Anguished Democrats try to regroup and figure out what went wrong

President Joe Biden on Tuesday night gathered in the White House residence with some of his longest-serving advisers, the ones who guided him to victory in 2020 and centered his reelection campaign around a fight for democracy, then reluctantly advised him to drop out of the race.

The mood started out optimistic, in the hope that Vice President Kamala Harris would defeat former president Donald Trump as Biden had done four years ago. But as the results began flowing in, the mood turned somber, according to a person familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private dynamics.

As Democrats on Wednesday digested the extent of their loss, with Trump winning or leading in all seven battleground states, the party was awash in angst-ridden second-guessing. If Biden had not clung so long to his reelection bid, could the party have held primaries to produce a more battle-tested nominee? If Harris had picked Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) as her running mate, could that have improved her margins in the “blue wall” states? If Biden had stayed in the race, could he have retained the coalition that powered him to the White House in 2020?

Democrats were also asking a deeper question on their bleak day after: How had the party so misunderstood the country and so badly underestimated the number of voters attracted to Trump’s message?

For many Democratic strategists, a thorough rethinking was in order. “The party itself needs to be reflective on what just happened and not just wounded and angry,” said David Axelrod, a prominent Democratic consultant.

“The Democratic Party has become a metropolitan, college-educated party. And even though it retains its commitment to working people, it approaches them sometimes in a spirit of a missionary - that we’re here to help you become more like us,” Axelrod said. “Implied in that is disdain. I don’t think it’s intended, but it’s felt. And I think Trump has exploited that.”

Some Harris aides consoled themselves that the sheer breadth of her defeat meant it had been beyond their control. The obstacles - inflation, an unpopular incumbent, Trump’s intense following - were so daunting, they told themselves, that nothing they might have done would have changed the outcome.

While more critiques would come later and the party would sift through potential reasons for the loss, Democratic officials said, they were still reeling Wednesday and could point to no immediate tactical regrets.

“It said more about America than it did about Kamala,” said Donna Brazile, the veteran Democratic strategist.

Harris herself suggested the campaign had done the best it could.

“I am so proud of the race we ran and the way we ran it,” the vice president said in her concession speech at Howard University, her alma mater and the place she’d hoped to be making a victory speech the previous night. “I know folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now. I get it. But we must accept the results of this election.”

She urged her supporters to remain active in fighting for the causes at the center of her campaign.

“I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time,” she said. “But for the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case.”

Many in Harris’s circle viewed Biden as an anchor, frustrated that she could not shake the unpopular incumbent or convince voters that she would be fundamentally different from him. Some suggested that were Biden the nominee, the race would have been called much earlier in the night.

“We dug out of a deep hole but not enough,” Harris adviser David Plouffe wrote on social media. “A devastating loss.”

Approached at Howard University just before Harris gave her concession speech, Plouffe said, “I’ve had better days.”

[Analysis: Harris gave hope to Democrats, but a whirlwind run ends in crushing loss]

Other Democrats took the opposite view, arguing that Biden’s strengths had been underutilized by his vice president. Worse, they said, the effort to push him out of the race was a public humiliation that only hurt the party’s prospects.

“I do have an indictment of some of the strategy, and again, the people that said, ‘Joe Biden was the problem,’ " Symone Sanders, who worked for both Biden and Harris, said on MSNBC. “I will just note that it is probably not the best idea that Democrats orchestrated a very public stab fest, a proverbial stabbing in the front of the sitting president of the United States of America, and then didn’t use him in his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania.”

During a senior staff call on Wednesday morning, White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients urged Biden officials to keep working hard, and be good transition partners with incoming Trump officials. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre last week said that Biden would attend the inauguration no matter who won.

“Yes, he will,” she said. “Regardless of who wins, the American people need to see a peaceful transfer of power, and that’s what you’re going to see from the president.”

Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon sent an email to staffers conceding that “this will take a long time to process” and encouraging them to focus on the positives.

“You stared down unprecedented headwinds and obstacles that were largely out of our control,” O’Malley Dillon wrote. “We knew this would be a margin-of-error race, and it was.”

