Donald Trump’s decisive victory over Kamala Harris earlier this month means the Democratic Party faces an uncomfortable period in the political wilderness.
Trump’s victory saw his Republican allies flip the Senate and hold the House of Representatives by the thinnest of majorities, giving Democrats plenty of time to lick their wounds, sift through the ashes of defeat and figure out what comes next.
As various factions play the blame game, progressive Democrats who remain in Congress, albeit in the minority, are trying to offer an appealing alternative to the voters who ditched their party in November.
As the smoke of November’s defeat clears, it remains unclear what a winning message or policies could look like two years from the 2026 midterms.
Joe Biden largely bet his presidency on the idea that his policies to fix the economy ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic would give him political capital.
Wages increased under his leadership and unemployment dropped. He touted his “Union Joe” credentials by walking a picket line with striking auto workers.
But voters mostly rejected the policies he called “Bidenomics,” decrying inflation as Trump made historic gains not just with white working-class voters but those of color, particularly Latinos. He and running mate JD Vance billed themselves as pro-worker Republicans and Teamsters President Sean O’Brien spoke at the Republican National Convention.
In the days since the election disaster, some left-wing Democrats have bemoaned the party’s loss of working-class voters. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who has often espoused progressive policies but also collaborated with Republicans for the border bill that ultimately failed, said Democrats need to deliver a more robust economic message.
“I think it's got to be a more aggressively economically populist party that doesn't shy away from naming who has too much power,” he told The Independent. “I've been saying some of the same things for a long time about the consequences of the liberalism and allegiance to neoliberalism, inside the Democratic Party.”
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York campaigned for Kamala Harris in Nevada and warned that the Democratic Party’s bleeding with Latino voters.
“We have a housing crisis. We have, you know, these Wall Street and private equity groups that are making life impossible for working people,” she said. “For working people in Nevada and Las Vegas, we have Latino families that are pairing up five families under one roof just in order to afford rent.”
Trump became the first Republican to win Nevada, a state with a large Hispanic population and union presence, since George W Bush. In addition, voters in Ocasio-Cortez’s district swung 24 points toward Trump while she only lost 2 percent of her previous performance. Recently, Ocasio-Cortez asked people who voted for her and Trump why they did so, with many people saying that they appreciated both candidates’ authenticity and focus on the working class.
Harris attempted to address affordability during her campaign, particularly when it came to housing, running ads talking about building more housing and campaigning on providing $25,000 to people buying a home for the first time.
Representative Pramila Jayapal, the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, hails from Washington, the rare state that moved to the left when even blue states like California and New York lurched to the right.
“Our state has been very clear about the economic agenda down the ballot, the brand that the Democratic Party is one that stands up for working people and progressives,” Jayapal told The Independent.
At the same time, it wasn’t just progressives who did well in Washington State. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Blue Dog Democrat, beat back Joe Kent, an ultra-MAGA candidate in Washington’s 3rd district, largely by running a centrist campaign.
Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a pro-labor Democrat who lost his re-election campaign to Republican car salesman Bernie Moreno, criticized Democrats’ abandonment of the working class, saying “We focus our efforts, we focus our discussions, we focus on the dignity of work,” pointing out how he ran ahead of Harris.
Brown’s loss means that he will no longer be the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, which conducts oversight on Wall Street with Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts taking his place. Long before Warren’s failed campaign for president in 2020, she and Brown occupied the same populist wing of the Democratic Party.
“I spent my entire life taking on Wall Street and large corporations and trying to unrig a system that has been loaded against working families for decades, we've had some successes, but not nearly enough,” she told The Independent.
Warren will likely find her next fight in the form of Elon Musk, the billionaire Telsa and X executive who has become a close confidant of Trump’s and will help lead the proposed Department of Government Efficiency alongside right-wing businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.
On Wednesday, Musk said he would “delete” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was Warren’s brainchild when she was a professor at Harvard Law School.
As Musk and Trump attempt to slash the federal bureaucracy maligned by the GOP for so long, the likes of Warren and AOC will have to fight Republicans while simultaneously attempting to reimagine their own party and lead it back out of the Washington DC wilderness.
