As Democrats grapple with the reality of a second Trump presidency, they have already begun to bicker over what’s next for the party. 

While former President Donald Trump’s 2016 victory led to shock and anger, galvanizing Democrats on the streets in protest and at the ballot box in elections soon after, his political comeback against Vice President Kamala Harris represents something much more uncomfortable: the need for a genuine political reckoning. 

Trump won handily this week, with county-level data showing swings to the right in nearly every jurisdiction in the country. Even states that were certain to go blue, such as Illinois and New York, gave Democrats their smallest margins of victory in decades. But the question of how Democrats can avoid such a rout in the future has already started to divide the party into familiar camps, with a battle brewing between the party’s moderate and progressive wings — with Harris’ handling of Israel and the war in Gaza sure to play a role.

“I think if you’re a Democrat in America today, Nov. 6, 2024, whether you’re in New Jersey or wherever you are, if you’re not sober, looking in the mirror, being cold-blooded honest with yourself … you’re living in fantasyland,” New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, said on Wednesday. In New Jersey, President Joe Biden beat Trump by 16 points in 2020. This year, Harris beat Trump in the state by just five points. 

Exit polling showed Trump performing better with constituencies that had for years been central to the Democratic base, including Black men and Latino voters. Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts University, described the shift as predicated in class, not racial or identity concerns — reflecting economic concerns such as inflation. 

“What progressives have to grapple with is that they do have positions that they hold very dearly, like, say, around LGBT rights as just an example, or maybe around solidarity with Palestinians, or something like this, where their position is just not popular,” Hersh told Jewish Insider on Wednesday. “I think the broad anti-Trump coalition that was very broad in 2016, 2017, 2018, I don’t think will be quite as broad, in part because Trump moved a lot of those people to his side.”

Some far-left activists in the party are placing the blame for Harris’ loss, in part, on Democrats for being too supportive of Israel after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. 

In a post-election message, Justice Democrats, an activist group that helped elect Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and other members of the Squad, wrote to its supporters that Democrats cannot win if they “refuse to stop funding bombs we know are wiping out entire generations of families in Palestine.” 

Mark Mellman, a longtime Democratic pollster and the founder of Democratic Majority for Israel, said Democrats should not let the furthest-left voices in the party shape Democrats’ future. He didn’t make an argument about Israel; instead, Mellman suggested it’s good for Democrats electorally to spurn the extreme voices in the party. 

“Some people whose rhetoric and whose policies really are extreme and damaging are going to use this defeat to build themselves up. That’s the right answer for them, but it’s the wrong answer for the party,” Mellman told JI. “None of these people that we lost — none of these non-college educated people, none of these rural people — are running out saying, I want socialism in my country.” 

Some progressives turned their ire on Harris for reaching out to anti-Trump Republican voters in recent weeks. David Faris, a political scientist at Roosevelt University, called it a “strategic error” for Harris to campaign with former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) in a bid to win over conservatives, writing that Harris’ failure to win more Republican voters should “bury the conventional wisdom that Democrats must court Republicans by moving to the center over and over again.” 

But polling suggests that Democratic efforts to reach moderate and even conservative voters were needed, even if they went poorly this year. A September New York TImes poll found that 44% of registered voters thought Harris was too liberal, compared to 32% who said Trump was too conservative. 

“It would be ludicrous for Democrats to move left in response to this data. I think everything’s telling us that the opposite is called for,” said Ravi Gupta, a former Obama staffer who co-founded an organization that helps Democratic campaigns find staffers. 

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) told JI that a shift to the left would be a misreading of the election results.

“I don’t think that’s where the country is,” said Gottheimer, who has said he is considering a run for governor of New Jersey in 2025. “The voters that I speak to in my district made it pretty clear that they want people who are going to fight for more affordability, who are going to stand by the U.S.-Israel relationship, who are going to fight to get grocery prices down and their housing prices down and their childcare costs down, and who are willing to actually work with others to get stuff done.” 

After a narrow victory in Long Island, Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) told The New York Times that “the Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left.” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) echoed that sentiment: “We swung the pendulum too far to the left,” he told Semafor. Harris underperformed Biden by five points in New York. 

With the Biden-Harris administration coming to a close, the role of a future Democratic Party standard-bearer is still open. 

“This is the end of the gerontocracy in the Democratic Party,” said Kenneth Baer, a former Obama administration official. He added that Democratic governors like Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania should be asserting themselves on the national stage: “In almost all those swing states, there are Democratic governors who two years ago won handily, so they know something about putting together a winning coalition,” Baer added.

Primary campaigns ahead of the 2026 midterm elections will provide an early opportunity for Democrats to attempt to work out which direction to move after Trump’s election.

“Hopefully this time around, there are more clear factions ideologically,” said Gupta, who noted that the 2018 midterms after Trump’s first victory stemmed from a Democratic unity that may no longer exist. “It was kumbaya in 2018, and there was way less ideological debate.”

Party primaries tend to draw the most committed voters — the party’s core activist base. So while political trends might indicate that a moderate candidate would perform better in a general election, Democrats could still be drawn to more ideologically liberal candidates in the primary.

“It might be good for the party to moderate, to aggressively moderate. But they’d have to do that through their primary,” said Tufts’ Hersh. “And I’m not sure they can.”