As much fun as Tuesday night's election was for Republicans, things are about to get a lot more enjoyable moving forward. With Donald Trump having secured a historic landslide in the presidential race and the GOP all but certain to hold both chambers of Congress, the post-mortems are beginning to roll in.
Shorter: The Democratic Party civil war is on.
Shortly after midnight on Wednesday, with the race for the White House already decided, DNC official Lindy Li spoke to White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, and she did not hold back. Here's what she had to say.
- Tim Walz was a bad choice of running mate, Shapiro would have carried the blue-wall states.
LI: "People are wondering tonight what would have happened had Shapiro been on the ticket. And not only in terms of Pennsylvania. He's famously a moderate. So that would have signaled to the American people that she is not the San Francisco liberal that Trump said she was, but she went with someone actually to her left Minnesota....In the eyes of the American people, Walz was the governor who oversaw the protests,"
Li is half right. There is no doubt that Harris would have been more competitive with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro on the ticket. He's extremely popular in his state, and it's possible he would have made the difference there. Would he have delivered Michigan and Wisconsin? Almost certainly not given the rightward shift we saw during the election. Polls also showed that while Shapiro was a big swing in his home state for Harris, he was bordering on a drag in the other two "blue wall" states.
In other words, while Shapiro would have helped, pretending he would have won the election for Harris is a coping mechanism, and one you can expect to see escalate as Democrats tell themselves he can win it all in 2028. Tim Walz was awful, but he wasn't decisive.
- Harris' positions were not clearly staked out:
LI: "She knows it was a mistake to say on The View that she couldn't think of a single thing that she would do differently from the Biden administration. That was an opener for her to show Americans that she's going to get tough on the border, that she's going to take drastic measures to bring down inflation. That was her chance. And she knew that she maybe should have done two things differently when in the next 40 minutes, she said I would appoint a Republican to the cabinet. So she walked that back a little bit."
This would have made no difference, both because no one really watches 'The View' besides hardcore left-wingers and because Harris truly was a clone of President Joe Biden. She was never going to be able to square the circle that she represented change. It was an impossible task, which is why she never should have been the nominee. That's what happens when you rig the primary process and then coronate the worst politician in history.
- The focus on fascism was not working:
LI: "Future Forward, they were right."
This is an easy one. The focus on "fascism" was a major part of Harris' downfall. Very few persuadable voters believed it was true, and it wasted valuable narrative space where the vice president could have been talking about things people care about. Not even Democrats were truly moved by the charge given their turnout lagged 2020 dramatically.
- Too many cooks in the kitchen led to muddled campaign messaging, poor staffing decisions in key battlegrounds:
LI: "She heard us. We raised serious concerns about the Pennsylvania campaign's leadership. She actually installed some of her own people in the final weeks of the campaign, but I fear it was too late....We should have people who deeply understand, intimately understand the contours of the state rather than out-of-state operatives who move from campaign to campaign."
The thing is, it wasn't just her Pennsylvania campaign. Her national campaign was stocked with a horrendous brew of her own loyalists and former Obama campaign operatives. Is it any surprise that the "Obama bro" contingent, many of which ran Hillary Clinton's failed 2016 campaign, crashed and burned again?
Here's the truth of the matter that even Li, who hit on a few relevant points, doesn't want to hear. This was not a campaign strategy problem. This was not a messaging problem. This was a problem with both Harris herself and the Democratic Party's brand. Normal Americans see them as elitist and out-of-touch, and that's because they are. For Democrats to see any kind of rebound, they will need to do some serious introspection and make massive changes to their platform. Slick words and more door knocks aren't going to fix this.
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