She noted that while the country as a whole had moved to the right, the battleground states where the campaign focused most of its time had showed less of that movement. “That speaks to both the work you did and the scale of the challenge we ultimately couldn’t surmount,” O’Malley Dillon wrote.

Axelrod agreed that Harris ran a strong campaign and that the outcome may have been preordained no matter what she did.

“The country wanted to fire the administration, and she was part of the administration,” he said. “I just don’t know she was ever able to solve that problem, and whether there was a way for her to.”

Axelrod assigned significant blame to Biden. The president’s decision to stay in the race for several weeks after his disastrous June 27 debate performance against Trump prevented the party from staging primary contests, as numerous critics have noted. Instead, Harris had to try to introduce herself to voters during a highly compressed campaign.

Axelrod contended that Biden struggled to empathize with voters on economic concerns. “Sometimes it felt like the president was so eager to get credit for his laudable work to get through the pandemic and save the economy that he wasn’t really listening to what people were feeling,” he said. “Bidenomics is going to go down with New Coke as the worst branding decisions in history.”

That was a reference to the president’s effort to put his stamp on an economy that at the time was surging but burdened by inflation by labeling it “Bidenomics.”

The Democratic Party is clearly at a crossroads, having lost the White House and the Senate, while clinging to the hopes of winning the House as a lone counter to Trump’s power in Washington. The repudiation from voters was widespread, and Trump on Wednesday was leading in the popular vote - if it continues, that trend would make him the first Republican presidential candidate in 20 years to win a popular majority.

Democrats also have no obvious leader. Biden, 81, was forced aside by party officials worried about his age and capacity. Harris just lost a decisive race. Senate Democratic leader Charles E. Schumer (New York) has lost his majority. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, also a New Yorker, is relatively new and untested.

Former president Barack Obama could have a role steering the party, as could his wife, Michelle Obama, who drew large enthusiastic crowds as she campaigned for Harris but who has indicated she has little interest in dipping further into politics. Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) still has deep affection within the party, but she is 84 and holds no position of power.

Democratic officials began talking Wednesday about who might become the next chair of the Democratic National Committee. Some suggested Ken Martin, chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, while New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) also received calls from operatives and donors to gauge his interest.

The debate over what went wrong on Election Day - and how to correct it - will become sharpened when the party begins mounting its opposition to Trump’s presidential policies. It will take further shape as candidates emerge for the 2028 presidential nomination. There were some discussions Wednesday about whether the party would nominate a woman again in the foreseeable future, given the fear that the country is not ready to elect a Democratic woman.

Eight years before defeating Harris, Trump prevailed over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Harris and Clinton are the only women nominated for president by a major party.

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Virginia) said House Democrats were “disappointed” by Harris’s loss and have yet to discuss their role in how the party moves ahead. While Democrats are proud of Biden’s agenda, Beyer said passage of landmark legislation, from the Inflation Reduction Act to the bipartisan infrastructure law, meant that “there was so much change” over the past four years, “not to mention woke culture and the pandemic” that scared voters away from the Democratic Party.

“Republicans had a lot to push back on,” he said.

Biden called Harris and Trump on Wednesday, inviting Trump to meet with him at the White House, something aides to both men said they would work to schedule. Biden is also planning to address the nation Thursday, speaking about the election results and the transition of power.

A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private dynamics, said the president thought highly of the way Harris ran her campaign, viewing the race as complicated because of the nation’s polarization. Some in Biden’s circle noted that elections around the world had ousted many incumbents since the coronavirus pandemic.

Biden praised Harris in a statement Wednesday evening, calling her “a tremendous partner and public servant full of integrity, courage, and character.”

He added, “Under extraordinary circumstances, she stepped up and led a historic campaign that embodied what’s possible when guided by a strong moral compass and a clear vision for a nation that is more free, more just, and full of more opportunities for all Americans.”

But there was little second-guessing among White House officials over whether Biden should share in the blame for Tuesday’s outcome. They took pride in the fact that he remains the only candidate to defeat Trump, without saying he regretted dropping out of the race.

They also described his decision to drop out as a selfless one, dismissing the idea that its late timing had saddled Harris with an insurmountable handicap.

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Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report.