The boss wanted this one written, and honestly, it was overdue.
In November 2024, Donald Trump swept all seven swing states and won the popular vote. The Democratic Party, which had outspent him by hundreds of millions of dollars and deployed Beyonce, Oprah, and both Cheneys, was left staring at the wreckage. What followed was not introspection. It was a blame festival.
The Blame Machine
Within hours of the results, the finger-pointing began. The Harris campaign’s official statement cited “unprecedented headwinds that were largely out of our control,” as if describing a hurricane rather than an election they had spent over a billion dollars trying to win.
MSNBC’s Joy Reid called it a “historic, flawless” campaign that had simply been failed by the voters. Nancy Pelosi blamed Biden for staying in the race too long. Biden’s people blamed Harris for “benching” the president. One Democratic consultant offered perhaps the most revealing quote of the entire cycle: “Kamala Harris wasn’t a flawed candidate. America is a flawed country.”
Notice what is missing from that list: any serious examination of what the party itself did wrong.
What Voters Actually Cared About
The data is not ambiguous. A post-election survey by the University of Illinois found that 60.8% of Trump voters cited cost of living or the economy as their top issue. Among people who said inflation caused their family severe hardship, 74% voted for Trump.
This was not a mystery. Biden’s approval sat at 33% in January 2024, and it never recovered. Nearly half of Americans who rated economic conditions as poor specifically mentioned inflation or the high cost of living. Eleven percent pointed directly to food and grocery prices.
Eggs became the symbol. Egg prices jumped 39% in the year before the election. They were roughly three times more expensive on Election Day than they had been in 2020. For millions of families buying groceries every week, this was not an abstraction. It was the difference between stretching the budget and not.
The Party That Stopped Listening
The loss of working-class voters did not happen overnight. According to exit polls, Jimmy Carter won roughly 52% of the white working-class vote in 1976. By 2020, Biden was down to about 36%. In 2024, the collapse was complete: a majority of voters earning under $50,000 voted for Trump, while a majority of those earning over $100,000 voted for Harris. The party of the New Deal had become, in electoral terms, the party of the comfortable.
Bernie Sanders, who had warned about this trajectory for years, put it bluntly after the election: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
Working-class voters remember. They remember being called “deplorables” in 2016. They remember NAFTA. And in 2024, they watched a candidate surround herself with billionaires and Republican hawks while their grocery bills kept climbing.
Making Fun of the Eggs
Perhaps the most damaging instinct on display was the tendency to mock the very concerns that drove voters to Trump. When Americans said they were voting on grocery prices, a significant portion of the liberal commentariatThe community of professional commentators, columnists, and political pundits in media, viewed collectively as a class with shared assumptions and influence. responded with condescension.
The New Republic ran a piece titled “Sorry, but You Had to Be an Idiot to Believe Trump Could Lower Prices.” The author even admitted the double standard openly: if Harris had made the same day-one price promises Trump did, “She’d have been laughed off the campaign trail. Mocked relentlessly. And not just by the right wing. By mainstream economic commentators. By liberal pundits. By me.”
That admission tells you everything. The liberal establishment understood that voters were in pain over prices. They just thought those voters were stupid for wanting someone to promise to fix it. When the only candidate willing to say “I will make eggs cheaper” was Trump, millions of Americans shrugged and pulled his lever. Not because they were idiots. Because he was the only one who acknowledged their problem existed.
The Autopsy They Will Not Release
After 2024, DNC Chair Ken Martin promised a rigorous, transparent postmortem. “Of course it will be released,” he said. “There has to be some lessons that we bring on so that we can operationalize it.”
In December 2025, the DNC confirmed it would not release the completed report. The explanation was that releasing it might “distract” from winning. This is the same party that buried its 2016 postmortem. Two catastrophic losses, two buried autopsies. An independent report by RootsAction filled the void, documenting how Harris lost 6.8 million voters who had supported Biden in 2020 and calling the defeat “a preventable loss.”
