Democrats remain in a funk more than a month after gut-punch losses to President-elect Donald Trump and his Republican allies, a leaderless party heading toward Inauguration Day and soon without control of the White House and both chambers on Capitol Hill.
“We have no idea what’s going to happen next,” Donna Brazile, a longtime Democratic political strategist and former interim party chairwoman, told USA TODAY. “None of this has been in our playbook.”
Vice President Kamala Harris looks at President Joe Biden during a Labor Day campaign event in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
At the moment, Democrats don’t have an agreed-upon, top-down strategy. For now, they’re resound mostly to attaboys from the likes of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who encouraged the party faithful to keep their chin up at a recent Democratic National Committee event for donors.
“My dad would say, when you get knocked down, you’ve just got to get up, get up,” said Biden, who bowed out of the 2024 contest this summer, largely at the behest of big givers. “The measure of a person or a party is how fast they get up.”
“Our spirit is not defeated,” added Harris, who inherited her party’s presidential nomination from Biden and then went on to lose all seven swing states this fall.
Here is some of what lies ahead for the opposition party in 2025.
DNC chair race begins reboot
Democratic National Committee chair Jamie Harrison attends a rules and bylaws committee meeting regarding a vote on the order of presidential nominating calendar and the fate of Iowa’s first in the nation caucuses.
One of the first big tasks will be choosing a replacement for outgoing Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison, who telegraphed his departure before the presidential election’s outcome.
Without a president, House speaker or Senate majority leader in their leadership ranks, the chair will be a critical face of the Democratic Party, serving as its chief messenger for at least the next two years heading into the 2026 mid-term election. But the role also requires a person with a mind for recruiting candidates, establishing field organizing and the ability to haul in millions in campaign cash.
The chair race, expected to be held Feb. 1 at the DNC’s winter meeting in National Harbor, Maryland, will be one of the first proxy fights where Democrats will be able to wrestle with what happened in the 2024 election, and brainstorm a path forward as different factions jockey for their preferred candidate.
It has already been stocked with about a half dozen candidates, including Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Chair Ken Martin; Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler; former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and New York state Sen. James Skoufis.
Martin, considered an early front-runner by many after claiming endorsements from at least 100 of the 448 DNC members who will decide the next chair via a majority vote, said one of the big lessons he gathered this year was how Republicans won messaging by diving into nontraditional media spaces.
“We’ve got to do a better job reaching voters who don’t watch TV news,” Martin said in a Dec. 17 post on X. “We need to be taking our message everywhere – from social media to podcasts to influencers and more.”
No DNC ‘autopsy,’ but calls for an audit
A supporter listens as Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris concedes the election at Howard University in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 6, 2024.
There are some Democrats who want a deep dive to diagnose what went wrong for them in 2024, similar to the “full autopsy” Republican National Committee Chair Reince Preibus launched after falling short in the 2012 presidential election won by Barack Obama.
Allied groups, such as Way to Win, a left-leaning strategy tank and donor hub, have begun releasing preliminary exit polling and have promised an examination in the next few weeks.
In a post-election memo, the firm’s leaders argue rising costs, coupled with a global backlash toward incumbent politicians, motivated the voters whom Trump spoke to, as opposed to an ideological realignment. It says the “original sin of the cycle” was the Democratic Party’s failure to tell a “vivid, strong story about why things still felt so terrible,” even though the economy was improving.
That included providing voters with, “a clear villain to hold accountable for their continuing pain,” according to the memo.
“History has taught me that there will be leaders who will read our analysis and may disagree,” Way to Win founder Tory Gavito said. “Instead of engaging in healthy debate to forge new alliances, they will break off and build on their own. This is not a time to allow factions to grow within the anti-MAGA coalition.”
Other Democrats want a probing audit of Harris’ 2024 campaign spending after questions arose about the wisdom in doling out millions for large-scale rallies featuring celebrities versus more grassroots outreach efforts.
But sometimes parties skip those type of public examinations, which often turn into angry finger pointing. The DNC didn’t do one after Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, for instance, and the GOP didn’t do a review after Trump’s defeat in 2020.
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., a progressive lawmaker on Capitol Hill who served as an adviser to Harris, thinks a formal autopsy would be a waste of time, and instead suggests a soul-searching debate on how Democrats engage voters.
“Our party needs to be the party of free speech and a party that says we want we go in every forum and we welcome ideas and we’re not going to judge people because they may disagree with us, or they may say the wrong word,” he said.
Harris watch: Governor of California or another White House run?
Kamala Harris urges students to ‘stay in the fight’ as Donald Trump’s return looms
One area of interest for Democrats will be what Harris does next after being handed the party’s nomination with roughly three months left in the 2024 presidential race.
