Why The Democrats Lost

Source:PBS News- this photo is not meant to be insulting. At least not on my part.

The Democratic Party is going to make a huge decision about the future of this party in February or March. Which of course will be deciding who will essentially be the leader of the party, since they're going to be out of The White House again. And that position of course will be its next Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. 

But before the Democrats do that, I think we need to look at why they're going to be out of The White House for at least the next 4 years and why they're going to be the opposition party again, as well as the minority party in Congress, and why there will even be an election to nominate it's new leader. Instead of a President Kamala Harris just appointing the new DNC Chairman, while serving as the party leader. 

I think the popular thing in American politics right after an election, is to jump right in and write your own article about what went right and what went wrong. Even do it that Wednesday morning, if not late Tuesday night (if we already know who the next President will be) and give your 2 cents (even it's not even worth a penny) about what you think went well and what went wrong about the election. But I wanted to think about it and make sure I get this right. Plus, I literally had other things to do with this blog, like setting up pages for it, which took me at least another week after the election to do, so we're ready to go completely again by December. And be ready for the return of President Donald Trump.  

So I'm going to give you a few reasons why the Democrats lost The White House in 2024. It's not all President Biden's and Vice President Harris's fault. But they're both towards the top of the list. 

Remember then citizen Joe Biden promising not to run for President in 2020: 

"Former Vice President Joe Biden’s top advisers and prominent Democrats outside the Biden campaign have recently revived a long-running debate whether Biden should publicly pledge to serve only one term, with Biden himself signaling to aides that he would serve only a single term.

While the option of making a public pledge remains available, Biden has for now settled on an alternative strategy: quietly indicating that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisers fear could turn him into a lame duck and sap him of his political capital.

According to four people who regularly talk to Biden, all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss internal campaign matters, it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president.

“If Biden is elected,” a prominent adviser to the campaign said, “he’s going to be 82 years old in four years and he won’t be running for reelection.” 

From Politico

Even by October, 2023, it would've been too late for President Biden to drop out. But it would've been better than dropping out 6 months ago:

"Bill Maher called on Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential election, saying the 80-year-old incumbent is too old to run for president and likened him to the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The host of “Real Time with Bill Maher” mocked Biden on Friday night, describing the president as the “only democrat who can lose to Trump,” despite the men only having a four-year age difference.

“Someone has to convince President Biden that if he runs again, he’s going to turn the country back over to Trump and go… down in history as Ruth Bader Biden, the person who doesn’t know when to quit and so does great damage to their party and their country,” Maher said, referring to the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Ginsburg notoriously decided to not retire during the Obama administration when she could have been replaced with a liberal justice, only to die at the age of 87 in September 2020 during the Trump administration." 

From The New York Post

I don't agree with comedian Bill Maher on everything. But when he's right, he's damn right. (You put that stronger) And he called it in October, 2023: 

"The issue with President Biden isn’t if he will be replaced - it's who will replace him." 

From Real Time With Bill Maher

To put it simply: if President Biden announced let's say by April, 2023, that he promised not to run for reelection in 3-1/2 years a go to assure voters that he would pass the torch (so to speak) and because it was time "for a new generation of leadership", the Democratic Party would've had a full primary season and Vice President Kamala Harris probably wins the nomination anyway. And she would've been my preferred candidate right out of the gate. And all those townhalls, those debates, those TV interviews, that she didn't want to do this summer and to a certain extent this fall, all those things would've been taken care of during late 2023 and early 2024. 

And it's not just that President Biden broke his promise not to run for reelection. It's why he did that is even worst, his lack of reasoning for it. He made it about the economy and that he was the only person up to task of bringing down the high cost of living. When the fact is he knew damn well that his background as a public servant is not economics. He made his carer in Congress as a foreign policy and national security expert. As well as criminal justice and the Constitution. Not economic policy. 

The reason why President Biden tried to run for reelection, is the same reason why any other President who ran for reelection did that, because he wanted to be a two-term President. It's almost embarrassing for President's to not get the 2nd term. And probably feels worst when you don't bother to run. Worst than that when you own damn party doesn't want you to run for reelection. 

And to set the record completely straight: my colleague Fred Schneider from The New Democrat argued against what Bill Maher was back 14 months ago and this was his reasoning for it: 

"You can show me all the polls in the Democratic Party that suggest that President Biden shouldn't run for reelection and that Donald Trump might actually beat him. But for me at least to even take those polls seriously, you need someone besides a professional conspiracy theorist, whose in the same age range and generation as both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, to not only announce their own presidential campaign, but show polling that suggests that they could not just beat Joe Biden, but then beat Donald Trump next year as well." 

From The New Democrat

And I agreed with Fred at the time. We thought 14 months ago that President Biden was simply the only Democrat who could beat Donald Trump. But then the debate happened and that changed everything for everybody. And to Bill Maher's credit, he saw that President Biden was simply too weak at least politically, to beat Donald Trump 13 months before the election. 

