Democrats pick apart Trump victory: ‘How do you spend $1bn and not win?’ | US elections 2024

Democrats across the country were left in disbelief and searching for answers as they confronted the reality of another Donald Trump presidency.

Trump’s victory was announced early on Wednesday morning, marking a significant political comeback that has sent shockwaves around the world.

As Kamala Harris’s chances of winning dwindled, the vice-president decided not to address her supporters gathered at Howard University in Washington DC on Tuesday night, instead scheduling an address for 4pm ET on Wednesday.

In the meantime, Democratic operatives and strategists and others filled the void, expressing their disappointment and already beginning to pick apart what went wrong for Harris and the Democratic party.

The Democratic pollster Paul Maslin argued that Harris did as well as she could have, given the environment and circumstance. Harris “did a really good job”, Maslin told Politico, but ultimately “this race was unwinnable”.

“Trump, rightly or wrongly, his persona and his fundamental attack line against the condition of the country, the Biden-Harris administration and frankly the Democratic party, was in the end unbeatable,” he said.

CNN’s national political correspondent Alex Thompson noted that a former adviser to Joe Biden criticized the Harris campaign, asking: “How do you spend $1bn and not win?”

Others, Thompson said, have suggested that Biden should have exited the race sooner.

He said one longtime Democratic operative told him the party “sleepwalked into disaster” on Tuesday night, adding that “swapping the pitcher in at the sixth inning wasn’t enough, and that Kamala Harris did as good of a job as she could have done”.

Mark Longabaugh, a veteran Democratic strategist who previously advised Senator Bernie Sanders, also said Harris was handed the reins “too late”, adding that it was a “tough environment” according to Politico.

The moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, Kristen Welker, also mentioned the potential impact of the timing of Biden’s decision to step down after the presidential debate and not before.

“There was so much discussion, even over the summer, about potentially having an open primary and having that fight play out within the Democratic party,” Welker said. “So I think it’s one of the big questions moving forward.”

Others, such as Lindy Li, a senior Democratic official in Pennsylvania, are questioning whether the outcome would have been different if Harris had chosen a different vice-presidential candidate, such as the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro.

Li argued to Fox News that the moderate Shapiro would have conveyed to American voters that Harris is not the “San Francisco liberal” Trump portrayed her to be. “But she went with someone actually to her left,” Li said, referring to the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, whom Harris chose as her vice-presidential pick.

Li also criticized the Harris campaign for not distinguishing Harris enough from Biden, a point that has been echoed by other operatives and commentators in the last few weeks.

Some pointed to Harris’s appearance on the talkshow The View, when she was asked if there was anything she would have done differently than Biden and responded: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”

Those comments were quickly seized upon by the Trump campaign and Republicans, who used it as an opportunity to try to tie Harris to Biden’s unpopularity and blame her for the administration’s challenges related to immigration, inflation and more.

On MSNBC on Tuesday night, the commentator Joy Reid expressed disappointment at white women in North Carolina for not coming out to vote for Harris and contributing to the Democrat’s loss in the swing state.

“In the end, they didn’t make their numbers, we have to be blunt about why,” Reid said. “Black voters came through for Harris, white women voters did not. That is what appears happened.”

In the run-up to election day, Van Jones, a CNN contributor and former Barack Obama adviser, had criticized the celebrity appearances at the Harris campaign’s rallies, arguing that they were not the best use of supporters’ time.

“I don’t think people understand, working people sometimes have to choose: am I going to go to the big, cool concert and pay for babysitting for that, or am I going to figure out a way to get to the polls?” Jones said. “I don’t like these big star-studded events.

“I don’t want people going to concerts. I want people out there knocking on doors, I want people out there fighting for this thing,” he added. “I’m just nervous, nervous, nervous.”

David Sirota, who was a senior adviser for Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, described Tuesday night as a “very bad night”.

“Some of us spent years warning Dems to take working-class politics more seriously & to not tout neocons,” he said. “We did so in hopes of avoiding this & yet we were vilified as traitors by Dem elites & liberal pundits.

“There’s a lesson here.”

Another former Sanders staffer, Jeff Weaver, told Politico that the Democratic party now needed to “re-establish its relationship with the working-class people”.

As of Wednesday morning most Democratic lawmakers remained silent about the election outcome, perhaps waiting until Harris addresses the nation, which she is expected to do on Wednesday afternoon.

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage