Democrats called for a full party showdown Wednesday as they sought to pick up the pieces of their shattered organization a day after the impeachment of Vice President Kamala Harris. loss to former President Donald Trump.

Interviews with more than a dozen campaign aides, strategists, elected officials and battleground state Democrats found the party consumed by anger, sadness, finger-pointing and self-reflection. Many were granted anonymity so they could talk openly about internal dynamics while emotions were still fresh.

They said they saw a party that had moved away from its former identity as the protector of those left behind, in order to represent party elites. They questioned the campaign’s decision to focus on reaching “soft” Republicans when they have their own problems with base voters.

Some spoke of a renewed view of the party on immigration and called for tougher enforcement at the border. They saw the growing support for Trump in metropolitan areas as a threat. Reaction of first policies During President Joe Biden’s administration, he kept immigrants flowing into blue states; here working-class residents were often housed and financially supported even as they struggled to receive services.

“This is a realignment. Our country has moved to the right. It’s not center-left. Our party needs to grapple with that and find our place in this world,” said Rep. Nikki Budzinski, an Illinois Democrat who won by double digits in a purple district after campaigning heavily on the economy. “It takes time. “There is no point in pointing fingers. This was a message. It would be to our detriment not to hear it.”

Of course, this was not a universal view and underlined that a great internal struggle was approaching.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., issued a statement criticizing “the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party.”

“It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that a Democratic Party that has abandoned working-class people sees the working class abandoning them, too,” he said Wednesday. “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.”

Blame Biden

The finger-pointing continued in full force Wednesday. While many Democrats blame Biden for not leaving sooner, he essentially won the primary for him, acknowledging that it was the party that made it possible for him to run for a second term.

They said Harris inherited a campaign in which the fundamental negatives of a nation on the wrong path were cooked up. Some blamed the influence of Obama-era advisers and strategists who played a big role in sending the message, according to one longtime Democrat. Those close to the Biden team were “stuck in 2009.”

Democrats as a party must reckon with creating a “martyr” in Trump by impeaching him twice, filing a series of state and federal lawsuits against him and creating a House Select Committee that attacked him for weeks on Jan. 6, one of Harris’ allies said. her on prime-time television.

“People had to choose who was going to go after her,” Harris’ allies said of prosecutors and Democrats. “There can’t be eight cases against him. This is not strategic at all because you will make him a martyr. And guess what? You martyred him. Everyone is suing him. All the attorneys general are investigating him. Every Democrat with investigative authority is investigating Trump. “We made ourselves look like a joke.”

A person close to Biden said some of what went wrong could be traced to the breakup of the coalition that put Biden into office in 2020. The president declared victory over Trump after trailing a large primary field that moved too far to the left. But as Biden moved into the Oval Office, his top aides pushed him toward policies that strayed from his moderate personality, such as sweeping student debt cancellation, loosening border restrictions and rolling back permits for the Keystone Pipeline.

Bring new protection

Many Democrats have also called for a purge of the old guard who has run the last few campaigns.

“It’s time for the team that was there to retire. We need a completely different strategy,” said one Democrat who is part of his reelection effort. “The day of Obama and his geniuses is over. They were left behind. They are out of touch with the American people. “The Democratic Party is disconnected.”

Campaign aides and allies directed much of the anger at campaign chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon, complaining that she was running a store with the hand of an autocrat. They viewed her as a Biden loyalist and never allowed Harris to truly drift away from him in the way she needed to win, according to three senior campaign officials.

They said O’Malley Dillon hoarded information only to a narrow circle of advisers and kept other senior officials off email chains and updates. That sidelined many of Harris’ top aides who have known her the longest, they say.

This has led to what some see as serious mistakes, like Harris’ comment on “The View.” In the interview, he was asked what he would do differently than Biden. Harris said he couldn’t think of anything.

The message directly contradicted what they felt was a crucial message that the vice president would be a change agent. Republicans jumped on that comment and ran it in ads.

Harris’ longtime aides were not involved in preparing Harris before this interview, one of the officials said.

“He makes this mistake on ‘The View.'” “He’s making this mistake on ‘The View’ because they told him to ‘be loyal,'” a senior campaign official said.

A source with knowledge of the campaign dynamics pushed back on the idea that O’Malley Dillon had sidelined any of Harris’s team members, saying O’Malley Dillon had criticized Harris’ two chiefs of staff throughout the contest, Lorraine Voles and Sheila Nix.

An aide to Harris called for more diversity among decision-makers, pointing to an overwhelmingly white leadership structure of Harris’s campaign and Biden’s previous campaign. Senior advisors to the campaign included campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez and former Rep. Cedric Richmond.

“There was a big gap in the leadership of the up and down colors of the system, and I think that played into some of these blind spots,” the person said. “I just want to see more honesty and a little less whiteness… I think if we can look within ourselves and see the talent that is already there, then there can be a new generation of leadership. But it will be difficult. This feels like a decade of loss. This is really bad and we have to decide where to go from here. “We need to restructure everything.”

The aide believed that if Biden were to become the nominee, Democrats would still lose and that the party should work to ensure Biden did not run for re-election.

“How did we not solve this problem? He’s 80 years old. It was supposed to be one-term. The guy could barely talk and was actually coherent,” he said. “It was very late and this time last year we knew we had a Biden problem. The party knew it and people were talking about how out of touch he was and how out of touch he was.” He wasn’t really honest about how his age was really playing out with America.

Ultimately, the party needs to re-evaluate its leadership both in office and behind the scenes, a Democratic lawmaker said.

“There needs to be a real reckoning for the institution about what went wrong,” the MP said. “Longtime incumbents and former leaders frankly need to step aside and allow new ideas and the rebuilding of the Democratic Party with much more vision, substance and inspiration.”

Vermont Senator Peter Welch, who was the first Democratic senator to ask Biden to bow and said he did not regret it, said there was an instruction for Democrats to work with Republicans right now. But he did not have an answer as to who would be the next leader in the party.

“To be honest, I couldn’t point to anyone,” Welch said. “This is a loophole. Bring back James Carville.”

‘I try to please everyone’

Many Democrats have scoffed at any discussion of 2028, but governors such as Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and JB Pritzker in Illinois are among those on the shortlist as potential next-generation White House contenders.

Adam Jentleson, a former top aide to Senate Democrats, said Trump’s clear victory shows Democrats have a “fundamental brand problem” that no campaign will likely fix in three months.

He said the party prioritizes coalition management and keeping numerous interest groups happy within its orbit rather than focusing first on winning elections, which limits candidates’ flexibility and pushes them to adopt unpopular positions like the one Harris espoused in her primary. He ran for president in 2019 and spent much of his 2024 campaign trying to avoid it.

“We’ve fallen into the habit of trying to please everyone, and only after we’ve pleased everyone do we take what’s left and try to turn it into a winning strategy,” he said. “We have to be much better at setting boundaries with groups and taking the demands of politics seriously.”

Once the thermostatic backlash against Trump kicks in, Democrats need to be careful about channeling it into winning rather than pushing the boundaries of acceptable policies as they did during Trump’s first term, he said.

“The question will be: What do you do with this energy,” he said. “Do we do what we did last time and spend it on the policies of progressive fringe lords, or do we seize it to actually fight and change policy?”

Wade Randlett, a Harris supporter and longtime Democratic fundraiser from California, expressed optimism about the party’s prospects moving forward. Next up are the 2026 midterm elections, where Trump’s record will be front and center with voters.

“Trump is going to do crazy things for the next two years, and we’re going to run a referendum campaign on those crazy things in the 2026 midterm elections.”

“By 2028,” he continued, “we should have a much better, clearer, more compelling case with candidates who can make people without a college education feel like Joe Biden. So he’s the middle-class Joe. He’ll take your life. And he’ll take your life.” We need someone who can do this.”