Democratic officials blame Harris election loss on outside factors

FILE PHOTO: Democratic presidential nominee U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris reacts as she delivers remarks, conceding 2024 U.S. presidential election to President-elect Donald Trump, at Howard University in Washington, U.S., November 6, 2024. REUTERS/Kev

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -While many Democrats are calling for a party overhaul after Kamala Harris lost every battleground state to Republican Donald Trump in the presidential election, some party officials insist it could have been worse and are asking for fresh donations.

The party lost ground in the Nov. 5 election among once-core working class, Latino and women voters. Republicans emerged in charge of the White House and both houses of Congress.

Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison sought to play down the extent of the defeat in a memo on Tuesday.

"Although Democrats did not achieve what we set out to do, Trump wasn’t able to capture the support of more than 50% of the electorate and Democrats beat back global headwinds that could’ve turned this squeaker into a landslide," Harrison wrote. "Trump's election is far from a mandate."

Harrison, who has said he plans to leave his post next year, said the result fit a global pattern in which 80% of incumbent parties lost seats or vote share in 2024. The party’s heavy campaign spending across the country helped prevent "what could have been a larger red wave" of Republican victories, he said.

Far-right parties have gained ground in Europe, especially with younger voters, and are questioning climate change and pro-immigration policies.

Democrats raised about $1.5 billion in the 2024 campaign, much of it after Harris took over from President Joe Biden as the candidate in late July. Nonetheless, the campaign finished the election in the red, financially and politically.  

"Continued investment in the central party apparatus is crucial," Harrison said.

Harris' loss shocked many Democratic voters and activists who thought a flood of volunteers, fundraising and fresh momentum would help her win. Some Democrats blamed Biden for not stepping aside earlier.

U.S. voters identified jobs and the economy as the country's most pressing problem, Reuters/Ipsos opinion polls found, and were concerned about high prices. Trump also claimed, without evidence, a rise in crime due to illegal immigration and blamed immigrants for high prices.

Top Harris advisers, including her campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon, deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks, and advisers Stephanie Cutter and David Plouffe cited other outside factors in a recent interview.

They said Americans' post-COVID economic woes and the short 107-day span of the Harris campaign worked against Democrats and the damage caused by two hurricanes in the final weeks before Election Day diverted attention from Harris’ whirlwind campaign.

"This political environment sucked, okay? We were dealing with ferocious headwinds, and I think people’s instinct was to give the Republicans, and even Donald Trump, another chance. So we had a complicated puzzle to put together here in terms of the voters," Plouffe told podcast Pod Save America last week.

James Carville, a party strategist who was the top political aide to former President Bill Clinton, has called for an audit of the campaign and the Democratic Super Political Action Committee known as Future Forward.

He said fundraisers are exhausted.

"They’re really pissed now, and the damage that the 2024 campaign has done, that the damage that this decade has done to the Democratic brand is almost unfathomable," Carville said on a recent podcast.

Senator Bernie Sanders, a former presidential candidate, is among lawmakers blaming the loss on Democrats' failure to focus on working class issues.

Others have clamored for new leadership, especially after hearing the Harris campaign managers' explanations.

"If I see a dumpster fire and we've put it out and I want to work on how to prevent future dumpster fires, I'm not going to go talk to the arsonists," Aidan Kohn-Murphy, the founder of Gen Z for Change, a political activism group, said on TikTok.

The DNC invested $264 million in U.S. states, Harrison wrote in Tuesday's memo, helping to pass state abortion rights measures, win legislative seats in others and make it easier for workers to unionize.

Trump defeated Harris in the Electoral College 312-226 but received slightly less than 50% of the popular vote because of third-party candidates. His margin of victory over Harris by total votes -- around 1.5% -- ranks 44th out of 51 elections since 1824, Harrison said.

Democrats won Senate seats in four states that Trump won, and Democratic Senate candidates in battleground states overperformed Harris by an average of 5 percentage points, Harrison wrote.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Jeff Mason; Editing by Heather Timmons and Stephen Coates)