“I think there needs to be a house cleaning, a new generation of leaders to emerge,” California Rep. Ro Khanna, who is among several Democrats with presidential ambitions to address the future of the party, said Wednesday. “New thinking, new ideas and a new direction are needed. And, you know, this order led to a disaster.”

While votes were still being counted, Trump was on track to become the first Republican to win the popular vote in two decades.

Trump picked up a small but significant share of young voters, Black voters and Hispanic voters, many of whom feel bad about the economy, according to AP VoteCast, a comprehensive survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide. The Republican president-elect has also made inroads among voters without a college degree.

Many of the elected Democrats most mentioned as 2028 presidential candidates, including the governors of California, Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania, refused to weigh in when asked. Others canceled scheduled meetings.

The few progressives willing to speak publicly offered different explanations. Relatively few people accuse President Biden of reneging on his promise not to seek re-election, preventing the party from selecting a replacement in the traditional primary.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont and former Democratic primary candidate, had warned Harris before Election Day that she was focusing too much on flipping the Republican vote and not enough on wallet problems. He issued a statement condemning the party leadership.

“It shouldn’t be too surprising that a Democratic Party that has abandoned working-class people sees the working class abandoning them, too,” he said. “First there was the white working class, now there are Latino and Black workers. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they are right.”

Others were not so willing to make wholesale changes.

“Our challenge is not to overreact to this election,” said Virginia Democratic Rep. Don Beyer, who easily won re-election Tuesday night. “We had a relatively low-profile candidate; no one knew much about Kamala Harris, who was going up against one of the most well-known people in human history.”

Just eight years ago, Democrats were stunned by Trump’s shocking victory over Hillary Clinton. But many at the time agreed that dysfunction within the Democratic National Committee was to blame for the loss. Others blamed Russian influence efforts supporting Trump or FBI Director James Comey’s statement condemning Clinton’s handling of classified information in her emails while serving as secretary of state.

No excuses this time. The results show that Democrats’ current problems extend far beyond the political machine.

Officials from the party’s progressive wing decried Harris’ campaign to devote too much time and resources to winning over moderate Republicans at the expense of the party’s working-class base; This includes union workers impressed by Trump’s promises to impose tariffs on friends and foes alike and threats against Americans. Businesses considering moving jobs overseas.

Warnings about Trump’s threat to U.S. democracy are important, they said, but the issue is not on the minds of most voters.

“Our party will be doing a lot of introspection, a lot of thinking in the coming months,” said Rep. Shri Thanedar, whose district includes most of Detroit. “Democrats focused on Trump’s character. He has legal problems such as being a criminal. However, most of the people who were suffering economically and felt that they were in a worse situation economically did not pay much attention to his character.

The data shows Democrats have serious work to do.

Four years ago, Biden polled on par with Trump among voters without a college degree, with 47 percent of the vote compared to Trump’s 51 percent. But voters without a college degree turned toward Trump in 2024, giving him a clear advantage with 55 percent of their votes. Even fewer (43 percent) supported Harris.

Jef Pollock, a veteran Democratic pollster, said Harris’ campaign “fared poorly given the international rebuke from incumbent parties around the world as voters grew disenchanted with the economy.”

“But Democrats need to look within themselves and ask ourselves what we can do to rebuild our relationship with rural, working-class and Latino voters, as well as with young men,” Pollock said. “Frankly, they believe we are not meeting their daily needs.”

For now, it’s unclear whether the party will undergo any formal self-review process to determine what exactly went wrong.

Faiz Shakir, the Democratic strategist who is running Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, worries that Democrats won’t do the necessary introspection after this devastating defeat.

“A healthy party challenges itself to do this kind of post-mortem and hear what we did wrong,” he said. “I don’t even know that such a process will happen.”

Sanders himself was more forthright in his statement.

“Can the big capitalists and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn real lessons from this disastrous campaign?” he said. “Will they understand the pain and political alienation experienced by tens of millions of Americans? Do they have any ideas on how we can counter an increasingly powerful oligarchy that has so much power economically and politically? Probably not.