Why Democrats lost, according to Democrats

Some results from a recent survey of county chairs

Photo by Dmitriy Serafin on Unsplash

Why did Kamala Harris lose to Donald Trump last month? Obviously this is a hot topic, and there’s no shortage of opinions. (I have my own.) But I was curious to hear from those whose opinions on this are rather consequential for U.S. politics going forward — local Democratic Party leaders. These folks have more influence than most of us do on how the Democratic Party is going to behave and whom it is going to nominate in the years to come, so their thoughts on this are pretty relevant.

I sent out a survey to my list of over 2,000 Democratic Party chairs across the country. (I also sent out the survey to Republican chairs and will report on that later.) 263 Democratic chairs responded. It was a short survey, the main question being an open-ended response asking chairs why they thought Trump had beaten Harris.

I read through all the responses and broadly characterized them into nine different narratives, which I’ve listed and described below in declining order of popularity. There were others, but I’ve limited it to the nine narratives mentioned by at least ten chairs.

1. This was about Harris’ race and/or sex. This was the most popular response, named by 23% of the survey takers. Examples: “A middle aged White Male with reasonable ideas would have swept the election.” “Dems have to learn that we can only run white men for President.” Notably, more women than men made the argument that voter sexism kept the woman candidate from winning, which was true following 2016 as well. (Note: I addressed this narrative here.)

2. It was because of Republican disinformation/misinformation. Trump and his allies flooded the zone with lies and caricatures about Harris and the Democrats, affecting many voters.

3. Inflation and the economy. Whether it was based on perception or reality, voters were unhappy about the state of the economy and blamed the governing party for their woes. As many noted, this seemed to be true in many democratic elections around the globe this year.

4. It was the voters’ fault. Some 13% of Democratic chairs blamed voters for the election outcome, saying that they misunderstood some basic features of the nation’s condition or failed to take their role seriously. Examples: “Lack of civic knowledge and general ignorance on how government works.” “Lack of critical thinking skills — combined with a view of politics as entertainment.”