Was there more the Democratic party could have done to get Kamala elected? Photo courtesy of CNN.com.

JASPER PILARZ | NEWS CO-EDITOR | lpilarz@butler.edu

Donald Trump has been elected the 47th President of the United States. In the weeks following Nov. 5, I’ve spent much of my time reflecting on the last 11 months of the election season and find myself returning to just one question.

 What the hell has happened to the Democratic party?

To be clear, I stand by my decision to vote for Kamala Harris and remain deeply disappointed by the outcome of the 2024 election. In no way does my criticism of the Democratic party reflect any positive sentiment toward Trump, his politics or his supporters. Never in my life will I show any support for a man who believes such hateful and egregious things about women, the LGBTQIA+ community and people of color. 

Nevertheless, this election was a complete mess. Maybe I’m just becoming more jaded with age, but I found myself continuously disappointed by the strategies taken by the Democratic party. 

This election season, I was begrudgingly supporting the people meant to represent my best interest. Instead of voting with the confidence that my rights would be protected and my needs would be met, I cast my ballot for Harris with a sense of defeat. I could only hope that, if she won, I might have a slightly better chance of surviving the next four years as a transgender, leftist American than I would in the alternative.

Unfortunately, I know I’m not the only one. When it came time to cast our votes, I knew many who detested Trump but could not find complete peace with voting for Harris.

Eleanor Waiss, a senior mathematics and actuarial science double major, donated a considerable amount to the Harris campaign, but by the end of election season still made the decision to vote third party.

Waiss said she initially felt hopeful that Harris could win the election but became disillusioned with her campaign as Harris continued to distance herself from those who expected her to be more left-leaning.

“When Harris first received the [nomination] after Biden dropped out, I will admit I fell into the Harris wave,” Waiss said. “I saw the potential for what could be … I was really excited. As time went on, though, and I saw the messaging that the Harris campaign was sending out and how they were reacting to dissenting voices to their left, I became more and more worried that any form of coalition that they may have the potential to build would go out the window.”

This was not an unfounded concern on Waiss’ part. At the Democratic National Convention (DNC), the Democratic Party denied several interest groups an opportunity to speak, including a Palestinian congresswoman and members of the Uncommitted Coalition. Refusing to make space for these stances made one thing exclusively clear about Democrats and their campaign strategy — they would be aligning themself with undecided voters in the center, not those on the left.

While it isn’t abnormal to consolidate campaign efforts in the swing states, the Democratic party behind Harris failed to properly campaign on anything that would motivate those further left than the Democratic party. In aligning closer to the center voters, Democrats overestimated their appeal to those to their political left. This was a mistake that cost the Democratic party nearly 13 million votes in comparison to Biden’s win in 2020.

The Democratic party has become the American “leftist” party, but, unlike the Republican party and its alignment with the right, a lot of the Democratic party’s campaigning as a political entity falls to the center, as an attempt to appeal to undecided voters in between the two extremes.

This shift to the middle is indicative of a failure on the Democratic party’s part to establish itself securely on the left, while the Republican party on the other hand has successfully created a sense of belonging for its constituents on the far right.

Assistant professor of political science Rhea Myerscough criticized the Democratic Party’s failure to organize to the extent that those on the right have.

“I think the right is more organized, particularly within the institutions of government,” Myerscough said. “So if we think about the Dobbs decision [for example], … one simple fact is that conservative and evangelical groups organized at all levels of government, at all levels of judiciary, to create this infrastructure that allowed [Dobbs to pass]. This was a decades-long organizing project, and the left is supposed to be good at organizing, but I think they have gotten real bad.”

Beyond distancing their constituents with their campaign promises — and non-promises — Democrats have also lost any sense of community with those to their left. In their shift to the center, the entire party has grown distant and prioritized the individual over the power of true collective action. 

Lecturer in political science Ryan Daugherty said this lack of community organizing likely contributed to the high level of leftists who didn’t turn out for Harris.

“[Democrats] need to build civic capacity,” Daugherty said. “We’ve been very atomized … We increasingly feel we’re individuals and not part of a greater common good.”

As a leftist, my critique comes from my understanding that the Democratic party led a disappointing campaign and the mistakes made by the most powerful politicians in the party contributed to what may have been an inevitable loss for Harris-Walz. In their attempt to distance themselves from the right but still appeal to those in the middle, Democratic politicians have postured themselves into a moral gray zone that pulls away from the truly left-leaning members of their voter base. So what happened to the Democratic Party? In the end, I don’t think Trump’s victory was anyone’s fault but the Democratic Party itself. To beat a conservative superpower like Trump there needed to be more secure and sure posturing of the party against him, with concrete plans and real, leftist policy. The Democratic Party failed to do that, and the rest of the country will have to bear the brunt of whatever the next four years bring.