Still-stunned Democrats begin to squint toward their future

(CNN) — Pick one word to describe Republicans and Donald Trump, the focus group moderator asked, and one word to describe Democrats and Kamala Harris.

“Crazy,” said the White woman in her 40s, who hadn’t gone to college. Then: “Preachy.”

The focus group organized by Harris supporters in western Pennsylvania, not long after the presidential debate in September, was made up of a dozen people who voted for Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 but who were undecided this time, except for being sure that they’d vote.

Asked to pick between the two words, the woman said she’d “probably go with ‘crazy,’” anguish clearly in her voice.

“Because ‘crazy’ doesn’t look down on me,” she said. “‘Preachy’ does.”

In CNN’s conversations with two dozen top Democratic operatives and elected officials since Election Day, the fear isn’t just that no one knows the answer to what’s next – it’s that they don’t even know what the question is at this point.

“Why is it that Donald Trump did 8 points better than he did against Hillary Clinton in Illinois and yet down ballot, Democrats held every office and gained at the local level across the state,” said Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who has already begun analyzing the results and planning for what’s ahead, with an eye on other down-ballot Democratic successes last week in Trump-won states like Michigan. “Donald Trump is a uniquely more popular figure, but what is it about him that makes him that way? We can all guess, but why don’t we actually look and find out?”

Democrats’ shell shock is real, and not just because top Harris aides were telling Biden senior staff and former President Barack Obama aides past 9 p.m. on Tuesday that she was about to win. It goes to the core of their conception of their party.

A few months after Obama won reelection in 2012, his aides started a group called Battleground Texas, emblematic of their faith in massive demographic shifts, particularly among Latinos, that they figured would define a Democratic era, turn the Lone Star State blue by 2028 and lock Republicans out of the Electoral College.

Instead, Latino voters, Black men and other marginalized groups shifted toward Trump nationally this year, ushering Democrats into an unprecedented moment for a modern political party – grappling with gutting losses for president and other offices; being potentially locked out of power in Washington with no clear leaders; and an incoming president who campaigned on radically remaking America and punishing the “enemy within.”

And Texas went redder than it has since Obama’s reelection.

Some of the recriminations since Trump’s resounding win have taken a self-validating turn.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, fresh off winning a fourth term, issued a long statement slamming Democrats for having “abandoned working class people,” despite getting fewer votes than Harris there Tuesday and after four years of cheering on Biden’s record, which union leaders have described as the most pro-labor in American history.

Harris campaign senior adviser David Plouffe responded to the blowback from his social media post implying blame on Biden by deleting his own X account – even as other Harris aides complained to CNN that the decisions and consolidation of power by Plouffe, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and leading communications strategist Stephanie Cutter were what sucked the Harris-specific energy out of the run as they tried jamming her into being an Obama redux.

But what Democrats face is much deeper than the usual finger-pointing by a losing campaign or speculation about the next set of presidential primary candidates. It goes beyond easy comments about talking more to the working class when Democrats lost ground among nearly every demographic in the presidential race.

“The actual way to think about this is not moderate or progressive, liberal or conservative, but, ‘Are you with the people, and against the elites with power?’” argued Rep. Pat Ryan, a New York Democrat who said he massively outperformed Harris in his competitive Hudson Valley district. “That’s the reality for the people on the ground.”

Decades of Democrats talking about and making substantive moves to improve the economic standing of people outside the wealthiest didn’t make much of a difference. Nor did the measures enacted by the Biden administration and the forward-looking promises Harris made after she took over the campaign, much to the consternation of the president and top aides.

“In any political landscape, we need normal people to feel a sense of agency. We need people who are driving trucks and changing diapers and turning wrenches to run for office,” said Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who won a tight rematch in Washington state against a Trump-style Republican she’d first beaten coming straight out of the auto repair shop she runs with her husband. “It’s not that we shouldn’t have lawyers in Congress. It’s that we need a body that’s representative of the American experience. We need to change our idea of who is credentialed and capable of holding elected office.”

“We don’t fix politics,” Gluesenkamp Perez said, “by becoming more political.”

No clear leaders, no clear path to get to them

From when Biden declared for reelection through when Harris took over, aides at campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, would often brag about the “trusted voices” they were lining up – community leaders or niche celebrities who could validate the candidate to voters who weren’t sold. Democrats who won on Tuesday told CNN that getting to more wins and a future for America that isn’t forever defined by Trumpism would require candidates themselves to be those trusted voices.

One party strategist argued the focus shouldn’t be so much on finding a “Joe Rogan for Democrats,” as has become a popular postelection cause on social media, but finding Democrats who can go on Rogan’s podcast or similar outlets. (Rogan, who endorsed Trump a day before the election, had backed Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primaries after the Vermont senator’s appearance on his podcast.)

Factors like that will define the next generation of Democrats, multiple leading operatives and strategists argued, even as some prospective leaders start making moves – Pritzker with a news conference Thursday vowing to stand in the way of any Trump attempts to hurt people who live in his state; Tim Walz drawing a similar line as he returned to his duties as Minnesota governor; and California Gov. Gavin Newsom calling for a special legislative session in a show of preemptively pushing back on the incoming president.

