As Democrats work through a coherent plan to handle President-elect Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, they’re also struggling with what the right strategy is to reengage minority voters who defected to the GOP during last month’s election.
Trump didn’t just win all seven battleground states and the popular vote in the battle against Vice President Kamala Harris. He made inroads with black, Latino, and Asian voters.
Trump garnered 25% of the black male vote and 48% of Latino men, according to an Associated Press VoteCast survey.
BIDEN TO USE LAME-DUCK SESSION TO ‘TRUMP-PROOF’ LEGACY
The president-elect’s share of young black men improved from the 2020 race, with roughly 3 in 10 black men under 45 voting for him this cycle.
Although Harris won Asian American voters 55% to Trump’s 40%, according to NBC News’s exit polls, it was below the 61% of Asian American voters then-candidate Joe Biden won in 2020 and the 65% former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won in 2016.
In the aftermath, several Democrats, including those running to chair the Democratic National Committee, are pushing for a reset of the party’s priorities.
Some have chastised the party for not focusing enough on economic policies and have called for the party to learn from the lessons of Trump’s success, while some of the loss in support could be attributed to anger over Democratic support of Israel in its battle against Hamas.
Other Democrats are unswayed.
“To be more like Trump is not the answer here,” said Washington State Democratic Party Chairwoman Shasti Conrad, who is also running for DNC vice chairwoman. “But I do think across all communities, regardless of real particular racial demographics, all working-class people felt like the party wasn’t speaking to them. And Trump was able to channel a lot of that rage.”
The economy, along with immigration, was one of the top two issues that voters cited as influencing their vote and was a key issue that persuaded more black and Latino men to vote for Trump.
Most Democrats agree that economic anxiety likely persuaded many voters of color to vote for Trump and have pointed to revamping the messaging strategy ahead of the 2026 midterm elections and the 2028 presidential elections to connect directly how lawmakers in Washington, D.C., are passing laws to improve the daily lives of voters.
“There’s a lot of self-awareness in the Democratic Party,” said Michael Ceraso, a Democratic strategist who has worked on multiple presidential campaigns. “They’re not defensive. And I felt like eight years ago, we felt defensive. And I now think we just go, ‘No, there are ways to be better.’”
BIDEN MISHANDLING OF CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS LOOMS OVER PRESIDENTIAL TRANSITION
DNC chairman candidate Martin O’Malley told CBS News that Democrats “suffered a very bad loss” and needed to “learn from it in order to win the next battles ahead” as an example of how the next set of leaders are hoping to learn from 2024.
Still, political experts also cautioned that Trump had somehow transformed the GOP into a multiracial coalition.
“While there are variations in the strength of white, Black, and Latino or Hispanic vote margins, it is clear that white voters continue to favor Republicans and the latter two groups favor Democrats,” William H. Frey for the Brookings Institution wrote.
Donna Brazile, former interim chairwoman of the DNC, pushed for an analysis of the party’s loss during a recent Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting in Washington, D.C.
“Will a postmortem take place at any point over the next two months as we prepare to elect new offices?” Brazile questioned current Chairman Jaime Harrison.
Harrison claimed the organization is “evaluating” programs but an analysis likely won’t come until after the new chair is selected.
Brad Bannon, a Democratic strategist, claimed his party would need to have a coherent and consistent message that he claims Harris sometimes lacked.
“Minority voters were concerned about grocery prices just like everybody else, and Democrats failed to address the issue,” Bannon said.
Bannon also pointed to recent remarks Trump made about the difficulty it will be to lower prices as a way for Democrats to win over voters of color.
“Look, they got them up. I’d like to bring them down,” Trump said, speaking about lowering grocery prices to Time magazine. “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard. But I think that they will. I think that energy is going to bring them down. I think a better supply chain is going to bring them down.”
Assuming inflation continues to plague Trump and his promises to slap tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada, “it leaves an opening for Democrats to hammer at the issue in a way that Harris didn’t in 2024,” Bannon said.
Emory University professor and political analyst Andra Gillespie claimed that Democrats will likely need to wait and see how Trump governs in his second administration before coming up with a strategic plan for winning over voters of color.
HARRIS FACES POLITICAL WILDERNESS AFTER HISTORIC LOSS LEAVES HER PARTY ‘IN TATTERS’
“This is an opportunity for Democrats to do some reflection, and we see that kind of taxing in real time and in public, but I think Democrats also need to give themselves time to come up with a response that is not reactionary,” Gillespie said.
“But in the meantime, now that they’re the party out of power, I think they also have to wait to see how this next administration unfolds so that they can provide contrast,” she also said. “If there are policy failures, for instance in the Trump administration, then I think the big lesson for 2024 is not, ‘Well, we didn’t do that, or we’re not that person,’ but, ‘Here’s how we would do things differently, and here’s how this would benefit people.’”
As Democrats are figuring out what a rebrand for the future entails, many are already pushing for generational change for younger leaders who can speak to disaffected minority voters.
“People are seeing that there is a generation in the Democratic Party that doesn’t want to cede power,” Conrad said. “They would rather keep things as they are and not make room. … We’ve done a lot of good work of getting younger people of color elected, but then we don’t want to actually listen to them or put them in leadership roles.”
“If we’re a party that claims to champion diversity, we need to have diversity of age as well at the table, and not in just a symbolic way but in a real way that gives us the authority to speak out and be in these meetings,” said youth activist David Hogg, who is also running for DNC vice chairman, to HuffPost.
Perhaps one example was progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) losing out as the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee to veteran Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), who was recently diagnosed with cancer.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Winning back voters of color may simply mean becoming more authentic in how the party speaks to the public.
“Voters specifically don’t want you to bulls*** them,” Ceraso said.