Our report’s purpose is two-fold: to illuminate why the Democrats lost and to help propel the party toward a different approach and result in the future. Without a full and honest accounting of the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party’s myriad failures, there can be little realistic hope of defeating Trumpist authoritarianism in the future.
Our report identifies five main reasons for Harris’s failure:
- Voter Disenchantment: Losing a whopping 6.8 million voters who supported Biden in 2020 proved pivotal in this extremely close election. Harris’s inability to mobilize these pro-Biden voters may have been the campaign’s biggest failure.
- Biden’s Betrayal: Former President Joe Biden’s disastrous decision to run for reelection, and his stubborn refusal to step aside until very late in the process, robbed voters of a Democratic primary process, created confusion and chaos, and severely hindered Democrats’ chances.
- Abandoning the Working-Class Base: With millions of Americans already disenchanted and desperate due to inflation, the Harris campaign lost this essential Democratic base by focusing on courting Republicans, kowtowing to corporate donors’ interests, and failing to confront the role of corporate greed in escalating inflation.
- The Gaza Effect: There is ample evidence that Harris lost many voters, especially young voters, Arab-Americans, and critical support in Michigan and elsewhere, due to the campaign’s failure to shift or even signal a potential shift in policy on Israel and Palestine.
- Losing Young Voters: Extensive evidence shows a huge drop-off in both turnout and Democratic support among young voters aged 18-29.
This report examines the voluminous evidence bolstering these conclusions. We document the many ways in which the Harris campaign and Democratic Party leadership failed to meet the moment and gravely miscalculated both what and who the election hinged on.
We don’t just tally losses and failures—we also document a promising alternative that frequently outperformed Harris in 2024. Progressive and economic populist campaigns often “beat the spread,” winning where Harris lost. As we report, vast polling shows strong majority support for bold candidates and measures that address the needs of working-class Americans.
As the adage goes, those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. This autopsy helps illuminate the reasons for the Democratic Party’s 2024 losses, examines the party’s wayward drift, and recommends course corrections for a winning future.
Introduction: A Multitude of Sins
Within hours of the November 2024 election results, theories abounded on why and how Kamala Harris and the Democrats lost. As final vote tallies trickled in, it became clear there was no landslide for Trump, who barely edged Harris in the popular vote, with neither reaching 50 percent. Still, Trump managed to swing the popular vote significantly, beating Harris by 1.5 percent after losing to Biden by 4.5 percent in 2020. Trump won all seven swing states, whereas Biden won six of them in 2020.
As our nation endures a fascistic, right-wing assault under the second Trump administration, the Democratic Party has yet to answer the most pressing questions for its political future: How did Kamala Harris and the party lose such a crucial, winnable election in 2024? With the nation’s democracy and future on the line, how can the Democrats prevent another catastrophic loss to an authoritarian and bigoted MAGA Republican Party?
The better we answer these questions, the better we can repair the epic damage this electoral collapse has enabled. Without a thorough, unflinching audit of these failures, the Democrats are likely to repeat the many drastic miscalculations we document in this report.
More than a year after the 2024 disaster, the Democratic Party continues to avoid publishing a rigorous accounting of what happened and why. It should be obvious, even to the casual observer, that such an evasive approach is political malpractice. This RootsAction report attempts to fill the void, digging into the Harris campaign’s electoral breakdown to provide clarity and direction for a winning future.
“Deciding to Win,” a glossy report by Welcome, a corporate centrist consulting firm, avoids criticizing two top factors: Biden’s belated exit from the race and the Harris campaign’s many strategic blunders. This is like performing an autopsy without a corpse.
Welcome and its PAC are “largely funded by donors who are firmly ensconced in the superstratum of the ultra wealthy,” Common Dreams documented. The group’s major funders include David Nierenberg, national finance chair for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, and Michael Eisenson, a managing director of a private equity firm.
Welcome’s report echoes longstanding centrist attacks on progressive ideas, predictably—and without evidence—blaming the 2024 presidential defeat on supposedly “unpopular” progressive policies on immigration, public safety, and identity politics.
After Hillary Clinton’s disastrous loss in 2016, the Democratic Party similarly refused to probe its own failures. Meanwhile, RootsAction rigorously examined the party leadership’s fateful missteps. A finding from that report, “Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis,” will remind many readers of the Democrats’ most recent meltdown: “The Democratic National Committee and the party’s congressional leadership remain bent on prioritizing the chase for elusive Republican voters over the Democratic base: especially people of color, young people and working-class voters overall.”
Tragically, the Harris campaign and Democratic Party leaders replicated much of the same losing formula in 2024. As this autopsy report documents, while the Harris campaign faced significant external obstacles and challenges, the campaign and Democratic Party leaders set a series of timeworn priorities and made a series of miscalculations regarding their core messages, policies, and strategies that turned off millions of vital voters in a very close election.
