President-elect Donald Trump's landslide victory has thrown the Democratic Party into disarray, without a clear leader to pull it out of the political abyss.
Democrats had planned for either President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the party for at least the next four years, but President Trump's underwhelming performance appears to have left the party in tatters until a new dynamic emerges. .
Former Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump stands on stage during the final rally of the election year at Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on November 5, 2024. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
Many of the current Democratic leaders are too old to represent the next generation of Democrats. The heydays of Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and John Kerry are behind us. Current Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., New York) is 73 years old. Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-New York) is 84 years old. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is young enough, but under his leadership, House Democrats lost in 2022 and 2024. DNC Chair Jamie Harrison is younger but faces the same challenges as Jeffries.
Some Democrats who could emerge as leaders could also be found among governors who remain in power but whose resumes are unblemished by Trump's landslide victory. . This includes the government. Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, JB Pritzker. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also has a chance to take power, even though she only represents a very blue district in New York state.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) speaks on the first day of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois, on August 19, 2024. (Mandel Gann/AFP via Getty)
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Some of this might have happened if President-elect Harris were now considering how to structure her Cabinet to guide the direction of her new administration. But some within the party are already beginning to realize that while all of these initial squabbles are fine as short-term coping mechanisms, they are diagnosing and introspecting both the party's own failures and President Trump's significant inroads into its base. There is already a fundamental consensus that the actual work will take many months. If not the year. Some of this is formal, carried out by party committees, data companies and super PACs, which now have support from rabid donors. In the meantime, there will be casual criticism of Biden and Harris in particular. Already, some officials close to Mr. Biden's original campaign are wondering aloud how Mr. Biden got away with refusing to take polls to understand his own image before launching his campaign in 2023. Meanwhile, those close to Ms. Harris are questioning how her advisers worked with Biden supporters as the race shifted. And how some of the people who knew her best in California were shut out. Many believe that before they can chart their own coherent and aggressive path forward, they really need to dig deeper into the party's more fundamental shortcomings in the eyes of voters. For now, as one top strategist told me this week, they're “licking their wounds” as they ponder “patient diagnoses.”
As such, the atmosphere is more 2004-esque despair and introspection than 2016-esque rage. Even if the party can come to some sort of agreement on whether this outcome is due to Biden and his rejection of the inflation he oversaw, or is part of a deeper, global anti-incumbent mood, this trend will continue. will continue. Even if Democrats largely agreed with Elizabeth Warren's post-election message about the importance of vigilance against Trump's return, she said Republicans relied on them “blaming each other.” This is why the special warnings were greeted with a collective shrug. In fact, now is the time for condemnation.
But the biggest difference between now and 2016 is that the party lacks clarity on who it can or should turn to for leadership and vision, or even early ideas.
Compounding the Democratic power vacuum is that party leaders appear to be at a loss as to why Trump won re-election in a landslide, shifting 48 states to the right in the process. One of the takeaways from the election for some on the radical left is to denounce Hispanic and black voters as misogynists. This theory was promoted by MSNBC co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Ocasio-Cortez.
The second theory suggests that the loss has nothing to do with Trump, but rather with Democrats being victims of inflation. This theory has been promoted by the White House, former President Barack Obama, and his former staff.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter for Breitbart News and a former RNC war room analyst. He is the author of The Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell “×” @WendellHusebø or society of truth @WendellHusebo.
