CNN One Thing

Okay, the presidential election is over. But now we're about to figure out what a second Donald Trump presidency might look like. Loyalists have already started jockeying for key jobs in his administration. World leaders are lining up for phone calls and meetings. Sources tell CNN that allies and some in the private sector have already begun preparations to detain and carry out those mass deportations of migrants. Trump promised on the campaign trail. It remains to be seen just how far he will push the power of the presidency.

Now, I know folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now. I get it.

But on Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris did something Trump never did. The last time he ran, she admitted she lost.

While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign. The fight, the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and the dignity of all people.

And as Democrats look around at an electorate that has shifted to the right across multiple demographics and in some unexpected places, they're starting to point fingers. My guest is CNN's senior reporter Edward Isaac Dovere. We're going to dive into the Democratic blame game and why they may need to throw long held the assumptions about their base out the window. From CNN, this is One Thing. I'm David Rind.

So, Isaac, you wrote a story right after election night, aptly titled Where Harris's Campaign Went Wrong, which is something I think a lot of people have been trying to figure out in the aftermath here. So what did you find?

Well, I should say I wrote that story sitting at at least the first part of it, sitting at Howard University, still on the grass between the risers waiting, just.

Waiting for her to come out.

Yeah. Which she didn't like. What happened for Harris is a lot of things. And I say that not to equivocate at all, but when you look at the way this loss went, you can argue that it was lost at the margins on pretty much every margin. A couple of points in every group at least went to Trump. She did not outperform Joe Biden anywhere. Her vote total and Trump's where the voting was under the levels that it was in 2020. And you look at some of the places where Democrats never think about anything other than doing well, like in New Jersey, where Kamala Harris won the state by five points. That is a minuscule margin.

Yeah. That's where I live. And I was breaking down the county results and it was pretty shocking.

Yeah. Or in in in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a place that is first of all, in Massachusetts. Second of all, heavily Latino. Harris was 30 points behind Hillary Clinton.

Wow.

Now, is that because she ran a bad campaign? I would say those sorts of numbers don't really reflect the kind of campaign that she ran and reflects something deeper going on. Which is not to say that she ran a perfect campaign. As I get into in the piece, there's a lot of things that people would point to to say, here are the issues. And I didn't even get into all of them. But what we definitely see happening here is at least partially what has been happening all over the world, where people coming off of Covid have not been satisfied with the way the economic recovery has gone. They feel like prices are too high. They're still feeling battered and bruised and all sorts of ways. And they have taken that out on the incumbents.

Well, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?

There is not the thing that comes to mind in terms of...

Then there are the specific things about Joe Biden that people did not like and that Harris herself had real trouble differentiating herself on.

Yeah, I was going to ask about Joe Biden because, you know, Astead Herndon, the great podcaster at The New York Times and a CNN contributor, has basically been saying that by not being that bridge candidate that he promised to be and staying in the race as long as he did, it allowed Trump and the Republicans to paint themselves as that change agent to chance to disrupt the status quo. And then when Harris took over without any competition, that problem was kind of only compounded. I guess I'm wondering, are the people you are hearing from willing to concede that that idea may have been a contributing factor?

It may have been. But I also think that that's a convenient explanation here and a convenient explanation that may be at least partially correct, if not fully correct. The other thing to keep in mind, just at least for the sake of the full set of facts here, is that Joe Biden is the only person who has ever beaten Donald Trump and he outperformed Harris everywhere. That does not mean that he would have won the election in 2024. In fact, he might have ended up doing better. It might have been the same. Right. But I think it is a little too facile to just say that Joe Biden was the problem himself. And we need to look at the way that this would have gone down. Had he stepped aside earlier and if and when that earlier would have been if it had been two months earlier, if had been two years earlier. Right. There would have been a more intense Democratic primary, certainly if he had stepped aside after the midterms. I don't know that Kamala Harris would have emerged from that as the nominee.

There is anger at the advisers around him, too, for not dealing with and tolerating any suggestion over the years that the president step aside. This is what a senior Harris campaign official told me. They said the lack of a competitive process for replacement, that he didn't allow for that to happen. People are still angry about the shunning that they took for speaking out earlier about him.

I had a piece that I published, I think it was the Sunday after that debate between Biden and Trump that the headline was something like Democrats fear every version of what happens next year, whether it was Joe Biden staying in or him stepping aside for Kamala Harris and what Harris would be running or some sort of an open primary at that point. There was just no good answer for them. And again, it may be that given the global trends and the economic response here, that any Democrat was going to have a real trouble mounting a campaign that would win.

Do the Democrats need to start rethinking what their base actually looks like? Because I feel like you could read the results as the party banking on a certain type of voter. Voters of color specifically, and almost kind of assuming they would settle back into historical trends. But looking at the results, that didn't really happen.

Yeah. And look, we don't know. Part of what's happening here is that there's a moving target. Now. They have to think, okay, where are voters going to be? Where's the country going to be by 2028? That's a long time, especially in thinking about the kind of massive changes to politics and culture and government and America's role in the world that Donald Trump is promising. We just don't know how it's going to play out. And it's not just about Donald Trump. Where is the economy going to be in four years? Is Donald Trump going to actually go through with this massive tariff plan that he's talked about? And how will that affect prices and how people respond to that? All of these things make it very difficult for them to know where they're going. And there is no unifying figure in the party. There's no leader. And so it's hard for them to even start to conceive of, okay, is this about going to the working class voters more? Is this about talking about economics more? And the truth of it may be that in addition to the cultural factors, it's a simple matter of politics that they have to find politicians who are more appealing to people in that gut way that Barack Obama was, that Donald Trump is that ultimately Kamala Harris wasn't.

