The 2024 presidential election isn’t over.
While the vote count is official and President-elect Donald J. Trump will be the next occupant of the Oval Office, just about everything else, including how much of a mandate he has, why the Democrats lost and what the future of the two political parties — and the country — will look like, is still the subject of fierce debate.
That came through strongly during a discussion on Dec. 4 at the DealBook Summit in New York City about the election and its aftermath. The 10-member election task force, one of four held away from the main stage, included those involved in politics, the media and advocacy.
Early on, the lines were set: Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Mr. Trump, thanked other task force members for joining him in “celebrating President Trump’s victory.” Shortly afterward, Sarah Longwell, an outspoken Republican against Mr. Trump and publisher of the website The Bulwark, described Mr. Trump as “the most dangerous criminal human being that America has ever elected.”
And, she said, gesturing at Kevin McCarthy, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and another task force member, “you’re the one who went down and resurrected him,” referring to Mr. McCarthy’s visit to Mar-a-Lago shortly after the Jan. 6 insurrection.
To which Mr. McCarthy replied, “You’re welcome.”
Not all exchanges were testy, but that did not mean there was a meeting of minds. Democrats on the panel rejected Republicans’ assertion that the victory was a sweep.
Kellyanne Conway, the campaign manager for the 2016 Trump campaign and former senior counselor, declared the election “a rejection of wokeness,” while Alexis McGill Johnson, chief executive and president of Planned Parenthood, called it “a rollback on 50 to 100 years of progress that we have been making among communities of color, among gender, among people who just want to live their lives.”
Most agreed that the Democrats’ loss hinged on a variety of factors: inflation, immigration, anti-incumbency and a false sense of hope created after the 2022 midterms, where a predicted red wave never appeared.
The anger many felt after the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, less than five months before the midterms, carried through that election, but “also kept Kamala Harris competitive because she stepped into that role and for two years has been an incredible surrogate and messenger” for abortion rights, Ms. Johnson said.
But more emphasis was needed on the economic woes of voters, “the daily decisions that they were making from buying a box of cereal to when and how their families would survive,” she added.
More broadly, panel members of all persuasions pointed to an overall failure of the Democratic Party to understand what disillusioned and divided voters were looking for.
“Something that we as a party will have to face up to is that we have absolutely lost our credibility with people who are at the lower end of the economic scale,” said Anita Dunn, former senior adviser to President Biden. She added that, “If you were to say to me, what is the Democratic Party’s biggest problem right now? It’s that the people we think we’re representing don’t think we are representing them when it comes to the core issue.”
Van Jones, a CNN political commentator and chief executive of the nonprofit Dream Machine, also pointed to the failure of Democrats to attract young men.
“There was a huge disconnect from what the campaign thought was going to work and what was actually resonating with young men,” he said. “I’m going to tell you, young men of color are up for grabs. They don’t like Republicans, they don’t like Democrats, and they don’t like their circumstances.”
In fact, one thing most could agree on was that all sorts of voters are now up for grabs in what Ms. Longwell called a major political realignment.
“The Democratic Party is now populated by a lot more of these college-educated voters, and there aren’t enough of them,” Ms. Longwell said. “The Republican Party has built a multiracial, multiethnic working-class coalition for a variety of reasons, much of which is part of negative polarization — a rejection of something else, as opposed to an affirmative.”
While the election feels unprecedented, that is not the case; Major Garret, chief Washington correspondent at CBS News, said the only other time a president was re-elected to a nonconsecutive second term was also during a time economic and cultural disruption: Grover Cleveland who was elected in 1885 and then again in 1893.
Just like now, he said, during the Gilded Age “there was massive dislocation, massive convulsions, people feeling as if the world they knew is not only changing but may never be there again.”
These ongoing political shifts also raise the question of what the Republican Party will look like after 2028: Mr. McCarthy acknowledged that, “Republicans have problems too. We didn’t win; Donald Trump won.”
Yet, for the most part, the Republicans on the panel saw bright days ahead.
“When you look at where he is now in 2024 versus 2016, this is an entirely different level of organization and preparedness for a new administration,” Mr. Miller said. “I would make the case that we’ve never seen an administration ever come into Day 1 ready to go like President Trump is, quite frankly because he’s done it before.”
Mr. Miller brushed off questions about Mr. Trump’s vow of retribution against those he considered disloyal, including the media, once he is sworn in.
“The president said very clearly his only retribution or revenge will be success, and that’s what it’s going to be,” he said.
Some weren’t satisfied with that answer.
“You said he said retribution will be his success, but he also talked about putting Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad,” said Margaret Hoover, host of “Firing Line with Margaret Hoover” on PBS. “He talked about hanging Mark Milley,” a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
She then read several names from a list of 60 people who appear in the book “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy,” written by Kash Patel, Mr. Trump’s nominee for F.B.I. director. That compilation has been referred to as an enemies list of people he hopes to prosecute.
“Is prosecuting people who held those positions of power in the previous administration, his own administration, the proper way to go?” Ms. Hoover asked Ms. Conway.
“I think what’s going to happen is he’ll be asked about all of that in his confirmation hearings, and we should welcome those questions,” Ms. Conway said about Mr. Patel. “He’s a big boy. He can answer those questions.”
The meeting ended with no conclusions, just a general agreement that the way blue and red politics have traditionally played out in this country is undergoing a major upheaval.
“In 2020 people voted for change, because they were sick of Trump,” Mr. Jones said. “In 2024, they voted for change. They’re probably going to vote for change a bunch more times because something is off. There’s something really going wrong for real, everyday working folks in this country, and I’m not sure either party has an answer yet.”
Takeaways
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A month after the 2024 election, profound disagreement remains about what the results actually mean.
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Democrats have to acknowledge, and understand why, they have lost credibility with working- class voters and other parts of their traditional base.
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The new administration is prepared to take charge Day 1, but Republicans need to look at a future beyond Trump.
The post Seismic Political Shifts Are Likely to Continue appeared first on New York Times.