External Factors: Voter Disinformation, Racism, and Sexism
Before we dig into these disastrous results and the decisions that enabled them—things that Harris and Democratic Party leaders had control over and badly bungled—it’s important to note the challenging political landscape, contemporary circumstances, and historical trends that were beyond Harris’s control.
One significant factor that the Democrats could not control (nor adequately counter) was the role of immense special-interest spending to manipulate voters’ information and perceptions on social media platforms. Leading this cynical charge was mega-billionaire Elon Musk, owner of Twitter/X, Starlink satellites, and Tesla Motors, among many other businesses. In full-throated support of Trump, Musk spent a gargantuan $291 million on the presidential race in 2024, far eclipsing all other wealthy elites. Some of this largesse, along with others’ multimillion-dollar donations to Trump, fueled an unprecedented social media machine that spread rampant lies and disinformation.
A report by Brookings has enumerated many social media lies, including “infamous stories about immigrants eating cats and dogs, hurricane disaster relief funding going to undocumented immigrants, Kamala Harris in a swimsuit hugging convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and the supposed case of Tim Walz abusing a young man 30 years ago.” This vote-swaying disinformation, they wrote, “flowed into our info-ecosystem from other countries as well. One video featured a Haitian man (although he was not really Haitian) saying he had just gotten to the United States and had voted in two counties—Gwinnett and Fulton—in Georgia, but it turned out to be a fake video.”
Racism and sexism were also factors. Numerous studies have shown that both overt and covert racism and sexism can play a role in voters’ preferences. As a woman with both African-American and Asian heritage, Harris was certainly disadvantaged by these biases and bigotries. Nevertheless, our research and analysis lead to the conclusion that sexism and racism were not the top reasons for Harris’s loss. Her campaign and the Democratic Party leadership bear responsibility for Trump’s return to the White House.
Distressingly, the Democratic Party has continued to cling to failed ideas and strategies and has refused to engage in a transparent and honest evaluation of its failings. Party leaders have leaned into excuses that point to those external circumstances while taking no responsibility for their own failures.
Instead, Democrats, and all who care about our nation and planet’s future, must ask: what can we change that is within the Democrats’ control?
1. Voter Disenchantment: “Rocks Just Laying Around”
Failure to Inspire
Among all the election data, perhaps the most important and glaring result is this: while Trump added about 2.8 million total votes to his 2020 results, Harris underperformed by about 6.8 million votes compared to Biden’s 2020 victory. In such a close race, where Trump won by just 2.4 million votes nationwide (and only 761,000 votes combined in the seven major swing states), the Harris campaign’s failure to secure these nearly 7 million Americans who voted for Biden is pivotal. What happened to these voters and their votes? Where, how, and why did the Harris campaign lose these millions who previously supported a Democrat? The evidence suggests a few leading factors contributed to this massive and decisive drop in support for the Democratic nominee.
First, Democratic Party leaders must face the reality that millions of registered Democrats simply did not vote—for anyone. On Election Day, Edison Research reported, independent voters turned out in larger numbers than did registered Democrats—the first time that had occurred since Edison began gathering exit polling data in 2004. One-third of the voting population did not cast a ballot.
The turnout plunge hit Democrats hard, in important areas and among key parts of the electorate. Data analysis from FiveThirtyEight and others shows major voting downturns in urban areas and in counties that Biden won in 2020. Turnout plummeted in areas one would expect Harris and the Democrats to win, hampering Harris’s vote totals in states across the country. According to a New York Times analysis, “Counties with the biggest Democratic victories in 2020 delivered 1.9 million fewer votes for Ms. Harris than they had for Mr. Biden.”
Although Harris’s biggest vote losses were in solidly blue states that she won anyway, she also lost critical votes in swing states. Trump’s narrow victory in Michigan, the Times reported, “was mainly a result of the drop-off in Wayne County, home to Detroit and diverse suburbs like Dearborn and Hamtramck that supply the state with its most significant source of Democratic votes.”
While we can’t read these voters’ minds, we know from exit polls, anecdotal reports, and common sense, that this turnout plunge indicates that Democrats failed to inspire or motivate these millions of crucial voters who made the difference between defeat and victory. Why didn’t they vote this time?
To revive a poignant line from Jesse Jackson in 1984, Republicans (led at the time by President Reagan amid a deep economic recession) won then, as they did again in 2024, “by the margin of despair.” Millions of dispirited, non-voting Democrats were, then and now, “rocks, just laying around,” without a candidate who inspired them to vote. Millions of these key voters, then and now, feeling alienated and abandoned, stayed home. The reasons for this broad disengagement are many, but what’s clear is that Harris and the Democratic Party leadership then in control of the White House failed to offer these millions of voters ample reason to vote—failed to offer them convincing policies for substantial economic/social uplift.
