There were tears shed, a crushing sense of disappointment and an outpouring of love among the thousands of Harris supporters gathered at Washington’s Howard University to hear its most famous former student formally concede defeat.
It was an emotional occasion for the candidate too. Propelled into the hot seat barely 100 days ago, she used her 15-minute speech to commit herself to the peaceful transfer of power to Donald Trump (in deliberate contrast in his own refusal to do so in 2020) and to urge her followers to keep alive the flame of social progress.
Yet, conspicuously, the Vice President failed to reflect any early lessons she drew from her devastating defeat or even to acknowledge that the scale of the election loss would require a serious process to understand what went wrong.
We should be under no illusions. This was a disastrous night for the Democrats who lost the White House to a convicted criminal, failed to win one of the seven swing states and lost the popular vote to a Republican for the first time in two decades. They lost control of the Senate too and – with votes still being countered across the US – their somewhat modest goal to retake the House of Representatives lies in the balance.
Such is the grip that Trump exists on the Republican Party that this MAGA takeover of the US government – supplemented by the solidly conservative Supreme Court – gives the former President a free hand in pushing forward his radical right-wing agenda when in office.
Disaster for the Democrats
Harris underperformed across the board compared to Biden in 2020, even among women despite the confident hopes that abortion and the Vice President’s elevation as the candidate would mobilise female voters to carry her towards the White House.
Even more concerning is how Trump is attracting voters who have traditionally been solid Democrat-supporting. Take Latino men. In 2020, Biden won this group by 23 points while in this election Trump had a lead of eight points.
Falling support among working class and lower middle-income voters (white and non-white) is a deep concern too. About six in ten Americans are in this group. They are unlikely to be college-educated, have been hit hard by the cost-of-living crisis and have higher concerns about the impact of immigration.
It looks like about 54% of this group supported Trump this time with 44% supporting Harris, continuing a trend that has been playing out for at least the last three elections [LINK] and reflecting a deep-seated problem facing other centre-left parties in the western world too, not least in Britain.
An opinion poll published earlier this year by the Progressive Policy Institute, a US-based think tank, found that 45 percent of American working-class voters believed the Democratic Party had moved “too far to the left,” and 40 percent disapproved of the party for being too heavily influenced by “special interests like public sector unions, environmental activists, and academics.”
Certainly, as with Labour, Democrat activists, representatives and decision-makers have become more educated, metropolitan and socially liberal and, in doing so, have become increasingly detached from the views, identity and outlook of working-class voters.
Defeating the rise of the right
A post-mortem of this election must surely identify this disconnection as a key factor that needs addressing. It is also the reason that it is highly unlikely that Kamala Harris will be the Democrats’ candidate for President in 2028.
In the extraordinary circumstances of Biden’s departure in the summer, Harris was the best Democratic candidate to grab the baton, and she outperformed the expectations of many. But she faced huge obstacles to win this election and, ultimately, these proved insurmountable.
There are suggestions that America – or certain parts of America – wasn’t ready to elect a Black woman as their commander-in-chief. Possibly. But the need to reconnect to its working-class base is a far deeper issue than the colour and gender of the candidate – and he or she will need to reflect and embody a serious effort to reconnect.
In the blame game that will follow, Biden will not be spared. Clinging on to the White House for so long robbed his party of the time needed to select a candidate with the qualities and space to build a relationship with voters.
READ MORE: Reactions from across the Labour Party as Trump secures his return to the White House
Biden was able to win back some support from core traditional Democrat constituencies in 2020. But many senior party figures believe that, once in office, he pandered too much to the left and was, for the first two years at least, tin-eared to the concerns of working-class voters about cost of living and immigration.
The rise of right-wing populism with its angry calls for change is proving an enduringly successful feature of western politics. Yet established mainstream centre-left parties have, in response, too often been tempted down an overly technocratic path becoming defenders of the status quo.
Democrats must work with Labour and other like-minded parties serious about power to discuss remedies to these shared political and electoral issues and threats, and to become once again the champions of radical change.
It’s happened before and must happen again if we are to avoid many more nights like the one this week.
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