The Democrat party is reeling from President-elect Donald Trump’s sound election drubbing, with many party leaders still questioning why they lost.
The chaos within Democrat ranks is an opportunity for Republicans to unite behind Trump’s bold campaign promises and enact legislation to further splinter Democrat factions that are at war with the others.
“What is it that we can do that’s effective when they control everything?” Joseph Geevarghese, who runs the grassroots organizing group Our Revolution, told the Hill. “They’re going to use their state power against us. I think they’re going to target progressives … It’s a very challenging moment.”
The far left and populist Democrats appear to be under mounting pressure not only from Trump’s landslide victory but also from establishment Democrats who are eager to maintain control after coronating a presidential candidate without a primary.
One of the biggest examples of the establishment’s primacy is its recent defeat of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) bid for the top spot on the Oversight Committee. House Democrats chose establishment Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) to be the ranking member, thwarting Ocasio-Cortez, who is widely perceived as a leader of the populist left.
“The party needs a reckoning with itself,” said Corryn Freeman, a far-left operative and executive director of Future Coalition. “They’re saying it out of their mouths but their actions are fully aligned with the sameness that has gotten us to the place that we are now, which is powerless.”
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“The people are dying for our own — I won’t say our own Donald Trump and our own Marjorie Taylor Greene because those people are unhinged — but Democrats are dying for people who are willing to stand up, take some assertive action and call things out as they see them,” Freeman said.
A second radical Democrat told the Hill the party needs to regroup and reexamine its entire platform. “I don’t know exactly when Democrats lost their comfort with populism, but I don’t think it was because Trump picked it up,” said the anonymous strategist.
“I think Trump picked it up because Democrats gave it up during the Obama years, when they started chasing Silicon Valley money and Obama wanted to appeal to college-educated people who think populism is icky and uneducated,” the person said. “We replaced it with a really prominent condescension.”
According to research by the far-left group Navigator Research, the Democrat party lost the presidential election because its leaders were too focused on diversity and elitism. Participants characterized the Democrat party as pushing ideas that are “often very different from what the average Democratic voter is,” and elitist snobs who are “obsessed with appealing to these very far-left social progressivism.”
The study indicates the small but loud radical-left side of the party is not popular with blue collar workers, although it is unclear if the Democrat establishment is any more attractive after it backed Biden over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in 2020 and then Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 with no primary votes cast in her name.
Fresh off the election loss, Pod Save America podcast co-host Jon Favreau, who worked in the Obama administration, appeared to blame inflation, a theory supported by Barack Obama. “We don’t know exactly what the explanation is, but a lot of it is pointing to: you have an unpopular president because of inflation and she couldn’t overcome it.”
Favreau did not fault the administration’s policies that facilitated inflation. Costs increased about 20 percent on average across the board after the Biden-Harris administration took power. Harris was a deciding vote in the Senate on a spending measure that fueled inflation.
Jon Lovett, a co-host with Favreau, agreed and said Trump’s landslide win had little to do with Trump, a claim not supported by down-ballot Democrat victories over Republicans.
“This looks much less like for Trump than a vote against people’s frustrations with the current administration and current economic conditions — than it does of any kind of embrace of Trumpism or Trump remaking America, or any grand and sweeping conclusions that some would like to draw,” he said.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
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