Crime Today News
The Democrats in the US are demoralised and directionless
| Photo Credit:
Serhej Calka
Nearly six months into the drubbing of 2024, Democrats seem to be still coming to terms with what happened at the hustings. Worse, for all the gasping at what has been going on since January 20, 2025, the party seems leaderless and directionless in terms of even putting up a token of a resistance in the hallways of Congress or outside.
Forget former President Joe Biden for a second, the former Vice-President and Democratic contender last November, Kamala Harris, is still making up her mind on her next course of political action. Will she contest the Governor’s race in 2026 or immerse herself in the next Presidential contest of 2028? At least those in the fray for the California top spot want to know soon.
It is difficult to be taken in by the argument that Democrats are still calculating why the party did so badly in November 2024 or why only after the first debate last June did the party painfully come to the conclusion that Biden was too weak on the ticket. Many writers and media pundits have made the point that the inner circle of Biden, including family members, were in denial. Biden was clearly not “up to it” even before he took the stage for the first debate in Atlanta on June 27, 2024, many are convinced.
As an after thought some have been making the point that Biden went back on his word and entered the 2024 race after saying in 2020 that he was a transitional President. Others wonder if Harris would have won the White House if she had more than 107 days to prepare for the showdown.
With Biden tanking in the polls, Harris was asked in one of her rare interviews in October 2024 if she would have done anything different than her boss. Her stunning response: “… there is not a thing that comes to mind”. This partly explains the debacle of 2024.
Misplaced outrage
Equally difficult is understanding the outrage of Democrats to the goings on in Washington. On every issue starting with immigration, jobs slashing, tariffs, Canada, Greenland, and so on President Donald Trump had clearly indicated how he would be proceeding. The only thing different is that the President has further fine tuned his ideas to fall in line with his base, the Make America Great Again (MAGA) crowd for the most part. If there is disbelief it is because Democrats did not expect him to go through or did not think he would pull it off last November.
Not long ago, veteran Democratic strategist, James Carville, who has seen many an election, argued that the best thing for Democrats to do would be to let Trump and Company have their way and sink under their own weight instead of fighting on every imaginable issue as was done in Trump’s first term.
“Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is retreat on the immediate battlefield — and advance in another direction”, Carville wrote, stressing the need for Democrats to look for good candidates in 2026 as they did in 2018.
Democrats would do well to listen carefully to what Carville has said. This is not the time to argue about a loss that was well on the cards given the campaign styles. It is hardly going to matter if Biden is going to say anything different in his new book that is supposedly in the works.
The bottomline for Democrats is to come up with a coherent message and an effective messenger for November 3, 2026 mid-terms; not resting on history that the party of the President sitting in the Oval Office loses.
The writer is a senior journalist who has reported from Washington DC on North America and UN
Published on April 15, 2025
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