Evidence emerged after the election showing that the Harris campaign had failed to reach many Black and Latino voters in key urban districts in Pennsylvania, which could have made the difference in this pivotal “keystone” state. Outreach to these vital voters was so paltry, a team of Harris campaign staffers “went rogue” just days before the election in a last-minute blitz to turn out these critical votes. As The New York Times reported, “Campaign organizers in Philadelphia said they were told not to engage in the bread-and-butter tasks of getting out the vote in Black and Latino neighborhoods, such as attending community events, registering new voters, building relationships with local leaders and calling voters.” This is just one instance of a broader strategic failure, in which the Harris campaign prioritized suburban and Republican voters over motivating the young and urban electorates.
Messaging Failures
The Harris campaign made other significant mistakes in misreading the electorate and the moment. In an election marked by economic anxiety and the uneven recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, Harris’s team failed to differentiate her message from that of the president she had served under. Her early campaign was rooted in “joyful” messaging at a time when few Americans felt they had much to be joyful about. She adopted the Biden campaign’s sunny talking points on the economy, despite abundant evidence that a majority of voters did not feel optimistic about the country’s economic direction. Even when given the opportunity to create some daylight between herself and the manifestly unpopular Biden, she said on The View that “not a thing comes to mind” that she would do differently from the then-president.
Harris’s campaign was dramatically out of step with many voters’ day-to-day realities. While Harris and her team courted suburban moderates and Republicans who were purportedly frustrated or disgusted with Trump, the campaign largely ignored working-class voters both in their outreach and their messaging. In quote after quote, in election assessments from across the country, working-class voters like this one from heavily blue Massachusetts said, “They just forgot about us.” Many, driven by hardships and stresses of inflation, turned to Trump out of either exasperation with the Democrats’ failure to listen and address their concerns, or in hopes of any kind of economic change.
The Harris campaign’s loss of 6.8 million Biden voters can be linked to three major factors we examine in this report: 1) loss of working-class voters, due to inflation stresses and struggles, combined with Harris campaign decisions to prioritize anti-Trump messaging and winning Republican swing voters rather than economic populist messages that could have won more working-class voters; 2) the Harris campaign’s woeful refusal to shift messaging or even signal a potential policy shift on Israel and Gaza; and 3) the Harris campaign’s larger failure to distinguish itself from an unpopular incumbent president and inspire voters.
2. Biden’s Betrayal
A key factor hobbling Harris’s chances in 2024 was the short timeline she had to execute her campaign—just 107 days. That her nomination was secured not via the traditional Democratic Party primary, but through some process of intra-administration succession, exacerbated this challenging chronology. This was, of course, due to President Biden’s betrayal of his 2020 promise to be a “bridge” president, and his tragic decision to continue running for reelection despite cognitive decline and plunging approval ratings.
While most analyses—including the revelatory book “Original Sin” by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson—fixate on Biden’s age and cognitive decline, Biden exhibited other serious flaws that boded ill for his chances in 2024. Despite the Biden administration’s early legislative victories, there were alarming signs that Biden’s support was eroding rapidly over discontent with his failure to seriously address inflation, as well as other political priorities, particularly funding of wars in Israel and Ukraine.
The Inflation Reduction Act, for example, was touted as a major policy victory for the Biden White House. Despite enthusiasm for the legislation among Democratic-aligned pundits, few Americans felt the impact of the IRA in their lives. Two years after its passage, an AP survey found that fewer than 20% of those polled felt the legislation had made a positive difference in their lives. A plurality of those surveyed simply did not know enough about one of the president’s main pieces of domestic policy legislation to register a response.
At the same time, Biden’s team held up the successes of “Bidenomics” as proof of the president’s fitness for another term in office. This came amidst widespread evidence that voters thought the economy was heading in the wrong direction. Exit polling revealed that, in fact, nearly 70% of voters thought the condition of the economy was “not so good” or “poor.” Of these, only 28% voted for Harris. It is clear that Biden’s insistence on running his second campaign on the strength of his economic policy was an enormous blunder, one that undermined Harris’s ability to differentiate herself from Biden once she became the nominee.
Then there was Biden’s support for unending war abroad, especially his stalwart support for Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government’s genocidal onslaught against civilians in Gaza after October 7, 2023. Faced with protests from within the party, especially among younger Democrats, Biden doubled down on his support for Israel’s war.
Starting in November 2022, as polling showed the severe weaknesses of a potential Biden reelection bid, Roots Action launched the “Don’t Run Joe” (later, “Step Aside Joe”) campaign. After Biden’s shocking debate meltdown in June 2024, mounting pressure finally induced his belated exit a month later and Harris’s entry in the presidential race. Prior to Biden’s exit, polling consistently showed Democrats—particularly younger voters—wanted other options. Those warnings were clear as early as 2022, yet Biden and Democratic Party leaders ignored it all.