We have to be honest as Democrats. We do have a problem connecting with working class voters. This started to emerge about a decade ago, and it was focused on white working class areas. That has now spread.

I think notably, you see people who are supportive of Donald Trump talking about appealing to the working class like Donald Trump did by going to the right.

Bernie Sanders, of course, the independents who caucuses with Senate Democrats put out a tweet earlier today saying that 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 that.

But then and you see Bernie Sanders talking about people going to the working class and he means by going to the left. And part of it is that we are in I think we'll look back on this period in history as a moment where right and left and center and what falls into what shifted a little bit, if not a lot.

This is what Richie Torres said. As a Democratic congressman from New York. He said, Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left, which has managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, blacks, Asians and Jews from the Democratic parties.

So they clearly need to make an appeal to more voters. But it's just not clear what that appeal is and which voters those are.

You know, I think they thought that, you know, abortion would be an appealing, you know, issue for women to try to get them out. But it didn't seem to move the needle quite as much as as maybe they thought. Trump once again won a majority of white women. Like, how is the party thinking about how that went.

Down with a level of shock? I think given where the gender gap seemed like it was going into Tuesday. There was an expectation that that would be still a major boon to Democrats. And if you look at the state ballot measures on abortion, they passed and that was one that passed in Montana. Montana, which went for Donald Trump and which kicked out Jon Tester, the incumbent Democrat, and kicked that tester by a pretty big margin. In Florida, it got a majority support. It did not get to the threshold.

Needed 60%, but it got above 50.

Right. And that's a state that was forget it, not competitive at all for Democrats. It didn't spend a moment there. So the other thing that I think is part of this is how much of this is unique to Donald Trump as a singular figure in our culture and in our politics, clearly defining this era of American politics, at least, if not more beyond him, and at least by anyone's basic read of the Constitution as it is now, he is not eligible to run for another term in 2028. Some of what the Democrats have to think about is what they're running and how they're running in an election which will still be defined by Donald Trump, but that he, at least again, by any normal reading of the Constitution right now will not be on the ballot.

That seems to be an incredibly hard read, though, because you won't know really and. Until it happens. And so, like, how do you prepare for an election like that when it's like hasn't been tested in a decade, basically?

No, I think that's right. That's why I say it's a moving target. It's more than a moving target. It's like a moving target and a pretty rough water ocean bouncing around in the waves like 500 yards out. So go ahead and get a bullseye on it. That's what the Democrats have to and they have to do it with. They don't know who can even fire the gun, essentially, and forgive the metaphor for extending far too long.

Yeah, we stretch the metaphor pretty far. Well, so what's you know, we've been trying to answer this question. What's next? You know, Democrats lost the White House. They lost the Senate. And as we record this, CNN has not projected control of the House. But there's a real chance Republicans will control that, too. So how are Democrats planning to counteract Trump's agenda as he takes office?

It's very hard to counteract it when you don't have a branch of government.

It must weigh on you a little bit to think about the the position that you could be. Not speaker, not speaker, but either way, but definitely for speaker. And Trump wins. What your life looks like then what what do you think about that?

I have learned never to put the cart before the horse and we've got to see what's in front of us and run to the finish line.

Four weeks ago, I was in Nebraska with Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the House Democrats. And the premise of the piece was that the Democrats knew that they had a real dogfight in front of them to win the House, but they were feeling like they would probably get there. And it seems like whichever way it lands now, it's going to be a pretty narrow majority, which is where things were going. And again, that there was clearly an underestimation of how much support there would be for Donald Trump, which helped some of these Republicans.

Again, I take what you said about you don't put the cart before the horse, but if it doesn't work out that way, it's a very different world that we're living in.

We'll cross that bridge when we get to it. You know, you don't think at all about what it would be for you.

What happens now when Donald Trump, who from every bit of reporting that we had over the course of the campaign, was aiming to get back into the White House without any of the usual guardrails and stomps on him that had been there even through the end of his time at the White House the first time around. So what does that mean? What is a party without any power as Democrats have without it? I mean, that's that's what I mean. This is an astounding situation for this party. And I say that as someone who's talking to people who are trying to figure out where that leads them, they're not sure where that leaves them. And in some ways, it'll be easier for them to be just the opposition. But there will also be a demand for them to find ways to work with this new governing power across the branches. All that said, it's also up to the Republicans to see are they going to be going forward with the mass deportations that Donald Trump promised over and over again that he would do if he were elected? So now he's been elected and he's got no brakes on him from Congress. Should he is he going to go through with that? Are part of the Republicans deciding how they're going to treat what is. Yes, a big win for them in the numbers, but also, like not he didn't win with 55% of the vote. He didn't win with 60% of the vote. He's claimed a mandate and politicians like to claim mandates. But there are a lot of people in this country who voted for Kamala Harris and voted for Democrats. So one of the questions also is it's a big question of how Democrats handle this. But it's also about what Republicans give them to handle.

Consequences, for sure on both sides, that we're just starting to figure out what that even looks like. Well, Isaac, thanks very much.

Thank you.

One thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Faiz Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager and Dan Dzula is our technical director. And Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhart, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage and Katie Hinman. We'll be back on Sunday with another episode. Follow the show so you don't miss it. I'll talk to you about.