Debate is raging in Democratic circles over the reasons behind their decisive loss to President-elect Trump earlier this month, an election that saw a rightward shift in districts across the country.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) told “The Daily” that Democrats lost because they were obsessed with race, gender and identity in an election that revealed the nation's sharp divide along class lines. Trump posted surprising gains among racial minorities, even as Democrats called him racist.
“You can say, ‘Look, isn’t great that we have in fact a very smart and effective Black woman who’s on the Supreme Court?’ Great. But you don’t hang your hat on that,” Sanders said, referring President Biden’s appointment of Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. “What you also want to do is talk about the reality of what’s going on in the African-American community all over this country.”
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) has been at the forefront telling Democrats they need to be more moderate on cultural issues, such as transgender women playing women’s sports. Axios reports that Democrats running for reelection felt ambushed by the Trump campaign’s ads on transgender athletes, which analysts believe were among the most effective of the cycle.
“Democrats should’ve had the easiest election in our lifetime… and yet we got defeated across the board, so seriously, we lost big. And we’ve got to come to grips with that if we’re going to be willing to change,” Moulton told CNN.
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who lost his reelection fight in deep red Ohio, told Playbook that Democrats have lost the working class vote to Republicans.
“Democrats have historically been the party of workers. I've seen that support erode from workers because Democrats haven't focused on workers the way that we should over the last 30 years," he said.
Former White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told Katie Couric that Democrats lost because of the rise of people who get their information from podcasts and other “platforms that have no fact checking mechanism and no accountability for having disinformation spread.”
But New York Times columnist Ezra Klein told “Pod Save America” that Democrats needs to stop blaming alternative media, citing the red shift in big cities, where voters expressed their displeasure with crime and the quality of living.
“Not just crime, but homeless encampments, trash on the streets, people jumping turnstiles in subways, crazy people on the streets," he said. "You just talk to people and they’re mad about it. They feel it’s different than it used to be. I mean, in San Francisco, like, the fury is overwhelming.”
Meanwhile, Democrats are preparing to resist Trump’s promise of sweeping change wherever they can.
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The Hill’s Mike Lillis reports: “Capitol Hill Democrats are pressing the White House to pull out all the stops to gird the executive branch against President-elect’s Trump’s promised efforts to tear down federal agencies and restructure them to his liking.”
- House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) urged Senate Republicans to serve as a check on a “particularly out of control” president-elect.
