Democratic legislators, activists and strategists through the ideological spectrum are engaged in a fierce debate on the way in which the 2024 elections damaged the party mark, a consecutive internal argument that already shapes early efforts to rebuild.
Although there was nothing denial that seized the Republicans after President Trump lost in 2020, Democratic leaders disagree on how to interpret the losses that have not only returned Trump to the Trump power, but also put the Republicans to the total control of the federal government.
The speed with which Mr. Trump imposed his will on the government, and the nation, only added the urgency to the discussions, which take place in closed -door rallies on Capitol Hill, to pensions for the donors and strategists and in the intramural campaign culminating during the election of this weekend of The next leader of the National Democratic Committee.
Many noisy voices of the party require calculation and reinvention. But others are considering less a recovery than an approaching approach, hoping to exploit what they expect from the reaction of public opinion against the ambitious Agenda of the White House of Mr. Trump to capture the House of Representatives in 2026 .
The ditch does not fall perfectly along the ideological lines. Some of the most moderate and progressive democrats are aligned in the search for a strong course correction to reverse the erosion of party support, especially among the voters of the working class.
“We need deep changes and difficult conversations, without nibbling the margins,” said representative Pat Ryan, a democrat who represents a swing district north of New York and who outperformed the top of the ticket by one of the wider margins of the country. “At the heart, the brand is weakened to the point that, without the members running there in difficult areas, we cannot reach a majority, which is structurally untenable.”
Democrats who share these darker perspectives see the statistical signs of the party decline everywhere: blue states give in the population to the red states. Voter registration figures are mainly directed in the wrong direction. More Americans identify with the GOP than with the Democrats. And the Democrats lost ground last year among the basic constituencies, in particular low -income, Latin and younger voters while Mr. Trump swept all the states of the battlefield.
However, there are also a certain number of democrats of half glass.
This more optimistic group tends to focus on the narrowness of the current advantage of 218 to 215 places from the GOP in the House, the extraordinary circumstances of the 2024 race – Mr. Trump survived an attempted assassination and Democrats have changed their candidates during the summer – and the fact that the political oscillations of pendulum are as common as it is predictable.
Almost no one suggests that Democrats should simply stay the course. But the various diagnoses of the party affliction could lead to extremely different treatment plans – in terms of policy, personnel and political priorities. A first objective was to know if the message of the party or its Difficulties to deliver this message is more to blame.
Representative Suzan Delbene de Washington, who was president of the campaign committee of the Democrating Congress in 2024 and who remains to supervise the party’s efforts to take the majority in 2026, noted that the Democrats de la Chambre “actually gained ground in 2024. ” She blamed an unusual Republican Redessier Congress maps in a single state last year for the continuing minority status of his party.
“With the exception of North Carolina by making a Gerrymander, we would be in the majority,” she said about a remapping that prompted three Democrats to abandon the hopes of re-election.
Others have underlined the relatively thin margin of 1.5 percentage point of the popular victory of Mr. Trump, and the fact that the Democrats won races in the Senate in four states that Trump carried – an unusually number high to divide their ticket into the current hyperpartisan era.
“We know what an electoral mandate for a president and his party looks like, and he does not lose a seat at home and does not lose four of the five competitions in the Senate,” said Neera Tanden, who served in the White House for The last three Democratic presidents, including the director of the National Policy Council of Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“There is work that the party must do to be more impatient with people in the working class – on economic and security issues,” said Tanden. “But Trump’s popular voting margin was less than half of half of Biden four years ago.”
Of course, the parts that enter periods of soul research are often blind to what exactly they are looking for: the Republicans have ordered a political autopsy After their loss of 2012 and recommended a brand change which was, more or less, the opposite of the strict and strict approach of immigration that Mr. Trump used to return the party in power in 2016.
For Democrats, recommendations could vary considerably, given the range of groups that make them: dozens of Congress progressives Recently met On Capitol Hill to settle on a message to counter Mr. Trump. A super democratic and non -profit heat pac, American Bridge, hold A retirement for its donors next month. And Third Way, a centrist democratic group, is organizing a rally in February to discuss how to “empower views and moderate and traditional voices”.
Such conversations in air do not occur in every corners of the party.
The senior managers of the Kamala Harris campaign and the leaders of the first Super Pac who supported him, Future Forward, have not been sitting since the elections for an official discussion of what was wrong in their spending blitz several billion dollars. The law on the financing of the campaign prohibited such conversations during the elections, and Tensions have increased between both sides.
The leadership of Future Forward contacted to suggest a summit in a way on the lessons learned, but such a rally was refused by the Harris team, according to three people informed of awareness, although they declared that he There had been informal communications through the ditch.
Some Democrats consider party losses in 2024 as more situational than systemic. They blame Mr. Biden for Ignore the survey It showed that the public was seriously disturbed by his age, and for having removed so late and in such a politically weakened state that Mrs. Harris actually inherited her unpopularity without enough time to carve out a separate identity for herself.
“There were people who were very unhappy with the outgoing administration, and all they needed to know about Harris was that she was working with Biden,” said Jared Bernstein, who was president of the Council of Economic Advocates of the White House for Mr. Biden.
Mr. Bernstein warned against the “over-interpretation” of the 2024 result, which, according to him, was aligned with a global reaction against the parts to power over inflation.
“It was largely a global anti-shaft-in our case very fueled by immigration and inflation,” he said. “We might have been able to overcome that if we had been able to launch a convincing defense of Pronouns against payroll checks. But we weren’t.
The final result was Mr. Trump’s first victory for popular voting in three trials, and only the second for a Republican since 1988. (The last was the re -election of George W. Bush in 2004.)
“No one can say that it was a landslide – hell, I was political director of Walter Mondale in 1984, and I was buried under one,” said William Galston, principal researcher at Brookings Institution .
But Mr. Galston said that focusing on the proximity of the masked popular vote the disturbing movements below the surface, like Gallup data showing that more Americans have identified or leaning a republican than Democrat for three consecutive years. This had not been the case in a single year since 1991, when the GOP had won the last three presidential elections.
At the time, when the Democrats were in the desert, Mr. Galston and Elaine Kamarck, a long -standing member of the National Democratic Committee, wrote a paper Together called “escape policy” – a criticism of those who have apologized for the party’s electoral gaps, rather than facing serious problems – which have become a manifesto for the post -react revival of the party .
In 2022, the two, who are both BrooKings scholarship holders, published a revised warningPrescribing a “reality therapy” course to the Democrats, including above the party’s “cultural bubble”, which, according to them, has put many members of the party with less educated or low-income Americans.
Galston said he and Mrs. Kamarck recover “the group for the last time” to write an update after 2024.
“It is logical to break the glass and pull the fire alarm,” he said about the difficult situation of the party.
Some Democrats have targeted spotlight on long -term erosion of voters’ recording in key states, which seemed to be expired in 2024. In Pennsylvania, the most recent figures show the democratic advantage in the state about 189,000 voters – down 916,000 when Mr. Trump brought the state in 2016 and more than 325,000 as recently as in October.
But Molly Murphy, a democratic survey that worked on Biden and Harris’ campaigns, urged her party to focus exclusively on solutions.
“We don’t even need to debate the depth of the hole,” she said. “What the Democrats must do is act as if we were in a very deep hole – and if it arises, leaving, we were not in a deep hole, then it is a booty for us. “”