The 60-year-old vice president has kept a relatively low profile since losing to Trump in November. But in a brief address last Tuesday, she told supporters “we must stay in the fight” and added “no one can walk away” from the pending fights.
Harris’ remarks could be a teaser for either making a third run for the White House or returning to California for a run at governor in 2026. It’s an appealing spot for Harris considering incumbent Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is term-limited and her own electoral successes in winning statewide twice as attorney general in 2010 and 2014, and once for the U.S. Senate in 2016.
While running to be the chief executive of the nation’s most populated state would make it difficult for Harris to turn around and run for president two years later, it would be similar to the move of another vice president who fell short in a White House bid: Richard Nixon. After losing the razor-thin 1960 presidential race to John F. Kennedy, Nixon turned around to run for governor of the Golden State. He lost that 1962 election before winning the 1968 presidential race.
Whichever way she goes, Harris’ decision will be one of the first consequential moves for both her and her party’s future.
“She couldn’t see it as merely a consolation prize after losing the presidential election to Donald Trump,” Los Angeles Times political columnist George Skelton wrote earlier this week. “Nor could she view it as a stepping stone back to the White House. California voters would sense those feelings and perhaps not elect her.”
Resistance or play ball: How Dems respond to Trump 2.0
Former U.S. President Donald Trump exits the stage after finishing a speech at the annual National Rifle Association (NRA) meeting in Dallas, Texas, U.S., May 18, 2024.
Just how will Democrats respond to Trump’s return?
The natural instinct by some, especially progressive House Democrats and big city mayors, will be to resist the former and future president’s incoming administration at all costs, especially in terms of its mass deportation plan aimed at undocumented immigrants.
House Democrats stuck together last week on Capitol Hill to reject a Trump-endorsed bill to fund the government through the first couple of months of the Republican’s administration after he tried to include a last-minute provision to raise the amount that the government can borrow until after the 2026 mid-term elections. The final spending deal that passed Congress didn’t include the language Trump wanted. Many in the party have already signaled their opposition to the president-elect’s return to the White House by refusing to attend his upcoming inauguration.
But other Democrats, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have also suggested a willingness to cut deals with Trump, starting with some of his policy priorities. The former Democratic 2020 presidential candidate said if Elon Musk, who is co-chairing the new Department of Government Efficiency, wants to cut wasteful Pentagon spending, “count me in.”
Generational battle looms as Democrats gear up for 2026 and beyond
WRep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks to reporters as she arrives for a vote series at the U.S. Capitol on September 25, 2024 in Washington, DC.
Biden’s age dominated much of the past cycle, with many Democrats feeling an octogenarian incumbent wasn’t the best option to energize younger voters and lead the country into an uncertain future.
Democrats have a deep bench of Gen-Xers and millennials in their ranks for future elections who are itching to seize the baton from older leadership.
One of the first post-election battles that saw this issue play out happened this week in the House, where 35-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., challenged 74-year-old Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., to be the ranking Democrat on the powerful Oversight Committee.
But House Democrats rejected her bid, which received criticism from younger progressives online who underscored how it repeats the underlying age issue from 2024.
“Tried my best,” Oscasio-Cortez said on the social media site Bluesky. “Sorry I couldn’t pull it through everyone – we live to fight another day.”
Despite that setback, a generational shift is potentially on the horizon for Democrats in the coming years, with competitive Senate and governor races looming in swing states such as Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan that could give younger leaders an opening.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, 42, recently told USA TODAY he’s “ready to catch my breath.” But the former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate is already being mentioned as a candidate for governor in Michigan, a state he recently began calling home. In Maryland, Gov. Wes Moore, 46, has sparked an early frenzy with observers, such as sports writer Jemele Hill saying earlier this year, “if there were Vegas odds on a future president, I’d put it on him. He’s got the goods.”
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, 47, was chosen to lead the party’s governors as their chief fundraiser and recruiter in the 2026 contests. Others atop the list of Democrats who are looking for a new leader include outgoing Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, 53; Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, 51, who was skipped over in the Harris 2024 veepstakes; and Newsom, 57, who is repeatedly mentioned as the national Democratic heir apparent.
The Democrats’ search for new blood comes as Republicans also appear poised to hand off their reins to a younger generation after Trump completes his second term in January 2029. Vice President-elect JD Vance is 40, while Donald Trump Jr., touted by his dad as a possible successor, is 46.
“Hopefully we can rewrite every script and not go with old scripts,” said Brazile, the former DNC chair. “But that’s when you have imagination, and not just looking at what happened yesterday.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump’s return: 5 takeaways on what’s ahead for Democrats
