The knives are out inside the Democratic Party and it’s easy to see why. They felt “nauseously optimistic” heading into Election Day, believing Vice President Kamala Harris would win, but they ended up losing badly to President-elect Donald Trump.
Even in a state like Georgia, where Trump lost in 2020 and has since been booked on felony election fraud charges, he won 120,000 more votes than Harris. That’s after the GOP’s unpopular restrictive abortion law went into effect and the state has grown even more diverse. How, Democrats are asking themselves, could they lose to Trump after all that?
The answer at the end of the day was not that complicated and it probably didn’t have anything to do with the Democratic Party of Georgia. To paraphrase Democratic strategist James Carville, it’s still the economy, stupid.
Carville posted his famous guidance about focusing on the economy at Bill Clinton’s Little Rock campaign headquarters in 1992. Less well remembered is what Carville wrote above that — the campaign’s top message against the unpopular President George H.W. Bush: “Change vs. more of the same.”
Both ideas worked for Clinton in 1992 and both worked for Trump this year. Because underneath the insults, the offenses, the criminal charges, and the bizarre diatribes during his rallies, the president-elect had a remarkably consistent message to American voters — you’re not happy and I’ll do something about it.
“I have one question for you,” Trump said at the beginning of every campaign rally in Georgia recently. “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?’
“Noooooo!” the crowd always answered.
Compare that to Harris, whose come-together closing message was inspiring for some, but missed the mark for the majority of Georgia voters who said consistently that they were unhappy with the direction the country and that the economy is the biggest reason why.
The point of no return for Harris may have come in October, when she was asked by the hosts of “The View” what she would have done differently from President Joe Biden in the last four years. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she said. “And I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.”
The biggest change voters were looking for this year was on the economy. That’s because grocery prices have gone up an incredible 21% during the Biden administration, part of an inflation surge that raised overall costs by about 19%.
Even though economists could point you to 100 charts to show the economy is improving, voters can’t eat a chart. Or live in it. Or use it to pay off student loans. If workers aren’t getting the benefits of a better economy, something’s got to change.
To answer that anxiety, Trump had a series of easy-to-understand fixes that he laid out at every rally that were especially good for hourly workers — no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime pay, no taxes on Social Security benefits. Are those ideas feasible? Who knows? At least he had a plan, voters said.
Harris adopted the no-tax-on-tips idea herself, but other ideas were complex and confusing. To bring down grocery prices, she promised to end price gouging, even though 37 states already ban the practice. Her proposal was so tangential that the AP wrote an article, “What is price gouging?” complete with an economist who said the practice is not particularly widespread and not really the reason groceries are so expensive for Americans.
The second issue Americans consistently pointed to as a top issue was immigration, which Trump used as a hammer at every rally. Undocumented immigrants are to blame for crime, housing prices, Black unemployment and nearly every crisis in the country, Trump said. Offensive? Yes. Effective? Absolutely.
To answer the immigration question, Harris said Trump should have let Democrats pass a bipartisan immigration bill earlier this year to fix the broken system. But she didn’t address the three previous years of the Biden term when the chaos at the border accelerated.
The biggest flashing red signs for Democrats now, other than the fact that they just lost to Trump, is what has changed in the electorate in the last four years. Working-class voters have broken strongly for the Republicans, as have more Latino voters than ever. The assumptions that both would stay with Democrats forever were wrong.
Even worse for the party in Georgia, exit polls found that just 30% of voters said they consider themselves to be Democrats, while 34% said Republican and 36% said independent or “something else.” Democrats either didn’t get their people to the polls with their $1 billion ground and ad operation, or being a “Democrat” is not resonating with 70% of Georgia voters.
We can’t look back on 2024 and not acknowledge the Democrats’ own chaotic path to November while they were calling Trump the candidate of chaos.
Biden clearly should not have run for reelection in the first place. The decision may have been a reasonable one when he made it, which is typically about 18 months into a first term. But his obvious decline in the two years that followed should have been addressed before Harris was thrust into a 10-week presidential campaign that would have been hard for anyone to win.
And finally, for all the hand wringing about what’s wrong with Democrats’ leadership, message and execution, and there is plenty, you can’t ignore the fact that only a man, Joe Biden, has ever beaten Donald Trump at the polls. American voters have picked him over female candidates twice.
So women of America, you’re about to get protected by Donald Trump whether you like it or not. At least, he says, you’ll be able to pay your bills.
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