After the heavy defeat of Kamala Harris against Donald Trump, the American Democratic Party must find new figures to embody the opposition to the Republican.
An explosion within the Democratic Party. Donald Trump's clear victory in the American presidential election against Democrat Kamala Harris opens a period of uncertainty for his party.
The Vice-President of the United States took up the torch last July after Joe Biden abandoned it in July. Faced with its failure, the Democratic Party will have to find new incarnations to represent the opposition during the mandate of Donald Trump and for the 2028 presidential election.
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Democrats were in a “deep hole”
The campaign was off to a bad start for the Democrats, according to their statements to the American media the day after their defeat. Deploring his “devastating defeat”, David Plouffe, a member of Kamala Harris' team, declared on Wednesday on X that his campaign had tried to get the Democrats out of a “deep hole”, without really succeeding.
“This Democratic disaster is largely attributable to Joe Biden. He should never have tried to run again at the age of 80,” asserted Larry Sabato, political scientist at the University of Virginia, to AFP .
In the spring of 2023, the Democratic president, buoyed by better than expected results in the legislative elections the previous fall, announced that he was seeking a second term. Doubts about his physical and mental abilities eventually pushed him to give up.
For Alex Keena, professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, if he had handed over earlier, the Democratic Party could have produced a robust candidacy at the end of a primary. “It was a missed opportunity,” he told AFP.
A call for a “new generation”
Without a primary and after the failure of Kamala Harris, the party now finds itself without a unifying figure. Other personalities who had been approached to become Kamala Harris' running mate, such as Josh Shapiro and Pete Buttigieg, have not yet reacted to the results this Thursday, November 7.
Bernie Sanders, Democratic senator and figure on the left wing of the party, castigated the campaign led by his party, accusing it of having “abandoned the working class”. “In the weeks and months to come, those of us who care about basic democracy and economic justice will need to have very serious political discussions,” he said in a statement released Wednesday.
“I think we need to clean up, we need a new generation of leaders to emerge,” Ro Khanna, elected to the House of Representatives, told the AP agency. “It takes new thinking, new ideas and new direction. And you know, the establishment has produced a disaster.”
“A void”
Speaking to NBC, Democratic Senator Peter Welch said he was unable to say who could lead the party in the coming years: “there is a void,” he said.
The Washington Post, for its part, identified the Obama couple as potentially filling this void: “Former President Barack Obama could play a role in the leadership of the party, as would his wife, Michelle Obama, who drew enthusiastic crowds during her campaign for Kamala Harris, but who indicated that she did not wish to become more involved in politics”, explains the daily.
Next deadline for the Democratic Party: the results of the election of the House of Representatives, expected in the coming days. If he manages to gain a majority, he can hope to represent a counter-power to the Trump administration. Otherwise, we will have to wait until the 2026 congressional elections.
