how to apply them. She said the party’s national leadership does not understand that it is facing a generational political realignment n places such as Saginaw across the US.
“It’s hard to find a good way to look at it. I’ll say the national Democratic party has really put themselves in a position of loss for a generation because I believe that this election was securing, not just starting but securing, a political realignment that’s been happening for decades now,” she said.
“We have set ourselves up for generational loss because we keep promoting from within leaders that that do not criticise the moneyed interests. They refuse to take a hard look at what Americans actually believe and meet those needs.”
After the meeting, O’Neal told the Guardian that he believes Harris lost in Saginaw because her campaign was too focused on abortion rights which was less of an issue in Michigan after voters amended the state constitution in 2022 to protect access.
“We already fought the race of women’s rights. What we missed were the table top issues that people were dealing with. They couldn’t afford to go into the grocery store, can’t buy food, trying to make ends meet. We didn’t talk about that economics. We missed it,” he said.
O’Neal blamed the national party for failing to listen to local voices.
“The policy was decided nationally. I’ve been in politics for over 20 years and I didn’t get much communication from them. Just using myself, for example, I could have been much more impactful. Had I been engaged early, I could have been out and been a voice and advocating for the message,” he said.
Hammond said that is partly the result of the Democrats’ reliance on polling over policy.
“The problem is that the consultant class has led every politician to believe that if they just have the right formula, they can put in any candidate, churn them through the machine, and people will vote for that candidate. And that’s not true,” she said.
“The Democrats have shown that they don’t have any principles, that they will follow the polls, that if they just talk about the economy and kitchen-table issues in such a way that they don’t actually have to promise anything, then they’ll win next time. But they will lose.”
Hammond said that the Democratic leadership erroneously thought it could gloss over core issues, such as anger over the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza, and a thirst for structural economic change which helped drive support for Trump. That’s a view backed by a YouGov poll released on Wednesday, which found that 29% of people who voted for Biden in 2020 but not for Harris last year said the Gaza war was the main reason why. Another 24% cited economic policy.
Pat Parker, who has campaigned for Democratic presidential candidates in Saginaw through five elections, is one of those who is trying to forge a change in the party’s electoral strategies by forcing it to listen to local voices.
“We were screaming locally at the Harris campaign: ‘This isn’t working. We’re putting a lot of energy in, and there’s something off.’ We had a huge team working really hard, but they might have been just throwing dirt in a new pile. It didn’t produce the desired result at all,” said Parker, a clinical social worker.
“The things Harris said, like she was going to give $25,000 for people to buy their first home, there were a lot of people said she was giving their money away to people who didn’t deserve it. It cost her votes. We were trying to tell her that.”
In the weeks since Trump’s victory, Parker gathered together groups sidelined by the Democratic establishment, including Black community leaders, trade unions and local party activists in an attempt to drive a bottom up approach to future elections. She said the local party leadership has engaged with them.
But Hammond is not optimistic that the national leadership will listen.
“I think that the Liberal ideology, with a capital L, is what is being revolted and rebelled against at a very fundamental level by a majority of America. But the Democrats can’t see it,” she said.
“A lot of people on the ground level, a lot of community organisers, a lot of people who were giving the warnings are exhausted of trying to save the Democratic party from itself. They’re the ones who have been shown the door long ago as the party systematically excised criticism from its midst. The leadership actually don’t want a big tent, they want a very top down small tent.”
Hammond said there is one other legacy of the campaign that the Democrats may come to regret for more than just failing to get Harris elected.
A large part of the Harris ad blitz in Michigan was dedicated to attacking Trump as a convicted criminal and a front for Project 2025, the authoritarian plan to impose rightwing control across the entire US government.
“The national party has made it so that they’ve set up a standard where if Donald Trump doesn’t literally ruin democracy in a very visible way that people feel, then they’re proven wrong. It wasn’t as bad as we thought, so they’re liars again. They have set themselves up for failure,” said Hammond.
