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With critical races in Georgia and North Carolina just two years away, the party is soul-searching on a time crunch.
Nov. 25, 2024, 11:00 a.m. ET
For some Democrats in the South, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s victories in Georgia and North Carolina this month crystallized a nagging fear that the inroads they had made in these presidential battlegrounds could be dismissed as a fluke.
The party had hoped to keep Georgia blue this year while flipping North Carolina, which seemed tantalizingly close after President Biden lost it by a slim margin in 2020. Instead, organizers and operatives said, a difficult political environment and disjointed operations on the ground hampered the party’s ability to engage voters.
In the weeks since Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss, there has been a lot of finger-pointing, and many theories about what the party must do going forward. The angst is by no means unique to the South. Mr. Trump won all seven swing states, from the Midwest to the Sun Belt, with reliably blue regions driving right. But with competitive races for governor and U.S. Senate just two years away in Georgia and North Carolina, the party’s soul-searching is crunched for time.
Frustrations have escalated, with long-simmering intraparty fights about messaging, leadership and resource allocation spilling out into public view.
“It was probably structure and strategy,” said Mayor Van Johnson of Savannah, Ga., and a Democratic National Committee member. He said he felt Democrats in Georgia had done the best they could with limited investment. But of Ms. Harris’s campaign, he added: “I don’t feel like they entrusted us with what we felt we needed on the ground. They gave us what they thought we should have.”
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