Discontent with Biden’s political goals and achievements, combined with his obvious physical decline, created a toxic miasma around his reelection campaign that repelled all but the most faithful Democratic Party constituents. A national election cannot be won solely on the backs of a party’s most hardcore supporters, and the Biden team was in no position to sway wavering voters to its side. Plunging Harris and her team into the environment Biden had created through his stubborn refusal to step aside severely damaged her campaign from its inception.Even Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the ultimate establishment insider, has blamed Harris’s loss on Biden’s refusal to step aside and the lack of a primary process, telling The New York Times, “had the president [Biden] gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race.” David Plouffe, a top Harris campaign strategist and former campaign manager for Barack Obama, called Biden’s perilous reelection bid the “cardinal sin” in Democrats’ losses.
3. Abandoning the Base
As the Trump vs. Clinton campaign heated up in 2016, Senator Chuck Schumer made an audacious prediction that would foreshadow the collapse of the Democratic Party’s coalition in 2024: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” This proved a disastrous miscalculation. In its 2017 post mortem, RootsAction’s autopsy report stated portentously: “You can’t mobilize your base if you are afraid of it.”
This same strategic misjudgment would saturate Harris’s abbreviated campaign. As CNN’s Eva McKend reported, “when you talk to the [Harris] campaign, they never viewed this as a base election.” Robert Costa, of CBS, noted the Harris campaign was “trying to reach out to those Republicans who supported Nikki Haley in the 2024 Republican primary.” Nowhere was this approach more evident than in the campaign’s embrace of Liz Cheney, the former Republican representative from Wyoming, whose father played a notorious role as the architect of the United States’ disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s.
Harris and Cheney—a Republican who had become a pariah in her own party —campaigned for several days together. On the campaign trail, they repeatedly hit high-minded themes about the threat that Donald Trump posed to American democracy, while scarcely speaking to voters’ more urgent concerns about the state of the economy. The Harris campaign clearly hoped that Cheney’s endorsement would deliver slews of “moderate” Republican voters, possibly anxious about voting for a Democrat but uninclined to cast a ballot for Trump in 2024. These swing voters, the campaign gauged, would help win enough purple states for Harris to lock up an Electoral College victory.
The Harris campaign’s calculation that 2024 was a swing-vote election—rather than prioritizing maximum turnout of the Democratic base—proved to be a huge mistake. The campaign’s emphasis on turning white suburban Republicans around undercut efforts to turn out young, progressive, Black, and Latino voters, both by muddying the Democrats’ message about economic inequality, and by consuming valuable campaign resources that should have been spent on a more robust base turnout operation.
One glaring instance of this came in Pennsylvania, the most critical swing state with its 19 electoral votes. As The New York Times reported, Harris campaign staffers in Pennsylvania were so concerned about poor outreach to Black and Latino voters in crucial areas of Philadelphia, they met secretly at a donut shop and formed a “rogue” voter turnout operation to reach these core Democratic constituents. In this clandestine operation, hastily conceived in the waning days of the campaign, members of Harris’s team set out to knock on the doors of as many Black and Latino voters as possible in a desperate dash to shore up Harris’s numbers among what should have been core constituencies.
Even when defending itself after defeat, the Harris campaign acknowledged its shortcomings. As senior Pennsylvania Harris staffer Kellan White put it a month after the election, “This campaign did more in Philadelphia to reach Black and Latino voters than any campaign has done in a long time. The issue is not that we didn’t knock on these doors—we knocked on a ton of doors. The problem was that the message itself didn’t connect…what we had to say didn’t resonate with enough voters.”
From Michigan came similar stories of exasperation among Harris supporters, who pleaded and urged the campaign to commit more resources to the field operation in such a tight race. As Reuters reported, Sherry Gay-Dagnogo, a Detroit school board member and former Democratic member of the Michigan House of Representatives, “said officials with the coordinated party campaign were dismissive of her concerns. She said she had to beg for yard signs to help energize voters in the city who were less inclined to vote. … ‘I’m telling them we’re getting 20 to 30 pieces of mail from Trump daily, and we’ve heard nothing from Harris,’ she said. ‘And then you see on TV [the Harris campaign is] raising a billion dollars. Like, what the hell?’”
It is astonishing to learn that a heavily-funded campaign for the presidency suffered from a shortage of yard signs and other key field and visibility resources in critical swing states.
Exactly why the Harris campaign’s message didn’t connect with so many vital base voters is a complex and important question that Democrats must genuinely examine if they hope to win future elections. While base voters may have varying reasons for rejecting a candidate’s message, it’s evident that the Harris campaign did not make a clear or compelling enough case for itself with voters it absolutely had to have.
As Schumer telegraphed in 2016, one core Democratic constituency that got marginalized by the Democrats and Harris in 2024 was working-class voters. This was evidenced by both the Harris campaign’s messaging and spending decisions, detailed below, and by voters’ comments and decisions at the ballot box.
