Democrats turn on each other and blame their own party for failures after election loss

In the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump, many liberal voters and leaders in the Democratic Party have wracked their brains trying to understand what went wrong and looking for a scapegoat to blame – but some say it’s a collective problem.

Political analysts, commentators and even voters have tried attributing Democrats losing both the executive and legislative branches to President Joe Biden staying in the race until July, Harris saying the wrong thing on the campaign trail, Democrats being too soft on Trump and other excuses.

But rather than play the blame game, Congressman Adam Schiff says the Democratic Party failed to listen to voters.

“I think the entire Democratic Party bares the responsibility, myself included,” Schiff, the senator-elect of California, told Meet the Press. 

Schiff said the country faced a “strong anti-incumbent wave” mainly due to economic issues. Given Democrats currently hold power in the presidency and Senate, that meant people rejected the “status quo.”

“The Democratic Party has to recognize the challenge we have, which is, for too many millions of battleground voters, working people, they don’t think we represent them,” Schiff said.

Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, who lost his seat in a close race to Republican Bernie Moreno, echoed that sentiment when explaining why Democrats, including himself, lost biggly.

Brown told CNN his party made a “mistake” by brushing off inflation as temporary and failing to attribute it to increasing prices but flat wages.

He said by failing to appeal to voters without a college degree and working-class people, Democrats missed an opportunity to expand their reach. Ultimately, that hurt Harris’s chances of winning and tricked down the ballot.

“When the leader of your ticket runs 12 points behind, almost, you can’t overcome that, even though it was a close race in the end,” Brown said.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, said the party has become “a party of identity politics” rather than focusing on working-class voters – who make up the majority of people in the country.

“Whether or not the Democratic Party has the capability, given who funds it and its dependency on well-paid consultants, whether it has the capability of transforming itself, remains to be seen,” Sanders told the New York Times.

After losing the election to Trump and other Republicans, Democrats were quick to try and diagnose the problem or point fingers at an individual candidate.

Some blamed Biden for launching a doomed campaign and remaining in the race even after facing public and private pressure to drop out. By dropping out in July, it left Harris with approximately four months to campaign.

But Harris’s campaign largely ran on policies that were similar to Biden’s – something most voters were clearly rejecting by the time she entered the race.

Some liberal voters hypothesized that the country has become anti-woman given at least 15 states have implemented strict abortion bans and Harris ran on a reproductive freedom platform. But in states where abortion was on the ballot, most voters turned out to vote in favor of expanding or protecting abortion rights. At the same time, many of those states still voted for Trump.

As a result of the Democratic Party’s failures, they now stare down at least two years of conservative agenda, elevated by Trump, approved by Congress and possibly upheld by the Supreme Court.