What Democrats can learn from Trump's victory

Democrats are trying to figure out how they could lose the White House to Donald Trump — again.

David Axelrod, political consultant and former adviser to then-President Barack Obama, says that there’s more to the story than the large wave of supporters backing Trump.

“Two years ago, after the midterm elections, the Republican Party was casting around for another candidate because they thought he was damaged goods and he was a liability,” Axelrod says. “But there was another force going on, and that is a sense of jaundice in the country about the direction of the country post pandemic and about the economy that was driven by high inflation and cost of living. And much as has been true in the rest of the world, it created a big anti-incumbent wave.”

Two years ago, you were one of the first prominent Democrats to say that President Biden should step aside to let someone else run. He didn't listen until it was arguably too late. Do you think that a Democrat without the baggage of his administration could have won this race? 

“I don't know. It was very hard for [Kamala Harris]. I think Kamala Harris really overperformed expectations as a candidate given her race in 2020. But the headwinds were so strong because if the country wants to fire the incumbent and you're the vice president, it's very hard to separate yourself out. You know, 28% of the public says the country's on the right track. The reality is that incumbent parties tend to perform badly when the incumbent president has numbers like this.”

What does this loss do to president Biden's legacy?

“Legacies are written over time. And one of the mistakes I think that [Biden] made was he was trying very hard to claim his place in history while he was still in office, telling people what a good job he had done on the economy. And I think you can make a pretty strong case on a lot of grounds that he did, but that is not the way people felt about the economy in real time. And the word Bidenomics will go down with new Coke as one of the great marketing disasters of all time.

“History will judge climate, infrastructure bill, some of the steps he took on health care. But honestly, this is going to be a big part of the story. He defeated Donald Trump. And then in some ways, was complicit in ceding leadership back to Donald Trump.”

We’ve been hearing a lot in the last couple of days about the way the Democrats have lost Latino voters and Black voters, which frankly is something the Democrats have known about for a long time. Did they ignore those signs? 

“I think that, in general, one of the things that the Democratic Party has to consider is whether it has a clear view and connection with the rest of the country from its highly educated, metropolitan base. Democrats think of themselves as the party of working people, but sometimes approaches them as missionaries with a message of, ‘We want to help you become more like us.’ That carries with it a message of disdain.

“And I think the Hispanic communities increasingly are behaving like other working-class communities, more socially conservative, more focused on economic issues. The Black community, I think the issue is a little bit different, although not entirely different. And it's just a sense that after years of promise, there's still great struggle in the community. Maybe they should take a chance on someone else. Now, I will say the loss in the African American community will turn out to be less of an issue than Hispanic voters.”

Is the Democrats failing to understand this distinction between class and identity part of the problem?

“One hundred percent that's part of the problem. The Democratic Party lost voters who make less than $100,000 a year. And that used to be the base of the Democratic Party. But the bases have shifted.

“Let me tell you in practice how this works. A lot of people in the suburbs were moved by the issue of democracy. I'm moved by the issue of democracy, but if you're sitting around the kitchen table and talking about the challenges to democracy, it's probably because you don't have to worry about the cost of the groceries on your kitchen table. If you have to worry about those, then that's probably your biggest concern.”

Democrats have been historically focused on celebrity. In this campaign, there were concerts with Beyonce, surprise endorsements from Taylor Swift and speeches from Oprah. Republicans use that to show how Democrats were disconnected and to label them as the elite. Do you think that clouded the message? 

“I had that question in the closing stanzas of the campaign when there was a big celebrity quotient. When it was announced that [Harris] was going to make a speech from the Washington Mall, my response was I'd rather see her speak at a suburban mall. I think getting down into communities where people had these day-to-day concerns and connecting with them was important.

“But I want to say, I don't want to be too critical. [The Democrats] did a lot of things right, the debate, the convention. And they were trying to put a campaign together going 600 miles an hour of spare parts — her people, Biden's people, the Obama people. I don't know if they had done everything perfectly, whether the outcome would have been different, because I think the headwinds were just so strong.”

Donald Trump has called this the greatest political movement of all time. Has Trump become a movement realigned the country to the right or are Republicans going to have a reckoning of their own when his time in the White House is over?

“I think it's way too early to say this is an era that will extend beyond his four years. And if I were the Republicans, I wouldn't sleep on the midterm elections. If Trump gets distracted by evening the score with people, governs for his class, there will be a rebellion. So, I think now he is the status quo, and the question is whether he can continue to present himself as an agent of change in that office and produce for people. If he doesn't, the same wheel of democracy will roll him over in two and four years.”

Lynn Menegon produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Allison Hagan adapted it for the web.