What Would Have to Change
The path forward is not complicated to describe. It is just uncomfortable for the people who run the Democratic Party.
Stop blaming voters. A majority of Americans earning under $50,000 chose Trump. Calling them racist, sexist, or stupid is not a strategy. It is a coping mechanism.
Talk about prices. Not in the abstract, policy-paper way that satisfies editorial boards. In the direct, plain way that a family buying eggs at $6 a dozen can hear and believe.
Stop chasing Republicans. The Harris campaign spent months courting GOP voters and ended up winning the same tiny share of Republican voters they attracted in 2020, while hemorrhaging their own base.
And release the autopsy. Two buried reports in eight years is not caution. It is denial.
The Blame Machine
Within hours of the 2024 results, Democrats began assembling their alibis. The Harris campaign’s official statement cited “unprecedented headwinds that were largely out of our control,” framing the loss as an act of nature rather than a consequence of decisions. MSNBC’s Joy Reid called it a “historic, flawless” campaign that was failed by voters. One Democratic consultant went further: “Kamala Harris wasn’t a flawed candidate. America is a flawed country.”
David Axelrod pointed to “racial bias” and “sexism.” Pelosi blamed Biden for staying in the race too long. Biden’s camp blamed Harris for sidelining the president. Progressive journalist Aaron Rupar attributed Trump’s victory to “the desire to dominate and inflict cruelty on outgroups.” What virtually none of these responses addressed was the substance of what voters actually said they cared about.
The Economy Was the Election
The data leaves little room for interpretation. A comprehensive post-election survey by the University of Illinois’ Gardner Program found that 60.8% of Trump voters cited cost of living/inflation (33.0%) or the economy (27.8%) as the most important issue. Those who voted for Trump reported significantly higher impacts from inflation, particularly with grocery prices. Even among non-voters, 44.4% said cost of living was their most important issue.
Among voters who said inflation caused their family severe hardship, 74% voted for Trump. Among those with household incomes under $50,000, a majority chose Trump. Among those earning over $100,000, a majority chose Harris.
Biden’s approval sat at 33% in January 2024, never having exceeded 40% since April 2022. Nearly half of Americans who rated economic conditions as poor specifically cited inflation or the cost of living. The Economist ran a cover calling the U.S. economy “the envy of the world.” Voters did not feel envied.
The Egg as Political Symbol
Egg prices jumped 39% in the year before the election, driven by avian flu outbreaks and feed cost increases linked to the Russia-Ukraine war. By Election Day, eggs were roughly three times more expensive than in 2020.
The egg became a litmus test for how seriously each side took working-class pain. Trump repeated his promise to bring prices down on “day one.” It was, by any honest assessment, an empty promise. Presidents cannot unilaterally lower commodity prices driven by disease outbreaks and geopolitical disruption.
But the liberal response was worse than silence. It was mockery. The New Republic published a piece titled “Sorry, but You Had to Be an Idiot to Believe Trump Could Lower Prices.” The writer openly confessed the asymmetry: had Harris made the same promise, “She’d have been laughed off the campaign trail. Mocked relentlessly. And not just by the right wing. By mainstream economic commentators. By liberal pundits. By me.”
This is the core problem distilled. Liberal commentators knew voters were in economic pain. They just thought those voters were naive for wanting a candidate who would at least acknowledge it with urgency. The choice was not between truth and falsehood. It was between a candidate who promised too much and a candidate who barely promised at all.
The Harris Campaign’s Strategic Collapse
A detailed Jacobin analysis of hundreds of Harris speeches, rallies, and interviews documented a clear pivot away from economic populismA political strategy that centers the economic interests of working people, emphasizing issues like wages, prices, and inequality over elite concerns. starting in mid-September 2024. In August, Harris had rolled out proposals on price gouging, expanded child tax credits, and homebuyer subsidies, and she briefly gained ground with voters on economic issues.