And then we get to Kamala Harris who for the most part inherited a strong campaign, as far as the organization, the people, the infrastructure, the finances. What she gave it, was energy, enthusiasm, and the only way I can put this but political adorableness, where she's just so cute and sweet as a person, it's really hard not to like her, if not love here. Assuming you are not a neanderthal jackass, who thinks that the only job that women should have, is to stay home and make their husbands happy. 

On the downside, Vice President Harris not just starts off Election 2024 as an unpopular Vice President, with a approval rating at around 35%, but where maybe 1/2 American voters (depending on what poll you look at) don't even know who she is, what she believes. 

I was calling for on my Threads page back in July, that Kamala Harris needs to do a series of townhalls, maybe a week after figuring out exactly what kind of presidential campaign she wanted to run and do those townhalls in just the swing states in the beginning. So people, especially Independents and Republicans who didn't want to vote for Donald Trump, as well as blue-collar Democrats who were considering voting for Donald Trump based on the economy, could get a good idea of who she and what here values are. 

The Vice President doesn't do any townhalls until October. It's September with CNN anchor Dana Bash, before she does any network interviews at all. So it's not just running for President late, which wasn't her fault, but starting out real late in the gates to even do an interview, that I think set her back. And her first townhall at all was in October with Univision News and CNN. 

And far as as the Harris Campaign's strategy, it seemed to be about maxing out yuppy, white-collar, especially female, yuppy, white-collar voters, of all political backgrounds, including urban and suburban Republican women, to vote for her. And hope African-Americans fall in line, where they were even dragging with President Biden, who did so well with them in 2020. And as far as blue-collar Democrats, I guess they left that up to Governor Tim Walz. 

According to the Roper Center, Barack Obama and John McCain split middle-income voters back in 2008. And then Senator Obama won the union vote with 59% of the vote. In 2012, according to the Roper Center, then President Obama won the union vote with 58 of the vote and they split the middle-income vote. 

According to NBC News: "Biden won 56 percent of union households to Trump's 40 percent, according to NBC News exit polls, doubling Hillary Clinton's 8 percentage-point margin among the group four years ago." 

From NBC News

From Brookings: "The dominant post-election 2024 narrative is that Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris was delivered largely by a multiracial working-class coalition. Backed by certain numbers, this narrative has many Democrats quaking in their 2026 campaign boots. For example, the exit polls show that working-class voters, defined as voters without a college degree, split 56% for Trump to 42% for Harris. The same polls tell us that white working-class voters favored Trump over Harris by 66% to 32%, and that Trump won a larger share of working-class Black and Latino voters than he did in 2020. 

All true, but let’s put those numbers into historical context and then, starting with the white working class, dig into what the exit poll data reveal when you run cross-tabulations by education and sex.1

As I have documented elsewhere, after winning a 56% white working-class majority in 1984 with Ronald Reagan, the GOP lost the majority in the 1990s, then got back to even with George W. Bush in 2000 (50%) and again in 2004 (51%). Mitt Romney won 56% of the white working-class vote in 2012, followed by Trump with 62% in 2016, 59% in 2020, and 66% in 2024. That two-thirds share is impressive, but many other Republican candidates have done as well or better electorally with the white working class. 

For example, in 2022, working-class whites broke 66% for Republican congressional candidates—the same percentage of those voters that Trump won in 2024. And several Republican governors who were not aligned with Trump won more than two-thirds of white working-class votes. For example, in 2022, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who would go on to challenge Trump for the GOP presidential nomination before becoming his staunch ally, won 70% of the white working-class vote; and Ohio’s Mike DeWine, who received a congratulatory call from President Joe Biden the morning after his reelection win, received 72% of it." 

From Brookings

Left-wing, especially woke, PC oriented, militant, left-wing Democrats, are going to hate hearing this, but the fact is if you want to win a presidential election in America, you go where the votes are and get the voters who are most likely to show up and vote. The country is officially still 70% European racially and ethnically. More like 80% if you included Spanish Latinos who of at least some Spanish descent. As well as 35-40 working class of all backgrounds. 

You can't get blown out with working class European-Americans and then try to make it up with people who don't tend to vote, like white-collar yuppies, young people, and African-Americans, as well as center-right Republicans, who don't want to vote for you anyway. And then think you get these voters with the current "hot celebrities". Who might just want the attention and money anyway.African-Americans will always be a major part of the Democratic Party. But they're still 12% of the country roughly. And European and Asian-Americans still out vote them, at least on a percentage basis. 

Hopefully tomorrow, I'll have my 2nd piece ready for why I believed Democrats lost and where to go from here. But before you can rebuilt anything, (which is what the Democratic Party needs to do now) you have to first know why you have to rebuild in the first place and what went wrong.

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