Make no mistake: this wasn’t just a disaster, it was a repudiation and rejection of the values of the Democratic Party itself, writes Jon Sopel
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t seems fitting, in this period of deep mourning for the Democratic Party, to quote the 35th president of the United States, John F Kennedy. After his harum-scarum diplomatic stand-off with President Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis – when the world seemed on the brink of nuclear war – he commented, after its peaceful resolution, that “success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan”.
It is so often true in politics, but not in what happened on Tuesday night. The failure of the Democratic Party is not just down to Kamala Harris; it is an epic fail with a wide cast of characters who must shoulder their share of blame. Make no mistake, this was a catastrophe; a repudiation and rejection of the values of the party itself.
First things first, compared to Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016, this is far, far worse. In 2016, Hillary Clinton fell short by 77,000 votes across the three swing states of the Midwest. She ran an awful campaign where she didn’t even bother to go to Wisconsin, such was her campaign’s confidence that the “blue wall” was impregnable.
There were other scapegoats, too: the FBI director, James Comey, reopened his investigation into her use of a private server while secretary of state – and – highly unusually – he made this public just days before the election. Her messaging was lousy, too – and she wasn’t sure how to handle the insurgent Donald Trump.
Harris had none of these problems. In her one presidential debate with Donald Trump, she was adroit and had by far the best of the exchanges. She raised a ton of money in record time. Her campaign wasn’t derailed by scandal at any point. She finished strongly, talking about the issues she wanted to discuss. It was professional, with a well-run ground game.
That is why I say the scale of the defeat is so much worse. We don’t have final numbers yet, but she will have polled over 10 million fewer votes than Joe Biden in 2020. She has lost the popular vote, will have lost all the swing states – and the Democrats have lost the Senate, too.
Yes, there were times when she spoke in word salad, rather than sentences. There would be verbs, nouns, adjectives and definite articles, but they came out as a jumble, rather like Eric Morecambe’s “all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order”.
There were times when she tripped over seemingly innocuous questions. I thought it was pretty lame when, asked what her economic policies were, she said: “I’ve got lots of them, go to my website.” And early on in her campaign, when asked a softball question about how she differed from Joe Biden, she replied that she couldn’t think of any differences. It’s hard to be the change candidate when you are so firmly tied to the president.
Did she put too much faith in the rage that women felt about abortion, or Trump’s threat to democracy? Possibly. Maybe she should have had a more convincing set of economic policies.
But, sorry, I just don’t believe that any of these things – either taken separately or together – explain the whopping shellacking she took. I’ve no doubts there are bits of racism and sexism in the rejection of her, too.
The problem though is more fundamental. Americans are worse off under Biden. Inflation has gone up by 20 per cent and wages have nowhere near kept pace. They are furious about the state of the border. They feel that Biden has led them and the country in the wrong direction.
Which leads us to Biden and those around him. There is a book to be written on what appears to be the cover-up at the White House over 2023 and 2024. The CNN debate at the end of June, when it appeared the president didn’t know what day of the week it was, was excruciating. It crystalised all the doubts that people had been speaking about for well over a year.
But who buys the idea that this was the first time his closest aides had seen him in such a state of mental fragility? Presumably, this had been going on for a while, yet it was hidden from the American people. Surely those closest to him knew he wasn’t fit to run for office – but instead tried to brazen it out and pull the wool over our eyes?
It would be another month after the debate before he bowed out. And that realistically left the party no option but to plump for Kamala Harris as the candidate. An open contest then would have been a ruinous bloodbath. But if he had gone earlier then maybe a more qualified candidate would have been able to run. And by more qualified, I mean one that would have been able to credibly put distance between him or herself and an unpopular president whose poll ratings were underwater.
Harris did as well as she could do. If she had decried Biden’s policies, then Trump would have questioned why she hadn’t challenged him more in office. But by embracing the Biden agenda, she was simply tying herself to his unpopularity.
But above all of this, the evidence of Tuesday night is that the Democratic Party is out of kilter with the popular mood in the US. It is a party of the coasts but now in a bleak, unforgiving wilderness. It did nothing about illegal immigration for the first three years of the Biden administration; there was not enough recognition of the way Americans were suffering economically. A bulk of Americans didn’t buy into the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda. The coalition of the discontented that Trump built was phenomenal. As the Conservatives found in July, hell hath no fury like a pissed off electorate.
The American people on Tuesday walked into the Democratic Party shop and decided they didn’t like the goods on offer. And ask any high street giant how difficult a job it is to turn a perception like that around.
Last night, Kamala Harris addressed her supporters with a defiant message: “I concede this election, but I do not concede the fight.”
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