Why Did the Democrats Lose the Election? It Wasn’t a 2024 Mistake

Joe Biden Failed As the “Bridge” President

In December 2019, Joe Biden was having internal discussions with his campaign team about whether or not he would announce his plans to run for a single term or seek re-election in 2024 when he would be 82 years old. An interview done by Politico with private sources close to Biden in 2019 certainly didn’t believe he would seek a 2nd term. “If Biden is elected,” a prominent adviser to the campaign said, “he’s going to be 82 years old in four years and he won’t be running for reelection.”

In March 2020, just as COVID was becoming a pandemic, Biden referred to himself as a bridge to the future of the party. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden said. “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.”

This made Biden the transitional president to defeat Trump in 2020, then give way to a younger Democrat for 2024. This was logical. Maybe it didn’t need to be announced to voters right away, but by 2021 or early 2022 at the latest, Biden should have followed through on his promise and announced he won’t seek re-election.

This would have given the Democrats plenty of time to find real candidates, Vice President Harris included, to run for 2024, hold actual primaries, and let the Democratic voters select who they want as their next candidate to inevitably face Trump this week. But Biden failed them by sticking in the race even though he knew all along he’d turn 82 years old in November 2024. He was already the oldest president ever when elected, a record now held by Trump, but there’s no way he was going to last in the White House until he was 86. Let’s just be serious.

You can blame Biden, you can blame other Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, but someone should have been on him about this early on. They should have had a plan. Instead, they had to rush Harris through the process after Biden waited until late July 2024 to finally drop out after his disastrous debate performance in June. But this should have been done years before that.

The Other Years-Long Failure: No Contesting Right-Wing Media

The other way Democrats failed themselves in the 2024 election goes back years even before Biden was their nominee. It’s about the way right-wing media is dominating the airwaves and getting the attention of millions on a daily or weekly basis (for years) through podcasts, YouTube videos, Twitch streams, TikTok, etc.

Whether it’s Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, or a young streamer like Adin Ross who did events with Trump leading up to the election, this is what people are watching and consuming all the time. This content is very favorable to Trump supporters, Republicans, conservatives, and the right. You could even throw someone more controversial like Andrew Tate into this, and a lot of young people who maybe couldn’t vote in 2020 were old enough to vote now. The 2024 Trump campaign seized on the “bro vote” in this election.

The Democrats and the left/liberals simply have no real challengers to this new media. There’s the Pod Save America guys, a trio of ex-Obama staffers who just don’t have the online movement with the kind of interviews you’ll get from Joe Rogan, who was credited by UFC’s Dana White at Trump’s victory ceremony for helping the campaign by Rogan doing a 3-hour interview with Trump. Kamala reportedly was offered the same time, couldn’t agree on 3 hours, so it never happened.

The Harris campaign did an incredible job by raising $1 billion in a short period of time. However, the fact is old media is not what it used to be. People aren’t buying newspapers that much at all anymore. Cable news ratings are down, cord cutting is up, and a lot of people don’t even watch their TV anymore to see those political ads.

People are watching these apps on their phone/tablet and getting their news fed to them through algorithms that tailor it to exactly what they want to see. Everyone’s living in their own little bubble these days, and the Republicans have been dominating the Democrats on this front for years now.

This is something the Democrats have to try leveling the playing field with, but that will be hard given the huge differences in the party’s vibes and respect for the truth. What would a left-wing Andrew Tate or Ben Shapiro even sound like? Someone who talks slowly and tells you to respect women? Good luck getting a big audience there. The more controversial you act, the more viral moments you produce, the more eyeballs you’ll get, and the idea is that will lead to voters on election day.

The Democratic party has a huge identity issue to tackle with what message they want to send to voters, and how they are reaching people for 2028 and beyond. They failed on this front while the Trump campaign thrived. The Democrats underestimated just how many people embrace the MAGA movement. The results speak for themselves in this election.

Yes, Kamala Harris Made a Huge Mistake Too

Finally, we cannot pretend Harris had a perfect campaign. But with the issues the Democrats faced that were years in the making with letting Biden hang on and not reaching more voters on new media, she might not have been able to win no matter what she did. Not when the voting spread looks like this everywhere, and the Democrats also lost control of the Senate and possibly the House in this election.

But the single biggest mistake by the Harris campaign was not having concrete answers for how she would differ from President Biden. Look, we get it. She had very little time to get a platform and everything going after getting the nod in late July. It’s also a tricky thing as you want to be respectful to Biden and the work your administration did while you were vice president the last 3.5 years. Trashing everything would make you look bad and a hypocrite.

The fact is George H. W. Bush wasn’t asked to differentiate himself much from Ronald Reagan when he ran in 1988 as Reagan’s VP because Reagan was well-liked. The same thing happened in 2000 when Al Gore ran for the Democrats as Bill Clinton’s VP. Clinton was well-liked.

As we saw this week, Biden was very unpopular with an approval rating of around 40%, which was a good sign he’d never win a 2nd term. People were not happy with the direction the country was going in, so this wasn’t going to be easy for Harris to make a new path forward while not completely discarding everything she’d been doing with Biden.

However, someone in her campaign team should have covered some of the most basic questions she knew she would be asked. Her most spectacular failure came on an interview on The View in October when she was asked if there’s anything she’d have done differently from President Biden in the last 4 years. Here was her response:

“There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of – and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact, the work that we have done,” Harris said.

The Trump campaign seized on this clip and used it in a very effective attack ad that ran for weeks before Election Day. That was likely the final nail in the coffin if you thought the Democrats had a shot. Not after that.

She had to have a planned answer for that kind of expected question. She could have explained her economic plan to help lower the prices of goods and inflation. She could have jumped on the border bill to help immigration and how she’d more aggressively push that forward, putting the blame on Trump for telling Republicans in the House to kill it. Anything would have been better than “nothing comes to mind” from Harris. That’s a campaign killer line.

Again, there are a lot of reasons the Democrats lost by a significant margin. We could also criticize the pace of the legal teams for not getting Trump’s 4 indictment cases further along before the election. He was convicted of 34 felonies in New York for the hush money case with his sentencing still to come this month, but the other cases are likely dead in the water. Too late.

But the major failures were years in the making for the Democrats, who just suffered a significant defeat that should lead to a housecleaning in messaging and leadership going forward. The Democrats won’t be able to run in 2028 on “we’re not Trump” as he should technically be forbidden from running for a 3rd term. But that didn’t work in 2016, it may have only worked in 2020 because of COVID, and it sure as hell didn’t work in 2024.

It’s back to the drawing board.