Pa. Democrats on what went wrong against Donald Trump and what’s next

Democrats across Pennsylvania were going through the stages of grief after the election.

As elected leaders and strategists saw former President Donald Trump surpass Vice President Kamala Harris in the state and Democrats lose down ballot, they tried to make sense of an election that many thought they could eke out — or that would at least look closer.

“Clearly, America wasn’t buying what we were selling,” Pennsylvania Democratic strategist Eric Stern said. “So I think it’s a question of: Did we not sell it hard enough? Should we be selling something else? Should we burn the store down?”

Across the state, Democratic Party leaders are soul-searching over their core messaging and facing intense criticism over their failure to hold onto working-class voters. On Wednesday, they were starting to evaluate how they lost.

Most agreed it wasn’t one thing but a combination of several: an electorate that wanted change and felt the economy was broken, a still, somehow, underestimated appreciation for how Trump personally connects with voters here, and the hard-to-compute factors, like the challenges Harris faced as a woman of color in a state that has elected few women to higher office statewide.

“She didn’t lose just because she was a woman or just because of inflation, and quite frankly most campaigns are like that,” Western Pennsylvania strategist Mike Mikus said. “What we as a party need to do is figure out, of the things we can control, what did we fail at?”

The result was not unique to Pennsylvania. Voters rejected a Democratic return to the White House in every single swing state.

“The post-pandemic world has not been kind to parties in power,” U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle (D., Pa.) said. “Inflation shock has hurt a lot of people, and they’ve taken it out on the party in power, whether it was the fault of that party or not.”

Democratic Sen. Bob Casey also lost his seat to Republican Dave McCormick on Thursday, a shocking result after dominant wins in his previous runs that underlines how bleak the results were for the party.

There was plenty of finger-pointing, though, both in the commonwealth and nationally. Some progressives questioned Harris’ strategy to try to appeal so hard to moderate Republicans in Pennsylvania and how she might have alienated voters concerned with the administration’s policy on the war in Gaza.

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats, said Wednesday.

Other Democrats denied that policy or messaging was the issue and questioned whether Harris should have replaced Biden on the ticket at all.

In Philadelphia, city committee chair Bob Brady brought a simmering feud with the Harris campaign into the public arena as he blamed the campaign for low support for her here, even while her declined margin in the city compared with President Joe Biden’s in 2020 reflected similar declines in support for Harris across the country.

Brady, who has been chair since 1988 and has faced criticism of his own regarding his ability to turn voters out for Democrats here, complained that the campaign didn’t deal directly with him and ward leaders.

“They didn’t show us any respect. I never talked to the lady,” Brady said of Harris.

He argued Gov. Josh Shapiro should have been Harris’ vice presidential pick and claimed money was an issue, too — saying the campaign paid about “half” what past campaigns did for Philly’s get-out-the-vote effort.

But the Harris campaign did have an expansive presence in Philadelphia, with several campaign offices in the city and more ad dollars spent here than anywhere in Pennsylvania, which topped all swing states in spending. Harris visited Philadelphia 15 times.

In response to Brady, Brendan McPhillips, a senior adviser to the Harris campaign in Pennsylvania, called Brady’s turnout operation “worthless” and said the Harris team “knocked more than two million doors in the weekend leading up to Election Day, which is two million more doors than Bob Brady’s organization can claim to have knocked during his entire tenure as party chairman.”

In Philadelphia, where votes were still being counted, turnout was just under 2020, and with ballots left to count it’s still possible this year matches or eclipses four years ago. But Harris’ margins in the city were the worst for a Democratic presidential candidate in nearly two decades. Her margins also lagged in the Philly suburbs and Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh.

And she lost ground in rural and Rust Belt areas where Trump really juiced his margins.

“I would like to say the Democrats could have done this, that, and the other, but we’re talking about the cult of Donald Trump,” said Carol Jenkins, a Democratic ward leader in West Philadelphia, who compared the moment to 1930s Germany. “You can call Bob Brady and say that it’s his fault, but the reality is it’s not.”

The economy loomed large in this election, and Democrats never figured out an effective rebuttal.

“Even though the economy is bouncing back, the regular products that the normal, everyday person cared about are up, and they’re not going down,” said City Councilmember Jim Harrity, who works with both the state and city parties. “The message of her going after the price gougers and stuff like that, I don’t think it really resonated. People thought, ‘Well, they were there, why didn’t they do it already?’”

That messaging fell especially flat in working-class communities, John Cordisco, a former chairman of the Bucks County Democrats, said. He noted that Trump carried or improved his margins in working-class towns in Lower Bucks County such as Tullytown and Falls Township.

“Why don’t we talk to those people? We gotta move away from what we think is best for them and ask them what they believe is important to them,” he said.

Cordisco said the Harris campaign focused too much on attacking Trump as a menace instead of focusing on her economic plans. “You needed to make it a central part of the messaging out of the gate,” he said, adding that the Democrats “never said clearly what we were going to do” to address the economy and immigration.

From Philadelphia to Scranton, working-class voters shifted rightward.

“Everyday people are crying out to be heard and the Democratic Party has turned a deaf ear,” said Diana Robinson, a co-deputy director of Make the Road Action in Pennsylvania, a Democratic-leaning group focused on working-class Latino communities in the state. “Last night, years of neglect of working-class people came to an ugly head.”

Blaming the loss on racism, sexism, or xenophobia ignores that Democrats have downplayed “the crises many people are in,” Robinson said.

“This election’s mandate is clear: Democrats can’t afford to play it safe. The party must confront people’s economic suffering head-on.”

The losses with Latino voters are of urgent concern for Democrats, Mikus said. “We as a party have to look at, was it him or was it us? Is there something unique about Trump that attracted them, or did we do something as a party to drive them away?”

And when it comes to rural communities, Democrats ignore how Trump drives up numbers there at their own peril, several strategists said.

Harris actually invested more time and campaign resources outside Philadelphia and the suburbs than most Democrats have, but Trump still increased his margins in 65 of 67 counties. In a lot of rural red counties, Harris didn’t even crack 20% of the vote.

“Democrats have to appreciate it’s not great to lose Blair County by 44 points,” J.J. Balaban, a Philadelphia-based Democratic strategist, said. “But there’s nothing that says it has to stay at 44. If things continue to get worse in rural areas, that’s gonna make it increasingly more difficult to win statewide.”

Staff writer Max Marin contributed to this article.