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Working-class voters, especially union members, have long been a crucial base for the Democrats, but that relationship has become increasingly tenuous. At least since Richard Nixon’s campaign in 1968, and with huge gains by Ronald Reagan in 1980, Republicans have steadily peeled away portions of working-class voters. This is particularly true with white working-class voters to whom Republicans have appealed, in part, by campaigning on—and fomenting—racial and cultural divides. Meanwhile, Democrats’ appeal to these critical voters has eroded significantly, with major slippage toward Trump in 2024.
While “working-class” can be a slippery, inexact term, the best measures focus on education levels, considered the most reliable predictor of income and wealth. In extensive polling before and on Election Day in 2024, AP Votecast found Harris lost decisive, game-changing ground among voters without a college degree. Trump won these voters by a gaping margin of 54% to 44%, far wider than in 2020 when he edged out Biden’s blue-collar support by 51% to 47%. These percentages represent tens of millions of voters, easily providing Trump his margin of victory.
Why and how did this happen? While Trump and Republicans lured working-class voters by cynically creating racist divides and distractions—blaming “DEI” and immigrants for the economic struggles of working-class and poor people, despite the absence of evidence—Harris and the Democrats opened the door to these manipulations by abandoning or marginalizing working-class people in their policies and campaigns.
During Barack Obama’s presidency, and then under Biden-Harris, Democrats lost working-class support by failing to deliver on policies that would have meaningfully and noticeably benefitted working people—such as universal healthcare (or at least lowering the age of Medicare eligibility), free public college tuition, increasing the federal minimum wage (still stuck at $7.25 and last raised in 2009), or instituting the union-empowering PRO Act, and other policies that never materialized even when Democrats held the presidency and congressional majorities.
Democrats’ biggest failure in 2024 may have been downplaying the hardships caused by soaring inflation under Biden. Extensive survey research from Data for Progress reflected most other polling, showing that the economy, jobs, and inflation were voters’ foremost concerns in the 2024 general election. The post-election survey found inflation “greatly impacted” the choice of 58 percent of voters, more than any other issue. As the researchers explained, “When likely voters who ranked ‘economy, jobs, and inflation’ as their top issue were asked which factors contributed to their concern, a majority said they were most concerned about inflation.” And voters most concerned about inflation “specifically pointed to the cost of food and groceries, followed distantly by the cost of rent or home prices.”
Surprisingly, some of the most compelling evidence of the Democrats’ spiraling losses among working-class voters lies in one of the nation’s bluest states, Massachusetts. The heavily Democratic Bay State has rarely gone Republican, last supporting a GOP president when Reagan won reelection in 1984. While more than 61 percent of the state’s voters chose Harris, Massachusetts nonetheless “experienced one of the most profound rightward shifts of any state in the country, largely driven by a rise in new Trump voters across working-class communities and a drop in Democratic turnout,” USA Today reported, citing the research of historical geographer Garrett Dash Nelson.
According to Dash Nelson’s data, this rightward tilt took place predominantly in working-class cities like Lawrence, Lynn, and Springfield, where Trump made major gains. In Lawrence, which is 80 percent Latino, Trump’s support shot up by a whopping 46 percent.
As Dash Nelson explained to USA Today, “Massachusetts saw a pattern that happened all across the country. The reality is that the pattern of Republican gains being concentrated primarily in working-class, oftentimes diverse working-class municipalities, holds up.”
The Democrats’ failure to inspire and mobilize working-class voters is even more glaring in light of their strong union backing. While the Teamsters notably did not endorse either presidential candidate, the AFL-CIO and most major unions supported and turned out votes for Harris—yet that still wasn’t enough to overcome the choices of many working-class voters who either abstained or went with Trump.
Another likely factor for why more working-class voters walked away from the Democrats: With guidance from Wall Street advisors like her brother-in-law, Uber executive Tony West, Harris shifted away from economic populist messaging. Due to these corporate influences, including from billionaire Mark Cuban and others, the Harris campaign avoided any bold policy proposals confronting corporate power, instead adopting “marginal pro-business tweaks to the status quo that both her corporate and progressive allies agreed never coalesced into a clear economic argument,” the Times reported.
While ultimately supporting Harris and the Democrats, labor leaders and others criticized the campaign’s fundamental contradictions: “When you’re too conflicted between the interest of corporate America and average working-day people, I think this is what you end up with,” said Jimmy Williams, the president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades told the Times. “A message that doesn’t resonate.”
In one example of this corporate-compromised politics, in an economic policy speech that August, the Harris campaign narrowed her policies on price gouging to only focus on groceries; then, after push-back from corporations and conservatives calling her policies “price controls” (which, incidentally, were last implemented by Republican President Nixon), Harris reportedly whittled those policies down further.
