President-elect Donald Trump, pundits on MSNBC and CNN offered a variety of views on the reasons Harris lost.
The election was close: According to Cook Political Report, Trump won the popular vote by roughly 1.5 percent. But Trump picked up 312 electoral votes, and Harris was unable to get past the finish line.
Some of the post-election dialogue has come from the Democratic polling firm GBAO, which conducted three focus groups for Navigator Research.
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Politico's Elena Schneider, in an article published on December 22, describes Navigator's findings.
"The focus group research, shared first with Politico, represents the latest troubling pulse check for a party still sorting through the wreckage of its November losses and looking for a path to rebuild," Schneider explains. "Without a clear party leader and with losses across nearly every demographic in November, Democrats are walking into a second Trump presidency without a unified strategy to improve their electoral prospects."
According to Navigator's Rachael Russell, the focus groups showed a "pretty scathing rebuke" of the Democratic brand.
Russell told Politico, "This weakness they see, (Democrats) not getting things done, not being able to actually fight for people — is something that needs to be figured out. It might not be the message, it might be the policy. It might be something a little bit deeper that has to be addressed by the party."
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Some of the focus groups' participants believe that the Democratic Party leadership is too focused on identity politics.
One of them, a Georgia man who voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 but voted for Trump in 2024, complained, "I think what the Democratic elites and their politicians believe is often very different from what the average Democratic voter is. The elites that run the Democratic Party — I think they're way too obsessed with appealing to these very far-left social progressivism that's very popular on college campuses."
Russell, however, argues that Trump is enjoying a "honeymoon" period that won't last.
Russell told Politico, "Once things start happening, it's going to take a turn, and so, it's going to rely really heavily on the actions in the first 100 days to see how we go from here.”
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Read Politico's full article at this link.