And more Democrats around the country are turning to Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, especially if enough of the outstanding races break their way to make him speaker.

But Democratic operatives involved in key races told CNN they don’t know how to figure out what those voters who went for Trump want, or how they’re doing in appealing to them.

Asked who she sees as potential leaders for the party going forward, Minnesota Rep. Angie Craig said it was “too early to answer that question.”

“That would be coming to a conclusion before we’ve actually had a true opportunity to dissect what happened and figure out how to move forward,” she told CNN on Friday, days after winning a fourth term in a district south of the Twin Cities.

Craig is a moderate. She’s also a married lesbian with a strong Democratic voting record, with four bills from her first term in Congress that Trump signed. On the trail, she talked about reproductive rights and freedom, but also about apprenticeships over student loans and getting tough on the border.

In a state where her popular governor was the No. 2 on the Democratic ticket, Craig said she ran ahead of Harris in a district the vice president barely won.

“If I’m talking to working folks and I’m really listening to them, when an administration puts forward a college loan debt forgiveness program, my immediate reaction is, ‘My God, my noncollege-educated working people are going to be really pissed off about that,’” Craig said. “If you don’t know where the American people are, or if you dismiss them and say, ‘Well, I don’t like where you are,’ this is going to continue over and over and over again.”

Taking ‘back the reins on what is sexy’

The concerns that have aired out since the election aren’t new. In sessions over the past year with up-and-coming House Democrats at his office in Washington, Obama urged them to think about how not to come across as “coastal elites.”

Find bills that seem like they’re relevant, he told them. Legislation introduced by Gluesenkamp Perez and New York Rep. Joe Morelle to clear the way for people to get the parts to repair their own cars and other products without going through the usually more expensive manufacturers’ processes was a perfect example, the former president said, according to people in the room. Another was Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s campaign promise, fulfilled with an executive order on his first day in office, to remove the college degree requirement for a range of government jobs.

Harris said in the final week of her campaign that she would sign a similar order on her first day in office, but it came in response to a question, almost as an afterthought rather than a big announcement or consistent theme.

“We need to take back the reins on what is ‘sexy,’” Gluesenkamp Perez said.

Pennsylvania Rep. Chris Deluzio, who increased his own 2022 vote margin in his district outside Pittsburgh and said he ran ahead of both Harris and Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, attributed his victory in part to acknowledging that the border was a problem but also to making local economic arguments that went hard at big corporations for raising prices in ways that evoked the New Deal more than “Bidenomics.”

“The more Democrats have gotten away from that, the more you’ve given space for a guy like Trump to yell about tariffs – and people want to listen,” Deluzio said.

To Deluzio, the woman in that western Pennsylvania focus group from September sounded like voters he knows in his district.

“You cannot have a candidate or a movement or a party be perceived as resenting people,” he said.

Looking for silver linings in a new generation

By the time of the next election, though, Obama will be 67, a full generation from his victory speech in Grant Park, and more time into his post-presidential life removed from the young voters – especially the young Black men he still feels most in touch with. Biden will be 86. Bill Clinton will be 82. Jimmy Carter, if he keeps holding on, will be 104. And though Harris’ concession speech was written in part to position her as a future party leader, several in the know said she hasn’t spent time thinking what that would be. The generation of operatives that came with each of them are aging out, too.

Democrats looking for silver linings point to 2004, when George W. Bush’s reelection and wide-scale Democratic defeats were followed two years later by the party taking control of Congress and then Obama leading them to victory in 2008 and ultimately a 60-vote majority in the Senate. They also note that Trump’s last election in 2016 spurred its own revolution in creating new Democratic stars.

Much will change over the next four years, including culture and technology. Liberals will be entering a decade into outrage at Trump. A generation of voters will have grown up fully in the age of Trump. The scale of what he will do to upend the government and the economy can only be guessed. Politics is certainly going to change, in ways that are impossible to predict.

It already has, at least internally among Democrats. Because ranked-choice voting decided San Francisco’s mayoral election, Tuesday also saw what was effectively the first primary of this new era, with Levi Strauss heir and political newcomer Daniel Lurie unseating incumbent London Breed, a fellow Democrat, by running on a platform of rejecting liberal sensibilities in favor of managing a city that has seen spikes in concerns about street crime and open drug use in recent years.

In the end, the money and energy that went into Harris’ multi-city election eve concerts, which ended with Oprah Winfrey introducing will.i.am for a rehashed “Yes She Can” version of his pro-Obama song, missed what was happening on the ground miles from the concert sites. The millions that went toward those concerts – and the campaign debts left to cover – may turn out to be a perfect metaphor for the chapter of the Democratic Party now closing.

And to Democrats or progressive activists in deep-blue areas who still believe that the answer should be doing more of the same, just faster and stronger, those who held on this year plead no.

“Come to my district and spend a week with me and see if you still feel the same way. There are many, many thousands of people who voted for Donald Trump and voted for me,” said Ryan, the upstate New York congressman. “Talk to them.”

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