Another report, based on interviews with corporate officials and others, found the Harris campaign “far more open to corporate input” than the Biden campaign had been, with one corporate executive saying that the Harris campaign was “definitely giving large corporations a seat at the table and giving them a voice… resulting in more centrist policies.”
Examining hundreds of Harris speeches and press events, Jacobin magazine revealed that as the campaign wore on, progressive “economic agenda items like ‘living wage,’ ‘affordable housing,’ ‘paid family leave,’ or ‘union jobs’ dropped out of Harris’s vocabulary in the weeks after Labor Day.” By October, Harris “was spending less of her time campaigning with [United Auto Workers President] Shawn Fain and Bernie Sanders than she was with Republican Liz Cheney and billionaire Mark Cuban, unlikely candidates to push any kind of progressive economic message.”
This corporate influence is not unique to Harris, of course. It is endemic to most Democratic Party leaders, as the party has become increasingly financed by corporate interests over the past 50 years and, correspondingly, has become increasingly detached from working-class people’s issues and interests. While nobody should be surprised by the corporate funding and influence over the Harris campaign, it reveals a fundamental and chronic contradiction within the Democratic Party that must be resolved in order to promote policies that attract and offer meaningful support for working-class Americans. It’s worth noting what writer Michael Tomasky calls a “maddening paradox”: when the Democrats lose, the mainstream media rightly criticize them “for not speaking to working-class people and their pocketbooks. But if they espouse plans to do that—a higher minimum wage, free community college, paid leave, and so on—then they’re being too left-wing.”
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5. Failing on Israel and Gaza
A major preventable failure that cost Harris crucial votes—most notably in the vital swing state of Michigan—was her refusal to distance or distinguish herself from President Biden’s unwavering support for Israel’s genocidal siege of Gaza.
Instead of forging a clear new path on Gaza and Israel, Harris’s message offered no substantive changes from Biden’s unpopular policies backing Israel. Harris merely reprised President Biden’s message attempting to shift the focus to the “day after” a Gaza peace deal—but many potential supporters found the notion offensive.
“What does ‘day after’ mean?” asked James Zogby, a founder of the Arab American Institute in Washington. “It’s the most insensitive term. What is a day after genocide?”
Polls by the Institute showed that “the Biden administration’s handling of the crisis in Gaza has eroded Arab American support,” leaving Arab Americans evenly divided, with 42% backing Trump and 41% supporting Harris—a huge plunge from the 59% of Arab American voters who chose Biden in 2020.
Harris and party leaders telegraphed this failure at the Democratic National Convention, where, after featuring an Israeli American family that had suffered losses from the war, there was no equal time for Palestinian Americans. Even after widespread pressure urging a brief (and fully vetted) speaking slot for a Palestinian American Democrat, Georgia State Rep. Ruwa Romman, the Harris campaign and DNC refused this basic gesture, which could have, at minimum, shown Arab American and other concerned voters that the campaign valued them and would fight for their votes.
Instead of appealing to these critical Arab American voters in Michigan by signaling some kind of shift away from Biden’s Gaza policies, the Harris campaign sought to win over white suburban Republicans. That included going after the 296,000 voters who supported Nikki Haley in the state’s Republican presidential primary. Harris’s visits to suburban Michigan and Wisconsin illustrated where the campaign thought they could win.
The strategy failed terribly. Harris lost Michigan by 80,000 votes—even more than Hillary Clinton’s 11,000-vote loss to Trump there in 2016. In Dearborn, home to a major Arab-American population, voters chose Trump by 42% to Harris’s 40%, while Green Party nominee Jill Stein, who received less than 1% of the national vote, was supported by 15% of voters there, Reuters reported. “In 2020, Biden won 69% of the city’s vote to Trump’s 30%.” The warning signs had been there for months—in the Democratic primaries, more than 100,000 Michigan Democrats voted “Uncommitted” rather than for Biden-Harris.
Beyond Michigan, polling consistently showed that Harris would have gained far more voters than she might have lost by shifting away from Biden’s mostly-unbridled support for Israel’s genocidal annihilation of Gaza.
Just a few months before the election, a poll by Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project/YouGov found that “large proportions of voters in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona say that they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate in November if the candidate came out for an arms embargo on Israel.” Among nearly 1,500 likely Democratic and independent voters, 34 percent “said they would be more likely to vote for the nominee if they pledged to withhold weapons to Israel, while only 7 percent said they’d be less likely.”
Polling in June 2024 by Data for Progress showed strong majority support for a ceasefire deal in Gaza, including 86% of Democrats, 64% of Independents, and 62% of swing voters.
Exit polling conducted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) put Harris a distant third among Muslim American voters, with just 20%, edged by Trump’s 21% and far outflanked by Stein’s 53%.
The evidence is clear: Harris would have gained critical votes in vital swing states, especially Michigan, had she signaled a shift from Biden’s Israel and Gaza policies.
Apart from any political calculus, it should be emphasized that the Democratic Party’s unwavering support for Israel—even when faced with the horrific realities of its war crimes and genocide, and mass starvation in Gaza—is unacceptable, immoral, and untenable. One major source of pressure to back Israel, of course, is AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which spends enormous sums of campaign and lobbying money—$51.8 million in 2024 alone—in its efforts to keep both parties dutiful to supporting Israel. More than 60 percent of this game-changing largesse went to Democrats, including $2.4 million for Rep. George Latimer (NY), $1.2 million for Senator Jacky Rosen (NV), and $866,000 for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY).
As the 2026 midterm election campaigns gear up, there is recent, anecdotal evidence of some Democrats distancing themselves from AIPAC—including U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Seth Moulton (who is challenging progressive Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey) returning donations from the group, and Rep. Jeffries accepting the endorsement of the more liberal J Street, which is critical of the Netanyahu administration. “With American support for the Israeli government’s management of the conflict in Gaza undergoing a seismic reversal, and Democratic voters’ support for the Jewish state dropping off steeply,” The New York Times wrote, AIPAC “is becoming an increasingly toxic brand for some Democrats on Capitol Hill.”
Nowhere has the Democrats’ fealty to Israel cost them more than among young and progressive voters, a decisive bloc the party needs to win.
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6. Losing Young and Progressive Voters
Young and progressive Democrats, a major part of Barack Obama’s winning coalitions—and Biden’s 2020 victory—were among the first urging Biden not to break his “bridge” presidency promise by running again. Polling in July 2022 showed 94 percent of Democrats under the age of 30 did not want Biden to seek re-election. It was a stunning turnaround, given that in 2020, according to FiveThirtyEight, “around 60 percent of 18- to 29-year-old voters cast a ballot for Joe Biden, making them the most Democratic-leaning voting group by age.”
While Biden surprised and temporarily impressed some progressives with his COVID-19 economic recovery stimulus and climate policies in the Inflation Reduction Act, large portions of young and progressive Democrats became disillusioned by Biden’s failure to move forward a federal minimum wage increase, ongoing struggles and uncertainties around student debt, inadequate progress on the climate crisis, and his unflagging support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
This disillusionment of millions of young and progressive voters proved politically deadly when combined with the sizable move to the right among many young voters. According to Catalist and the Cook Political Report, Harris underperformed Biden by six points among all young voters, with particularly big losses among younger Latino (-12) and Asian American and Pacific Islander (-9) voters.
Extensive polling suggests that Biden, and later Harris, could have inspired and mobilized these voters by campaigning on policies such as cancelling student debt, expanding healthcare access, curbing support for Israel’s siege of Gaza, and boldly promoting economic populist policies. In fact, as detailed below, progressive issues and candidates largely exceeded expectations in 2024.
Progressive Populism Can Win at the Ballot Box
While Harris lost after running a campaign that vacillated or maintained status quo positions on key issues, progressive populist candidates and policies met more success at the ballot box.
Eerily, in October 2024, one month before the election, a research report by the Center for Working-Class Politics, Jacobin, and YouGov predicted, “Populism Wins Pennsylvania.” Surveying more than 1,000 Pennsylvania voters about various economic messages, the report found, “All populist and economic-centered messages outperform those that focus on immigration and abortion, and they dramatically outperform messages foregrounding Trump as a threat to democracy.”
Perhaps most revealing, the voter surveys showed that “strong populist and progressive economic messages”—such as targeting economic elites, challenging inequality, reshoring U.S. jobs, and expanding Medicare access—outperformed all others among Pennsylvania voters. Harris’ “soft populist” and “moderate economic” messages, which the campaign invested most of its resources in promoting, did far worse. These gaps were especially pronounced among working-class voters in the Keystone state. For instance, 57% of blue-collar voters supported the “strong populist” messages, while just 45% approved of messages focused on Trump’s threats to democracy.
This support for progressive and economic populist candidates and messages reverberated across the country.
In Missouri, a deep-red state, voters passed an amendment to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by a wide margin, and approved guaranteed paid sick leave, while voting overwhelmingly against Harris. Roughly 75 percent of voters in conservative Nebraska backed a measure creating paid sick leave. Harris did not make either policy a major part of her campaign.
Many candidates, both moderates and progressives, won or outperformed Harris by campaigning on economic populist messages about reining in corporate power and inequality. As one report examining races in swing districts and states summed up, “candidates who anchored their messaging specifically in fighting corporate power overperformed the national ticket. These economic positions weren’t branded as progressive or radical but instead addressed what exit polling showed was top of mind for voters in this election: inflation and overall cost of living.”
For varying reasons, some moderate and many progressive Democratic candidates substantially outperformed Harris, notably those like Gabe Vasquez (New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District) and Marcy Kaptur (Ohio’s 9th Congressional District) who doubled down on economic populism during the campaign.
