Democrats are reckoning with Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump in Tuesday’s presidential election — and pointing fingers.

As they search for answers to explain how Trump handed Harris such a resounding defeat, Democrats have blamed President Joe Biden for seeking reelection, Harris for choosing Tim Walz as her running mate and poor messaging to voters, among other excuses.

Blaming Biden

Businessman Andrew Yang, who ran against Biden for the party’s nomination in 2020, told The Associated Press “the biggest onus of this loss is on President Biden.”

“If he had stepped down in January instead of July, we may be in a very different place,” Yang said.

Some high-ranking Democrats who spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity, including three advisers to the Harris campaign, also expressed deep frustration with Biden for failing to recognize earlier in the election cycle that he was not up to the challenge.

Under pressure from Democrats following his disastrous debate performance in June, Biden dropped out of the race a few weeks later, opening the door for Harris to replace him.

But even before then, there had been signs that many Democrats wanted to move on from the 81-year-old Biden. For example, a CNN poll in September 2023 found that 67% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters wanted the party to nominate someone else. Biden faced no major competition for the Democratic nomination.

While Trump was officially running for president for two years, Harris had three-and-a-half months to win over voters.

Walz pick

But the vice president was not blameless, either, in the eyes of some Democrats.

Political strategist Lindy Li, a member of the Harris campaign’s national finance committee, told Fox News she thought Harris made a mistake by choosing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. 

“A lot of people are saying tonight that it should have been [Pennsylvania Gov.] Josh Shapiro,” Li said. “Frankly, people have been saying that for months.

“I hate to say this, but I’m not sure how much Tim Walz contributed to the ticket,” she added.

Shapiro, a popular governor of an election battleground state, was a finalist to be Harris’ VP pick. Trump ended up winning Pennsylvania, the AP called.

‘Abandoned working class people’

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., had harsh criticism Wednesday for the party that he caucuses with, issuing a statement saying, “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.”

“First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

Harris won the Latino and Black votes, but Trump made gains with those groups, according to AP VoteCast.

Appearing on MSNBC on election night, Julián Castro, former Housing and Urban Development secretary under President Barack Obama, predicted that shift “is going to rewrite … how the parties approach Latinos and other groups.”

Racism and sexism at play?

Castro said Democrats also “have to reckon with the deeper forces that play a role” in elections, including misogyny and racism. Harris would have been the first woman, first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent to be elected president.

“It seems like these days we almost don't want to ask those questions as much,” he said. “And I think that's part of the problem that allows somebody like Donald Trump to get elected.”

David Axelrod, an adviser in the Obama administration, had a similar take.

“Let’s be absolutely blunt about it: There were appeals to racism in this campaign, and there is racial bias in this country, and there is sexism in this country,” he told CNN on Wednesday morning. “And anybody who thinks that that did not in any way impact on the outcome of this race is wrong.”

But Axelrod stressed he didn’t believe sexism and racism were the main factors behind Trump’s win and credited the former and future president’s campaign officials with running a “rational, well-conceived and well-executed campaign for an … often irrational candidate.”

War in Gaza

The Uncommitted National Movement — an anti-war, pro-Palestinian protest group — said Harris’ loss was “not a reflection of Donald Trump’s appeal,” but rather “a sobering reminder that the Democratic Party has lost touch with the very communities that once fueled its progress.”

“For Arab and Muslim Americans, this election was profoundly personal,” the group said in a statement. “Many have watched in anguish as American-supplied Israeli bombs have fallen on loved ones in Palestine and Lebanon. Our calls for understanding and action from Democratic leaders have too often been met with silence.”

Messaging

In an interview Wednesday with KUOW radio in Seattle, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., said the Democratic Party needs to do a “deep introspection” but should also “resist playing the blame game.”

She then faulted the party for not effectively communicating to swing-state voters how it would make their lives better.

“I was in swing states every weekend for the last six weekends and talking to voters on the ground, doing the canvases and actually hearing what people said,” she said. “And there were a lot of signs that they were not hearing us, that they didn't — or maybe I should put it this way — that they were not believing that we were going to do anything different.”

Jayapal’s comments echo another criticism levied by several Democrats in post-election media appearances: that Harris committed a major gaffe in an interview with “The View” last month when she could not immediately give an answer to what she would do differently than Biden as president. Republicans seized on the moment as they tried to link her to the unpopular president’s policies.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Ct., wrote on social media Thursday morning that he’s in favor of a “messaging/strategy biopsy,” adding that the party needs to “build a bigger tent; use economic populism as the tent pole; be less judgmental and exclusionary.”

But he added that a higher priority for Democrats is to prepare for “the round ups and political prosecutions” Trump threatened while campaigning.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed comments by Julián Castro to U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro.