A campaign sign in Bozeman, Mont., last month.
Credit...Janie Osborne for The New York Times

After Kamala Harris’s Loss to Donald Trump, Democrats Seek Answers

The Democratic Party agrees it needs to figure out what went wrong. The question is how.

by · NY Times

After suffering what could shape up to be their biggest electoral defeat in more than 40 years, Democrats agree on one thing: They need to figure out what went wrong.

The question is how.

After Republicans failed to oust President Barack Obama and lost ground in the Democratic-held Senate in 2012, G.O.P. leaders produced a 100-page report on what had gone wrong, which has been known ever since as the “autopsy.”

Democrats didn’t do that after Hillary Clinton’s narrow defeat by Donald Trump in 2016. But as my colleague Adam Nagourney and I dialed up Democrats all over the country today, we got the sense that a push for a similar exercise had begun in some quarters.

It’s coming from party stalwarts like Donna Brazile, a former interim chair and current at-large member of the Democratic National Committee.

“It’s vital that we learn why turnout disappeared from 2020 to 2024 and much more,” Brazile wrote in an email.

It’s coming from left-leaning lawmakers like Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

“People rightfully believe the system is broken — and we need to earn their votes,” Jayapal said in a statement. “I believe, as a party, we must undertake a process that brings in all wings of the party, dives into data and listens to voters, not just hot takes.”

Swing-district Democrats, like Representative Tom Suozzi of New York, who held onto his seat on Trump-friendly Long Island on Tuesday, also think the party has a lot to learn.

“Trump won my district by 19,000 votes. I won by 9,000 votes,” Suozzi wrote me in a text message. “Democrats should not be asking, ‘How could they vote for him?’ They should ask, ‘Why did they vote for him?’”

There is less agreement, though, on who in the party should undertake such an examination, or what it should look like. It’s hard to do an autopsy when you don’t know who the coroner is.

A party without a leader

This week, Democrats became a party effectively without a leader. Its new standard-bearer, Vice President Kamala Harris, is on track to have lost the Electoral College and the popular vote. President Biden is now a lame duck. And the chair of the Democratic National Committee, Jaime Harrison, has said for months that he will not seek another term — and the question of whether there should be a party autopsy could be litigated in the fight to replace him.

Democrats know what their problem is — losing — but they are already divided over the underlying cause. Some believe the party was too cautious for an electorate seeking big change, while others believe the party has become too progressive in a country that is increasingly conservative. It should be no surprise, then, that there is not consensus on who should diagnose the party’s ills.

“There needs to be a house-cleaning and a new generation of Democratic leaders,” Representative Ro Khanna of California told me. “We spent a billion dollars on concerts and focus-group-tested slogans that didn’t speak to the anger of ordinary Americans who feel that their kids aren’t going to be able to buy a home or a car and that the American dream is slipping away.”

He added, “I don’t think having some D.C. insiders come up with some 30-page report is going to do anything.”

Representative Chris Deluzio, a Democrat who held onto his House seat in a conservative swath of western Pennsylvania, says a lot more can be learned from voters — and from winning candidates — than from consultants.

“For the national economic message to not be so clear and cohesive on confronting monopolies and corporate power, that’s a mistake,” Deluzio told me. “Whatever that process might be for our party, they’ve got to hear voices from the Rust Belt that can win.”

Howard Dean, another former chair of the Democratic National Committee, said it was imperative that Democrats analyzed what had gone wrong.

“Fewer people voted this time than in 2020,” he noted, and that hurt Democrats more than Republicans. “We have to find out why.”

But even he did not think the D.N.C. was the right team for the job.

Outside analyses

Outside Democratic groups often do their own analyses of what went wrong. This week, Way to Win, a national group of left-leaning Democratic donors and political strategists, said it had already begun conducting qualitative and quantitative surveys that “will serve as our starting point for understanding what happened Tuesday.”

After Democrats lost seats in the House in 2020, Third Way, a Democratic think tank, did its own study, said Matt Bennett, a founder of the group.

“It was valuable,” he said. “One major finding was that ‘Defund the Police’ really hurt us.”

Democratic Party leaders did an autopsy in 2015 after their party suffered big midterm losses the previous year. It recommended that the party come up with a better “national narrative.” (They did not, apparently, find one by 2016.)

But the most famous autopsy was the Republican one released in 2013, which said the party needed a friendlier brand that would better appeal to younger voters, women and minorities in a diversifying nation.

Two years later, Trump announced he was running for president.

One Story You Shouldn’t Miss

More than just an olive branch

The success of America’s nearly 250-year-old democracy rests on the good faith buy-in of our political candidates. This week, Vice President Kamala Harris embraced an overlooked aspect of the transition of power: the concession speech. My colleague Nick Corasaniti explained why that matters.

On their surface, concession speeches try to offer some modicum of solace to an aggrieved losing side, to show grace in defeat and to extend a momentary olive branch for working together toward a common good.

But they also serve a separate function: to accept publicly the results of an election, and to tamp down the flames of election denial.

In the immediate aftermath of Harris’s loss, some left-wing accounts online began spreading doubt about the results, falsely claiming that 20 million votes were missing (this was a crude misrepresentation of how votes are counted; roughly that many votes are most likely still to be counted in the Western states in the next week). Others began claiming without evidence that Elon Musk had hacked voting machines (election machines are not connected to the internet).

But Harris in her speech poured cold water on all of that.

“I know folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now,” she said. “I get it, but we must accept the results of this election. A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results. That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny.”

President Biden echoed the sentiment the next day.

“I also hope we can lay to rest the question about the integrity of the American electoral system,” Mr. Biden said. “It is honest, it is fair, and it is transparent. And it can be trusted, win or lose.”

The remarks were a not-so-subtle critique of President-elect Donald J. Trump, who four years ago embraced the falsehoods about his loss that resulted in a riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He has never conceded the 2020 election.

So while some left-wing social media accounts continue to spread disinformation about the presidential results, and some right-wing accounts are spreading false claims about Senate races in Nevada and Arizona, none of that has reached the zeitgeist in the way that the falsehoods about the 2020 election did, in large part because the candidates this year have not given it oxygen.

Mr. Biden, in his remarks, also went a step further to honor a part of the electoral process that has been inundated with threats and accusations for the past four years.

“I also hope we can restore the respect for all our election workers, who busted their necks and took risks at the outset,” Mr. Biden said. “We should thank them — thank them for staffing voting sites, counting the votes, protecting the very integrity of the election. Many of them are volunteers who do it simply out of love for their country.”

— Nick Corasaniti

Our Coverage of the 2024 Election

The Presidential Race

Other Results

More Coverage and Analysis