Two candidates who lost their races nonetheless “had the highest percentage-point margin (7.6 percentage points) over the Harris-Walz ticket of any of the Democratic or independent Senate candidates,” The American Prospect reported—Montana Sen. Jon Tester and Nebraska independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn, who “railed against corporations and wealth inequality.”
As the Economic Policy Institute documented, voters supported progressive and economic populist ballot measures nationwide:
- Voters approved minimum wage increases to $15 per hour in two states (Alaska and Missouri).
- Voters expanded workers’ ability to earn paid sick leave in three states (Alaska, Missouri, and Nebraska).
- Voters approved a state constitutional right to abortion in seven states (Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and New York).
- Voters rejected school vouchers in three states (Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska).
- Alaska voters opted to ban anti-union captive audience meetings, while Oregon voters passed a measure to protect cannabis workers’ right to unionize.
Polling and analysis by the Center for American Progress shows that both working-class (workers without a college degree) and college-educated voters strongly support progressive economic policies such as a higher federal minimum wage, higher tax rates for high wage earners, large investments in infrastructure, and expansion of the social safety net. More than two-thirds (67%) of working-class people and 58% of college-educated voters surveyed backed a federal minimum wage of $17 an hour.
An April 2025 poll by Survey USA showed that 50% of respondents wanted the party to “become more progressive,” while only 24% said “stay the same” and 18% said “become more moderate.” A whopping 72% of Democrats told pollsters they preferred progressives like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, “who are calling on Democrats to adopt a more aggressive stance towards Trump and his administration and ‘fight harder,’ over moderate Democrats who are willing to compromise on Trump issues important to their base.”A revealing poll by Data for Progress, released just three months before the 2024 election, may provide some hope for progressives and the Democrats. Surveying likely voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the poll found broad support for raising taxes on big, profitable corporations; expanding Social Security by “making the wealthy pay the same rate as the working class”; hiking the long-stagnant federal minimum wage; and expanding Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing benefits. A remarkable 71% of voters in these swing states—including 89% of Democrats, 67% of Independents and third-party voters, and 55% of Republicans—supported higher taxes for the wealthy.
A Path Forward
Rising majorities of Democrats and independent voters are clamoring for progressive, economic populist candidates and policies. In addition to recent progressive wins, massive crowds are clamoring for “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies led by Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Economic populist candidates and ballot measures are succeeding (or, at minimum, significantly beating the partisan spread) in rural and swing districts across America. The Democratic Party needs to listen to what voters have repeatedly told them, and change course. It’s time for the Democratic Party to recover and revive its most populist roots, and put the needs (and votes) of working-class and middle-class people first.
Recommendations
The Democratic Party did not just lose the presidency and Congress in 2024—it is at risk of losing further ground in upcoming elections, due to both Republican gerrymandering initiatives (which the Democrats are countering in California) and polling that continues to show widespread distrust with the party. It is clear from Harris’s loss of 6.8 million Biden voters that the party has a serious enthusiasm gap. Even as President Trump plummets in popularity, the Democratic Party’s favorability ratings at the end of November 2025 stood near frozen at just 34 percent (Republicans were at 40 percent).
As we document in this report, much of this distrust and disenchantment stems from corporate capture and how big business interests induce Democrats to weaken and water down their agenda and message. The mainstream Democratic Party’s relationship to and reliance on corporate interests stand in the way of economic populist policies that, widespread polling shows, would win many votes for the party.
To win back the White House and Congress, we urge the Democratic Party to change course and embrace economic populist policies that inspire and help working-class Americans. The Democratic Party must show voters that it has a spine and can stand up to corporate and big-money interests.
Our recommendations:
- Commit to economic populist policies that inspire and benefit working-class people, including: Enhanced Medicare for All single-payer healthcare; raising the federal minimum wage; robust union protections; expanded job creation and funding to help manual and manufacturing workers when industries and companies go under; aggressive anti-trust enforcement to break corporate monopolies; and significantly increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
- Commit to significantly limiting and curtailing corporate campaign contributions and PACs, and mounting an aggressive challenge to Citizens United and corporate money in politics.
- Democrats should officially reject AIPAC and its stranglehold over the party and its foreign policy. Supporting Israel even amid its war crimes and horrific assault on Gazans was both morally indefensible and politically suicidal. Younger generations of voters and activists, the future of the Democratic Party, have made that abundantly clear.
Notes: This report was edited by Sam Rosenthal, an organizer and researcher based in Washington, DC. He recently served three years on the steering committee of the Democratic Socialists of America’s National Electoral Commission.
The research and writing of “Democratic Autopsy: One Year Later” was supported by Action for a Progressive Future, a 501(c)(4) organization that sponsors the online activist group RootsAction.org.
