Following decisive victories for President-elect Donald Trump and congressional Republicans on November 5, Democrats have advanced several excuses for why their candidates performed so poorly, ranging from Biden’s refusal to drop out of the race earlier to supposed “global headwinds” against incumbent leaders.
None of the explanations most popular on the left, however, evince any sort of self-reflection on the failures of liberal policies and ideology. As long as Democrats refuse to acknowledge that it is their own shortcomings that led to voters rejecting them at the ballot box, they will likely face more defeats in the years ahead.
Almost immediately after it became clear that Trump would defeat Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats and the liberal media viciously turned on Biden, whom they had just a few weeks earlier compared to George Washington for “heroically” stepping aside after his disastrous debate performance.
In an interview with the New York Times earlier this month, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, walking back previous comments about an “open” primary taking place shortly after Biden dropped out, said that, “had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race.” 2020 presidential candidate and Harris ally Andrew Yang piled on, stating, “The biggest onus of this loss is on President Biden. If he had stepped down in January instead of July, we may be in a very different place.” Massachusetts Democrat Representative Seth Moulton likewise said Democrats “would have been much better off” if Biden had left the race earlier.
According to this theory, either another Democrat would have fared better against Trump, or Harris would have done better had she had more time to campaign.
But this sort of Monday-morning quarterbacking belies the fact that Democrats and the media colluded to ensure that Harris was anointed as the nominee while denying Democrat primary voters the chance to have any say in the matter. While effectively disenfranchising the 14 million primary voters who cast ballots for Biden, the press and the Democrat establishment lavished praise on Harris as a political juggernaut, declaring any hesitation about her candidacy to be racist and sexist.
Blaming Biden for not dropping out sooner also implies the dubious assumption that another Democrat would not also have been hampered by Biden’s disastrous record. As is now glaringly obvious, Biden has always been a puppet of the Democrat Party establishment. Every one of his administration’s policies, from enormous inflationary spending packages to divisive left-wing social edicts, is a product of the insiders who run the party. Any Democrat who won the nomination would have also had to answer for Biden’s failures.
Additionally, Harris’s polling trajectory suggests that she likely would have fared worse, not better, with more time to campaign. After an initial polling surge fueled by media hype following her entry into the race, Harris consistently lost ground to Trump in the polls.
Had the election been held in December or January, the trends suggest Harris would have lost by an even wider margin. The more voters saw from Harris, the less they liked her.
Biden allies, recognizing that Harris’s loss cements Biden’s legacy as a failed president even among Democrats, have come up with another explanation for what happened on November 5 – “global headwinds” against incumbent leaders. “America has been through a lot over the last few years,” former President Barack Obama said following Harris’s loss. “Those conditions have created headwinds for democratic incumbents around the world, and last night showed that America is not immune.”
Biden Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre echoed Obama from the White House podium shortly after Trump’s victory, also blaming the pandemic. “Despite all of the accomplishments that we were able to get done, there were global headwinds because of the COVID-19 pandemic,” she said. “And it had a political toll on many incumbents. If you look at what happened in 2024 globally. And that’s part of what you saw.”
There may be some bit of truth here in the sense that a number of other liberal incumbents throughout the West have indeed been ousted in recent months. But chalking up Harris’s loss to the fact that left-wing politicians in other countries also lost once again distracts from the failures of Democrat policies in the United States and absolves Democrat Party leadership of responsibility for answering why exactly liberal policies and politicians are so unpopular with American voters.
Additionally, not all incumbent politicians had a rough go this November. Senate Republicans did not lose a single seat, and while votes are still being counted in a few House races, more Republican incumbents than Democrat incumbents are likely to have held on to their seats. In Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, for instance, which is blue-leaning, Republican contender Tom Barrett defeated his Democrat opponent by four points. In Pennsylvania, Republicans unseated two Democrat incumbents in a few of the most closely watched races in the country.
Democrats who are perplexed about the cause of their party’s poor showing this year should not be. Public polling throughout this campaign season showed that voters were unhappy with the direction of the economy, which they consistently rated as the most important issue, along with the border crisis and crime.
A poll conducted by CNBC shortly before the election showed that voters widely trusted Trump over Harris with their finances by a 42 percent to 24 percent margin. Trump also enjoyed a 35 percent lead over Harris on addressing border security and a 19-point advantage on tackling crime. According to another exit poll from NBC News, around “three-quarters of voters nationwide feel negatively about the way things are going in the country,” and 45 percent felt their finances were “worse off.” Another poll from CNN found that 72 percent of voters were dissatisfied with the country’s path forward under Biden.
Liberals who truly want to analyze why Harris and down-ballot Democrats lost should start by asking why their policies led to worse outcomes for the American people, rather than trying to shift blame anywhere but themselves. Otherwise, they may only be setting themselves up for more defeats.
Neil Banerji is a proud Las Vegas resident and former student at the University of Oxford. In his spare time, he enjoys reading Winston Churchill and Edmund Burke.