Then the corporate advisors took over. According to reporting from the New York Times and Sludge, Harris’s inner circle included former Uber executives and corporate PR managers. Terms like “living wage,” “affordable housing,” and “paid family leave” disappeared from her vocabulary. By October, she was spending more time with Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban than with UAW president Shawn Fain or Bernie Sanders. Cuban publicly declared that “the progressive principles of the Democratic Party are gone.”
Most damning: Harris’s own super PACA political committee that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money for electoral campaigns while remaining nominally independent from candidate campaigns., Future Forward, had tested thousands of ads and found that the most effective messaging combined pocketbook issues with a critique of economic elites. The top-performing ad acknowledged that “the cost of rent, groceries, and utilities is too high” and promised to “crack down on landlords” and “go after price gougers.” The Harris campaign barely ran it.
Instead, the closing message centered on Trump as a threat to democracy. A preelection poll of Pennsylvania voters found that economic populist messaging was far more effective than “threat to democracy” framing. The campaign chose the opposite approach.
Trump, meanwhile, talked about prices and cost of living more than twice as often as Harris across the entire campaign.
The “Nothing Comes to Mind” Problem
When Harris appeared on The View and was asked what she would have done differently from Biden, she answered: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”
For a candidate running in a country where 65% of adults disapproved of the incumbent president’s job performance, this was not just a gaffe. It was a declaration: she was the status quo. In an election defined by economic anxiety, the Democratic nominee told struggling Americans that she would change nothing.
A Decades-Long Divorce
The 2024 collapse was the culmination of a trend spanning half a century. According to exit polls, Jimmy Carter won roughly 52% of the white working-class vote in 1976. Clinton took about 50% in 1996. Obama dropped to around 41% in 2012. Biden managed just 36% in 2020. In 2024, Democrats received a higher share of votes from high-income Americans than low-income Americans for the first time.
The erosion began well before Trump. Bill Clinton’s signing of NAFTA hit manufacturing counties hard, and manufacturing communities across the country shed jobs throughout his time in office. Working-class voters remember NAFTA. They remember Hillary Clinton calling them “deplorables” in 2016. Each insult confirmed what they already suspected: the party had moved on without them.
The Ground Game That Wasn’t
The RootsAction autopsy documented operational failures to match the strategic ones. Harris lost 6.8 million voters who had supported Biden in 2020. In Philadelphia, campaign organizers reported being told not to engage in get-out-the-vote work in Black and Latino neighborhoods, such as attending community events, registering new voters, or building relationships with local leaders. A group of staffers eventually “went rogue” in a last-minute blitz, but it was too late.
Despite months of outreach to Republicans, the campaign won the same tiny share of GOP voters it had attracted in 2020. The strategy of chasing Cheney Republicans while neglecting the Democratic base was, by any measure, a catastrophic miscalculation.
The Buried Autopsy
After 2016, the DNC commissioned a postmortem. It was never released. After 2024, DNC Chair Ken Martin promised the new autopsy would be made public. “Of course it will be released,” he said in February 2025. “There has to be some lessons.”
In December 2025, the DNC confirmed it would not release the completed report. Martin’s explanation: releasing it might “distract” from winning. Two catastrophic losses, two buried autopsies. The pattern is not caution. It is institutional refusal to confront failure.
The Uncomfortable Lesson
None of this is an endorsement of Trump, whose tariff policies have since raised the very prices he promised to lower. The point is simpler and more uncomfortable: people who are struggling to pay for groceries do not care about your Theory of Democracy. They do not care about your coalition math or your polling on “threat to authoritarianism” messaging. They care about eggs.
Making fun of that concern, dismissing it as unsophisticated, or burying it under layers of institutional defensiveness is not analysis. It is the reason Democrats keep losing the people they claim to represent.
Sanders saw it. The party’s own super PAC saw it. The data screamed it. The question is whether anyone with power inside the Democratic Party is willing to hear it before 2028.
