Democratic activists shaken — and say they need a new plan

• Some compared their experience to Hillary Clinton's surprising defeat in 2016, and their disappointment of not electing the first woman president then.
• "That was devastating, the next day I would say, [but] because I went through that, today is more disappointing," Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, told Axios on Tuesday.

In 2016, "we really took for granted that Hillary Clinton was going to win," said Watts, who organized a record-breaking Zoom call for white women voters in July.

• "And what we realized in 2020 and then 2024 is ... we're actually in a fight for our safety and freedoms and no one's going to hand this to us."

Driving the news: LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, expressed deep disappointment over Tuesday's results, which she believes reveal less about policy and more about a nation coming to grips with its identity and values.

• To Brown, the presidential race pointed to unresolved social justice and equity issues that continue to shape the country's political landscape.
• Others pointed to a double standard: They couldn't imagine people like them getting away with things Trump has done, much less rising to become a president-elect.
• "Why is this even close? Why is this a nail-biter?" Brown asked.

Zoom in: Some organizers said the results exposed issues with the party's outreach to key voting blocs that were more reliably Democratic in the past, such as working-class voters and Black men.

• "We needed to start the conversation earlier about what benefits Black men in our communities," said Khalil Thompson, founder and CEO of Win With Black Men.
• "Texting is helpful, but it's not as effective if it's not peer-to-peer. We needed more door-knocking and more direct conversations."
• Exit polls suggested that although Harris won broadly among Black voters, Trump made gains.

Thompson stressed the need for a long-term approach, noting that his organization's 2025 strategy has already begun with plans for regional meetings and barbershop engagements.

• "We're committed to building stronger connections with Black men from all backgrounds," he said.

Watts said the "old ways of doing things, like having a good ground game, that's not necessarily the future of electoral politics."

• "A lot of us have created important coalitions in the last 100 days and so continuing to grow those, continuing to deploy those to play defense, for sure — but also to figure out a way to play offense in this new world order."

Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the progressive group Our Revolution, noted that while Republicans capitalized on economic populism, Democrats missed opportunities to connect with working-class voters.

• "We sounded the alarm," Geevarghese told Axios, explaining that progressives had warned Democrats' campaigns that issues such as economic security and the impact of the war in Gaza were top concerns for their base.
• "They took the base for granted," he said. "People are voting their self-interest, which is their pocketbooks."

The bottom line: "We are not going back," Watts said, in a nod to a Harris campaign slogan. "That will require us to be activists, but also to learn the lessons that did not work in this election cycle."

• "Which is, again, this sort of anachronistic idea of a ground game, it isn't the playbook that the Donald Trump team followed," she said.
• "It's something completely different."

Go deeper: Results suggest Trump made more gains with Latinos