Democrats and political talking heads have initiated the circular firing squad as they search to blame anyone else for Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election.
Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party lost the White House, lost the Senate, and still may lose the House. The Supreme Court has a conservative majority that handed Trump a presidential “get out of jail free” card for almost anything he does in office between 2025 and 2028.
So, who is to blame?
Some Democrats think swapping Joe Biden for Harris was their deadly mistake. Others have blamed Biden himself, saying he took far too long to drop out. Progressives point to the Biden administration’s stance on Israel and the Harris campaign’s attempts to appeal to moderates and anti-Trump Republicans.
Maybe it’s not a single person, but the issues themselves; some analysts have argued that Americans resonated with Trump’s stances — however sometimes disturbing — on immigration, on the economy, on foreign wars.
Here are the leading scapegoats Democrats and analysts are trying to serve up to enraged liberal voters:
The vice president has never had a showing as a strong national candidate. She lost her primary race in 2020, and took the reigns from Biden without a primary or any other input from actual voters. Harris was appointed the 2024 Democratic Party presidential candidate; she was not elected to that role.
Harris’s campaign hung its hopes on voters from marginalized backgrounds and women — including Republican women concerned about their abortion rights — to come through for her on election night. But that does not appear to have panned out, with Black men and Hispanic voters moving toward Trump.
She also tried to appeal to moderates and suburbanites, running on platforms of criminal crackdowns and bolstering the military — typically Republican stomping grounds — to little effect. The campaign highlighted former Congresswoman Liz Cheney after she and her war-profiteering father decided to back Harris. The move likely did little to sway moderates and a lot to disgust progressives.
Harris’s campaign was insistent that she was picking up new voters and that the race would be close; a recent poll out of Iowa only helped bolster that idea.
A Democratic National Committee official, speaking anonymously, told Reuters that they were fielding angry calls from party members on election night.
“They feel lied to by the campaign,” the official said.
Harris may also have been too close to a Biden Administration that did little to stand against Israel’s rampant and unchecked killing of Palestinians in Gaza. Despite comments she made indicating she might have taken a tougher stance on Israel, it does not appear to have moved many Democrats critical of the Biden administration’s response to the continuing crisis.
Politico argued that it was Harris’s inability to make a clean break from Biden that ultimately doomed her presidential hopes, claiming she could not both back the work of the Biden Administration and convince voters that she would effect significant change if she took power.
