But some Democrats are ready to follow Harris’s advice and turn the page on President Joe Biden, the vice president, and the policies they have come to embody.

Trump, a convicted felon who Democrats have criticized as a xenophobic, misogynistic fascist, not only won the Electoral College on Tuesday but became the first Republican since 2004 to win the popular vote with 4.3 million more ballots cast for him than Harris. He also led Republicans to a win in the Senate, with a 53-45 seat majority, and the GOP is likely to retain control of the House.

In comparison, Democrats, including strategist Jim Manley, contend their party is leaderless and rudderless right now.

Most Democrats are distraught by the thought of having to grapple with another four years of Trump. But although many do not hold Harris responsible for Tuesday, they do not consider her to be the future of the party.

“She ran a better campaign than I ever would have expected, especially given the bad position President Biden put her in, but there is no reason to think that she should run again in four years,” Manley told the Washington Examiner. “None, zero, zip.”

Others, including more liberal Democrats and lawmakers, do blame Harris, or at least her campaign and the party’s trend more broadly toward the center of the political spectrum.

“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,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said after the election. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) had a similar complaint but from the Democratic Party’s center, saying the working class is not “buying the ivory-towered nonsense that the far-Left is selling.”

“Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far-Left, which has managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, blacks, Asians, and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like ‘Defund the Police,’ or ‘From the River to the Sea,’ or ‘Latinx,’” Torres said. “There is more to lose than there is to gain politically from pandering to a far-Left that is more representative of Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok than it is of the real world.”

Democratic disagreement over what went wrong on Tuesday bodes poorly for the party as it tries to right itself before the next election cycle, though the 2026 Senate map is as disadvantageous as it was this year.

Democratic strategist Stefan Hankin downplayed the disagreement, at least regarding whether Harris should have adopted a base strategy for liberal Democrats as opposed to attempting to appeal to anti-Trump Republicans.

Instead, Hankin argued Democrats have to decide what the party’s “vision” should be moving forward.

“This feels like the there’s something bigger, fundamentally going on,” he told the Washington Examiner. “If the Democratic Party can’t beat this, what are we doing? This is not tinkering. This is not adjusting messaging. Wholesale changes are needed.”

For Manley, the Democratic Party is “in tatters,” in part, because voters did not buy, to borrow Torres’s terminology, what Harris “was selling.”

“She can play an instrumental role in that debate if she wants, but we have no real leaders right now,” he said.

During her concession speech, scrutinized for being delivered on Wednesday afternoon and not Tuesday night, Harris told a crowd at her alma mater, Howard University, in Washington, D.C., that she conceded the election to Trump, but not “the fight that fueled this campaign,” including “the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and the dignity of all people.”

“On the campaign, I would often say, ‘When we fight, we win,’ but here’s the thing, sometimes the fight takes a while,” she said. “That doesn’t mean we won’t win. The important thing is don’t ever give up. Don’t ever give up.”

Harris’s role in the Democratic Party is likely to be diminished “having lost so decisively to a guy the overwhelming majority of Democrats view as the political equivalent of the anti-Christ,” according to California Democratic strategist Garry South.

“When Democrats have a nominee who flames out — George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis — they tend to put them in the rearview mirror and move on,” South told the Washington Examiner.

South did allude to “widespread rumors” about Harris running to become governor of California in 2026. If she does, the strategist asserted the vice president would likely be a frontrunner, “even as a middle finger by Democrats to Trump.”

“There was another sitting vice president who was defeated in a run for president then came home to run for governor two years later: Richard Nixon,” he said. “He got beat. But he was running against an incumbent Democratic governor, while the seat will be open in 2026.”

A second California Democratic strategist, who did not want to be named in order to speak candidly, said the governor race’s field is “already quite crowded,” including with Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis.

The same strategist dismissed the likelihood of Harris running for president again “because her loss was so large,” unlike Trump in 2020 and another Democratic vice president, Al Gore, in 2000.

“Clearly, she’s got a world of options if she’s done with elected office — teaching, corporate boards, building an organization focusing on an issue most dear to her,” the Democrat told the Washington Examiner.

He continued, “Looking at others who lost presidential elections, there is precedent. Jimmy Carter’s good works are unassailable. Al Gore joined Apple‘s board pre-iPhone and remains focused intently on climate change solutions. Mitt Romney won a seat in the Senate. George W. Bush is a painter.”

In the past, unsuccessful presidential nominees have a “tough road to hoe” concerning comebacks, but the list who have succeeded is interesting, per presidential historian David Pietrusza.

In addition to Trump and Nixon, the list of unsuccessful and then successful nominees includes Andrew Jackson and Grover Cleveland. Nominees who have failed twice include William Jennings Bryan, Adlai Stevenson, and Tom Dewey.

“I suspect the Democratic Party will move on from Harris,” Pietrusza told the Washington Examiner. “She did not run a stronger race, certainly she was not underfunded, and she largely took the Senate and the House down with her.”

Harris’s camp has indicated it is too soon to speculate about her future as Democrats squabble over that of the party.

Regardless of policy and messaging, Biden has emerged as Democrats’s No. 1 target after Tuesday, a lame duck president who, only a couple of months ago, was praised by his party for suspending his campaign and endorsing Harris.

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Republican-turned-independent Dan Schnur, who was communications director of Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain‘s 2000 presidential campaign, was in agreement that “Harris’s fate may have been sealed when Biden waited too long to withdraw from the race.

“If Biden had stepped aside right after the debate instead of waiting almost a full month, there would have been time for even an abbreviated competitive process in which Democrats could have weighed Harris’ strengths against other potential candidates,” Schnur told the Washington Examiner. “They took a huge gamble by going in fully behind her, and they were left with an overly cautious candidate who was not able to provide a compelling alternative to Trump.”