Time for a Democratic autopsy?

In the wake of Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential race, a dumbstruck Republican National Committee commissioned a post-mortem aimed at figuring out what had gone wrong and how to fix it.

The result was a 100-page report whose recommendations included embracing comprehensive immigration reform to appeal to Hispanic voters; improving outreach to minority communities, women and young votes; softening the GOP’s tone on social issues; addressing the perception that the party favors the wealthy, and investing in data analytics and digital campaigning.

Then came Donald J. Trump.  

Overall, his reaction to that fabled autopsy can be fairly summarized as “pffftt.”  In his first campaign, he vowed to build a wall across the southern border with Mexico (and, of course, have Mexico pay for it) and has pledged this time around to execute the “largest deportation operation” of illegal immigrants in history.  Putting a cherry on top of that pile of hot rhetoric, a comic who was part of the warm-up act at Trump’s recent Madison Square Garden rally called Puerto Rico “an island of garbage.”

He said in the 2016 campaign that “there has to be some form of punishment” for abortions, and he’s delivering on that one.  Thanks to his U.S. Supreme Court appointments and their decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, pregnant women have died for lack of reproductive healthcare and physicians are afraid of being criminally charged if they perform abortions.

As for changing the perception that the GOP favors the rich, that was always going to be a stretch – but Trump once again tacked against the wind with new vows to give America’s billionaires more tax breaks and to bring Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, into his administration as “secretary of cost-cutting”.  

It’s not exactly obvious that Trump’s counterintuitive strategies hurt him at the polls in Tuesday’s election.  Indeed, he appears to have improved on his 2020 performance in every area of the state, if only in tiny numbers.  Even, for example, in Super-MAGA Brantley County, in deep southeast Georgia, he upped his share of the vote to 91.1% from 90.2% for years ago and squeezed another 548 votes out of that small rural county.

The same was true in Democratic strongholds.  In DeKalb and Clayton counties, both deeply Democratic and  heavily Black, he increased his share of the vote by 1.4 and 1.0 percentage points, respectively, and, in the process, added more than 5,000 votes to his 2020 totals for the two counties combined.

What this means, of course, is that Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, lost ground on President Joe Biden’s 2020 performance, and this is a matter of no small irony.  The Harris team ran what would ordinarily be considered a textbook-perfect campaign.  

Here in Georgia, she beat Trump in fundraising and had 24 field offices, approximately 200 paid staff and an unbelievable 35,000 volunteers.  The Democrat’s campaign claimed to have knocked on more than a million doors in Georgia and made more than two million phone calls to voters.  In the final week of the campaign, her campaign spent a reported $2 million a day on advertising.  

The only thing she failed to do was get enough voters to the polls.  This turnout difference between predominantly White Republican counties and heavily Black Democratic counties was obvious in the early voting data, and Harris failed to close the gap in Tuesday’s election-day voting.

The state’s 30 predominantly Democratic counties, most of them heavily populated urban and suburban areas, are home to substantially more registered voters than the 129 mostly rural and sparsely populated counties.  But the voters in those GOP counties turned out at an average rate of 75.2% versus 71.5% for the Democratic counties, according to data from the Secretary of State’s office. That 3.7-point difference was more than enough to tip the political algebra in Trump’s favor.

One big political irony in all this is that the anti-Trump wing of what’s left of the old Republican Party had been predicting that his loss would clear the way for a rebuilding process.  Instead, it appears the Democratic Party is the one left in a shambles and will now have to be rebuilt, pretty much from the ground up.

First, though, maybe they should conduct an autopsy.    

Charles Hayslett is the author of the long-running troubleingodscountry.com blog.  He is also the Scholar in Residence at the Center for Middle Georgia Studies at Middle Georgia State University.  The views expressed in his columns are his own and are not necessarily those of the Center or the University.