Bring in the new guard

Many Democrats were also calling for the elimination of old guard operatives who ran recent campaigns.

“The team that’s here, it’s time for them to retire. We need a whole different strategy,” said one Democrat who was part of the re-election effort. “The days of Obama and his geniuses are over. They were left behind. They are disconnected from the American people. The Democratic Party is out of touch.”

Campaign aides and their allies directed much of their angst at campaign chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon, whom they complained ran a store with the hand of an autocrat. According to three senior campaign officials, they viewed her as loyal to Biden, never allowing Harris to truly take the break she needed to win.

O’Malley Dillon, they said, confined the information to a tight circle of advisers, keeping other senior officials out of email chains and updates. That sidelined many of the aides who knew Harris longest — and best, they said.

This led to what some considered serious errors, such as Harris’ remark on “The View.” In the interview, she was asked what she would do differently than Biden. Harris said she couldn’t think of anything.

The message was in direct contradiction to what they saw as a crucial message that the vice president would be an agent of change. Republicans jumped on the remark and ran it in ads.

One of the officials said Harris’ longtime aides had not been involved in preparing Harris before this interview.

“She makes this mistake on ‘The View.’ And she makes this mistake on ‘The View’ because they told her, ‘Be loyal,'” a senior campaign official said.

A source with knowledge of campaign dynamics dismissed the notion that O’Malley Dillon sidelined any of Harris’ team members, saying that throughout the contest, O’Malley Dillon held meetings daily with Harris’ two chiefs of staff, Lorraine Voles and Sheila Nix.

A Harris aide called for more diversity among decision-makers, pointing to a leadership makeup that was far too white in Harris’s campaign and in Biden’s former campaign. The campaign had, among others, campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez and former Rep. Cedric Richmond as senior advisor.

“There was a huge gap in leadership of color, up and down the system, which I think contributed to some of these blind spots,” the person said. “I just want to see more honesty and a little less whiteness…I think if we are able to look within ourselves and see the talent that is already there, then there can be a new generation of leaders. But it’s going to be tough. It feels like a lost decade. It’s really bad and we have to decide where we go from here. We have to restructure everything.

The aide believed that Democrats still would have lost if Biden had been the candidate and that the party should have worked to ensure that Biden did not run for reelection.

“How the hell didn’t we solve this problem?” He is 80 years old. He was supposed to be a proxy. The man could barely speak and be coherent,” the person said. “It was too late and we knew we had a problem with Biden this time last year. The party knew it and people really weren’t being honest about the fact that he was out of touch and that his age was really messing with America.

Ultimately, one Democratic lawmaker said, the party must reevaluate its direction, both in power and behind the scenes.

“There needs to be real accountability from the establishment for what went wrong,” the lawmaker said. “Longtime operatives and older leaders frankly need to step aside and make way for new ideas and a rebuilding of the Democratic Party with much more vision, substance and inspiration.”

Vermont Sen. Peter Welch, the first Democratic senator to call on Biden to step down — who said he doesn’t regret it — said there is a mandate for Democrats to work with Republicans right now. But he had no answer as to who within the party would be the next leader.

“To be determined, I can’t point to anyone,” Welch said. “It’s a void. Bring back James Carville.

“Trying to please everyone”

Several Democrats have scoffed at any talk of 2028, but governors like Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and JB Pritzker in Illinois are on the short list of potential contenders for the next generation of the White House.

Adam Jentleson, a former top Democratic aide in the Senate, said Trump’s clear victory shows that Democrats have a “fundamental brand problem” that no campaign likely could have solved in three months.

The party prioritized managing the coalition and satisfying the myriad interest groups in its orbit instead of focusing first on winning elections, he said, which limits the flexibility of candidates and pushes them to adopt unpopular positions, such as those taken by Harris during her first campaign. presidential election in 2019 and spent most of his 2024 campaign trying to escape.

“We’ve gotten into the habit of trying to please everyone and then, only after we’ve satisfied everyone, taking what’s left and trying to integrate it into a winning strategy,” he said. he declared. “We need to do a much better job of setting boundaries between groups and taking the demands of policy seriously. »

If and when a thermostatic reaction against Trump occurs, he said Democrats must be careful not to channel it toward victory instead of pushing the boundaries of acceptable policy like during Trump’s first term.

“The question will be what to do with that energy,” he said. “Do we do what we did last time and waste it on progressive politics of the extreme overlords, or do we capture it to fight and change policies?”

Wade Randlett, a Harris supporter and longtime Democratic fundraiser from California, said he was optimistic about the party’s future prospects. Next up is the midterm elections in 2026, where Trump’s record will be a central issue for voters.

“Trump is going to do some crazy stuff over the next two years and we’re going to run a 2026 midterm referendum campaign on the crazy stuff.”

“When we get to 2028,” he continued, “we’re going to have to have a much better, clearer and more compelling case, with candidates who can make non-college graduates feel the same way Joe Biden does.” . In other words, he’s a middle-class Joe. He takes your life. And he thinks about your life. We need to have someone who can do this.