Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images
From the left: Democrats’ Huge Mistake
Donald Trump “won because the electorate rejected the Biden-Harris administration,” argues New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait.
The party went wrong when it “responded to Trump’s 2016 victory not by moving toward the center,” but “by moving away from it.”
Thus Harris joined the pack running left in the 2020 cycle — which “Joe Biden won because he abstained from that rush,” only to as prez adopt “positions (and eventually staff) aligned with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.”
That yielded inflation and the migrant crisis. Harris tacked centerwards in 2024, but could neither explain “why she had changed her mind from 2019” nor “detach herself from Biden.”
Dems went wrong after Trump’s first win; now their “future will be determined by whether they can respond more shrewdly this time.”
Democrat: Revolt of the Working Class
Trump’s win “sent a clear message to the coastal elites that it’s the working class and middle America that runs this country,” roars Mark Penn at Fox News.
He’s “likely the only Republican who could have won this race because only he was able to speak to the working class voters who feel left out of a Democratic agenda that offered handouts rather than opportunities and cared more about climate change rather than lower energy prices.”
The Democratic Party “will have to look at how far to the left it has drifted and reset itself for 2028.”
“Trump’s victory is a victory for the Americans who feel abandoned by the elites and a Democratic Party that moved too far from mainstream America.”
Libertarian: Kam Failed To Throw Joe Under Bus
Donald Trump “made major inroads with minority communities, vastly improved his totals in various states, and is currently projected to win the popular vote,” observes Reason’s Robby Soave.
Yet “the single most important contributing factor” to his win was Harris, “a disastrous candidate.”
Democrats’ assumption “that a simple candidate swap would be sufficient” was a huge mistake.
“She had every opportunity to throw Biden under the bus and part ways with his policies,” but instead said she wouldn’t change “one thing” — even as polls showed that voters preferred Trump to Biden on “the economy, inflation, and immigration.”
On policy, “Harris was more of the exact same.”
Conservative: Triumph of the Misfits
“Trump led an insurgency of oddball outsiders against an insular band of out-of-touch elites” to win the election, explains Eli Lake at The Free Press. “Kamala Harris had Beyoncé.”
But Trump had “a misfit coalition” that “was a tribune” for voter rage after President Biden “misinterpreted a narrow victory in 2020 as a mandate to make sweeping policy changes to everything from the border . . . to the national debt.”
That happened as “his Democratic Party advanced outlandish and radical social policies.”
Add fury as “a corporate media that carried water for the Democrats became the party’s press secretaries in the home stretch of the election.”
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris “kept making gaffes when she needed to demonstrate basic competence.”
She “couldn’t close the deal even as the media graded her on a curve.”
Liberal: Dems Must Face Reality
Democrats “must ruefully acknowledge” that “the Trump movement” is “a powerful expression of democracy,” warns Politico’s John F. Harris.
They thought “the Trump Era was something to be scraped off the national shoe. Instead, there will be another helping placed on the national plate. His adversaries don’t have to pretend it tastes good. But, for now, they need to eat it.”
Admit he’s “not simply a celebrity candidate” or a “comet that streaks across the sky and then is gone, but the leader of a political movement” who resonates with “deeper dimensions” of the American character.
“We are in for a new chapter of Trump’s career, and a new chapter in the American presidency.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board