Democrats' election reckoning pits liberals against centrists

The Democrats’ shellacking at the polls this week has triggered a feisty battle between the ideological wings of the party about what went wrong — and who bears the blame.

Some liberals say the party didn’t tack far enough to the left to animate the base. Many centrists say it tacked too far to the left and scared away moderate voters in key battleground states. And Democratic leaders are now faced with the difficulty of working to ease the tensions and ally the feuding factions in order to form a unified front against President-elect Trump as he prepares to enter the White House for his second term.

“It will be a big challenge,” said Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), former chair of the House Democratic Caucus. 

The debate is hardly new. Democrats have repeatedly clashed over the party’s strategy after tough election cycles, and the battle lines are the same now as then, pitting liberals vs. moderates. 

But this year the stakes were higher. 

Heading into the polls this week, Democrats had warned that Trump was an existential threat to the nation’s democratic foundations, and their fight to keep him from regaining power was was framed as nothing less than an effort to rescue the republic and the institutions that sustain it. Following Trump’s runaway victory over Vice President Harris on Tuesday, the internal dispute over the party’s strategy, message and direction has taken on a new level of urgency and intensity.

For some, the party’s woes revolve around mis-messaging on kitchen-table economic issues, like inflation, wages and the accelerating trend of wealth inequality. For others, the trouble stems from the explosive debate over the Israel-Hamas war. For still others, the problems relate to culture war battles, including that over transgender rights.

Whatever the issue, Tuesday’s election results — and the subsequent reckoning that’s shaking the Democrats — is sure to consume all the oxygen in the party for some time to come as leaders, lawmakers, donors and strategists sift through the ashes in search of answers for why so many voters left them for Trump this year. 

The early stages of that process are spilling into public view. 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a liberal icon who has built a career around issues of economic justice, made waves this week when he said there was “no great surprise” that working class voters had fled the Democrats because the party establishment had “abandoned” them in favor of moneyed interests. 

“The American people are angry and want change. And they’re right,” he said. 

Moderates countered that it was, in fact, the progressive movement that had doomed Harris and the Democrats on Election Day. Many of them singled out the issue of transgender rights as the culprit — an issue the Trump campaign had put under a bright spotlight with tens of millions of dollars in spending on late-campaign, anti-trans ads.

Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), who won by 2 points this week in a battleground Long Island district, told The New York Times that the Democrats are struggling because they are “pandering to the far left.” 

“I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports,” he said.  

Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) told CNN's Kasie Hunt that “there are folks on the far left who alienate a ton of people,” pointing to the transgender debate as an example. 

And Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) echoed those warnings, telling the Times that Democrats are too concerned about offending the transgender community at the expense of addressing “the challenges many Americans face.”

“I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” Moulton told the Times. 

The comments sparked some pushback from other Democrats on Capitol Hill, who accused the culture war critics of scapegoating.

“The Democratic Party needs to do some serious introspection to understand what went wrong and why our message isn’t resonating or reaching people,” Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) posted on social platform X. “But one thing’s for sure — blaming trans kids isn’t the answer.”

Other lawmakers noted that virtually no Democrats had focused their campaigns on the transgender issue this cycle. It was Republicans, they said, who exaggerated the Democrats’ support for trans rights in order to sow division and win votes.

“That's the problem. The Republicans created this strawman and then beat the shit out of it,” a Democratic lawmaker said. “I just don't think any Democrats I know were out there rooting for biological boys to compete with biological girls in high school sports. This is just not something that we were talking about or prioritizing. But to hear Republicans, that was like our whole agenda. 

“Trump, literally, was telling people that your child is going to come home from school one day with a gender reassignment.”

Democrats are hardly the only party facing internal divisions. 

Since House Republicans took control of the lower chamber last year, their time in power has been practically defined by clashes between far-right conservatives, many of them in the Freedom Caucus, and party leaders and their more moderate allies. The divisions have prevented GOP leaders from passing even the most basic legislation, like bills to fund the federal government, without significant Democratic support. 

In the midst of their internal policy fights, Republicans toppled a sitting Speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), for the first time in the nation's history and expelled another member of their conference, former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), over corruption allegations that are expected to land him in prison early next year. 

Still, for all the chaos, Republicans were able to flip control of the Senate and White House, and they have the edge in the battle for the House, although it remains too close to call as the last ballots are counted and the last races are formalized. 

Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a centrist Washington Democrat representing a Trump-won district, is leading in her race for a second term. She told the Times this week that her party is struggling because too many lawmakers fail to grasp the hardships facing working class voters — and talk down to them as a result. 

“No one is listening to anything else you say if you try to talk them out of their lived experiences with data points from some economists,” she told the Times. 

As Congress prepares to return to Washington next week, Larson emphasized the difficulty facing Democrats as they seek to be a welcoming “big-tent” party that can appeal to a broad array of voters without offending others. He warned against abandoning party values in the quest for that broader appeal, but acknowledged that the message probably needs some work. 

“In the case of all 435 districts, you're going to hear different things — both culturally, and also in terms of economics,” he said. “It doesn't mean you abandon the ideas and the sense of equality for all Americans. But there are perhaps better ways to state it, and show it, and demonstrate it, instead of having it perceived by the other side that this is all that we stand for.”