For months, it was clear to Rep. Lloyd Doggett that Joe Biden had no chance of winning the presidency again.
After Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump in June, Doggett became the first Democratic lawmaker to call on Biden to get out of the race. It was a gamble, but in the end, a few dozen lawmakers joined Doggett in challenging Biden openly, publicly asking him to step aside.
“Before, we were facing defeat,” he told reporters when Biden dropped out. But now, as the party rallied around Kamala Harris, “there’s a great spirit of hope out there.”
Was Doggett worried at the time that people might blame him in some way — for being the first to call for it — if Harris didn’t win?
“If there’s defeat, there’ll be plenty of fingers to point,” he told NOTUS over the summer. “I feel that the numbers vindicate my position, and ultimately that President Biden reached the same conclusion.”
With Harris’ defeat on Tuesday — and with Trump’s resounding victory — the Democratic finger-pointing Doggett warned of is already afoot. The blame games promise a painful, messy reckoning within the party. In interviews, lawmakers questioned the party’s communications strategy and Biden’s decision to run again. Others are openly complaining about opposing factions of the party or pinning the blame on the mishandling of their personal grievances. None of them have clear next steps to win back voters. Many of the Democrats who spoke with NOTUS for this story requested anonymity in order to speak frankly.
A different Democratic lawmaker told NOTUS on Wednesday that one piece of advice from consultants seems to have been a massive misstep: Don’t push back forcefully on GOP narratives that the American economy is failing.
“We were warned away from defending the economy as being super strong with low inflation and low unemployment, because it was said that this would offend people who were still hurting from the Trump and COVID-19 inflationary period,” the member said. “In hindsight, it looks to me like that was not a great strategy.”
“We should have been bragging about what the Economist magazine just called the American economy, which is the envy of the world,” they added. “And we should say we actually have been able to whip inflation and keep unemployment low and we have a roaring manufacturing sector, but we don’t have enough equality and too much of the gains have gone to too few people.”
The U.S. economy might have recovered faster from the shocks of the pandemic than other nations, but voters were still contending with higher prices than before the crisis.
One Democratic congressional aide argued, for that reason, that the big-picture trends were simply never in the party’s favor.
“It’s just inflation,” the senior Democratic aide told NOTUS. “My 500-word piece on why would be the word inflation 500 times.”
Others are furious with Biden for even running for a second term. Some are angry at his circle of close advisers, too, who knew he was not fit to run and didn’t urge him to step aside sooner.
Democratic megadonor John Morgan texted NOTUS that the president “obviously in hindsight” should have withdrawn his campaign sooner. “But the big mistake,” he said, “was the coronation of a terribly flawed candidate with so many to chose from.”
If Biden had allowed “the party a full campaign cycle to get energized about his successor, to build a real headline-grabbing and voter-energizing process around passing the generational torch, who knows,” said Democratic strategist Max Burns.
Another Democratic lawmaker defended Harris.
“She did the best job possible,” the member said, adding that “she saved the Democratic Party as we know it.” If Biden hadn’t dropped out, “Republicans would have 60 seats in the Senate. We would have suffered historic losses.”
“Biden should have stepped down long before he did,” this member added. “He could have been a transformational figure … I don’t know where we go from here.”
Some members do know where to go from here: far away from their ideological opponents within the party.
“Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left, which has managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews from the Democratic Party,” wrote Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York. “There is more to lose than there is to gain politically from pandering to a far left that is more representative of Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok than it is of the real world.”
Regular people, he added, are “not buying the ivory-towered nonsense that the far left is selling.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, the independent from Vermont who describes himself as a democratic socialist, claimed Democrats had not focused enough on the working class.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he wrote in a statement.
Others are litigating whether Harris should have chosen Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate instead of Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota.
“Shapiro could’ve helped with the blue wall and PA more than Walz,” texted a second Democratic congressional aide.
What should the party do about this result? What lesson can be learned from losing the popular vote to a Republican for the first time in 20 years?
“Some people are going to want to move to the left. Some people are going to want to move to the center,” this aide answered. “But I think we’ve got to do a better job of messaging our accomplishments. We’ve got to be able to explain to everyday people how things are helping them, how things are making life better.”
Others see danger in accepting an answer that doesn’t give the party enough agency. Clearly something went wrong — with strategy, perhaps with the candidate, perhaps even with passing trillions of dollars in progressive priorities after winning very slim majorities in Congress in 2020.
“They misread 2020,” argued Liam Donovan, a lobbyist and former GOP political operative. “2020 was like a turn-the-page election, where people just didn’t like the way things were going and wanted a course of correction. And Biden read that as ‘I’m going to do FDR things.’”
Donovan added that should be a warning to Trump too: “You’ve been given an opportunity to put together this new coalition, but it’s not yours yet.”
For all the recriminations and anger on the Democratic side, Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, at least, had a simple answer as to why Trump did so well.
“People were just not happy with this administration, and obviously the Democratic nominee was a part of it,” he said on Wednesday.
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Haley Byrd Wilt and Riley Rogerson are reporters at NOTUS.
Kate Nocera, managing editor at NOTUS, contributed to this report.