Finger-pointing advisers to Vice President Harris and President Biden agree on one thing: President-elect Trump's victory is the other one's fault, Axios' Alex Thompson writes.

• Why it matters: Biden premised his presidency on preventing Trump from returning to the Oval Office. Biden failed. So someone needs to be blamed.

🤬 In response to Trump's romp, aides in both camps are blaming the other for being more responsible, according to interviews with more than a dozen people in the White House and Harris' campaign.

• A Democrat familiar with White House dynamics pointed a finger at Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, Biden's top political aides: "Mike and Steve will have a lot to answer for — having him run" for re-election at 80 years old.
• One person involved with Harris' team told Axios: "The 107-day Harris campaign was nearly flawless. The Biden campaign that preceded it was the opposite."

A former Biden staffer dismissed the Harris team's criticisms as making excuses for the vice president's failures: "How did you spend $1 billion and not win? What the f***?"

The intrigue: Harris' campaign was undermined by internal confusion and a lack of clear decision-making hierarchy.

• Getting an idea, a tweet through its approval process was like a Rubik's cube, one person involved in the campaign said.
• Some Harris officials felt that many of the former Biden aides resented Harris and her ascension to the top of the ticket, even as Biden personally and enthusiastically backed her.

🥊 Reality check: The election was shadowed by global political dynamics beyond the campaign's control.

• "We faced the same trend that incumbent parties have all over the world," Biden spokesperson Andrew Bates said.

One thing Biden and Harris had in common: the political price of inflation.

👓 Zoom out: The Harris campaign's leadership is trying to contain the frustration and the anger some staffers are feeling.

• In an all-staff call last night, campaign leaders pleaded with staffers not to talk to reporters, according to four people on the call who spoke with Axios.

Near the end of the call, campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon teared up, according to a recording obtained by Axios.

• "I don't like emotion, I don't do that," she said before choking up. "You are great people who have done a great thing, and you came really close."
• During the call, Harris told staffers: "Yeah, this sucks. ... We all just speak truth, why don't we, right? There's also so much good that has come of this" campaign."

The message didn't resonate with some: "It was detached from the reality of what happened," one staffer said. "We are told the fate of democracy is at stake, and then the message was: 'We'll get them next time.'"

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Democrats didn't just lose badly. They lost to a convicted felon they ridiculed as a racist, misogynistic fascist — and an existential threat to democracy, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a "Behind the Curtain" column.

• And they didn't just lose to President-elect Trump. They lost the Senate ... likely the House ... many Hispanic men ... all three Blue Wall states ... both Southern swing states ... even substantial support in the bluest of states and cities.

Why it matters: Democrats are a lost party. Come January, they'll have scant power in the federal government, and shriveling clout in the courts and states.

• The traditional media structure sympathetic to their views, and hostile to Trump's, was shattered.

🖼️ The big picture: In our volatile, 50-50 America, where voters seem to swing fast and hard against the ruling party, resurrection and resurgence are often an off-year election away.

• But the road to the Democrats' Damascus requires deep, honest self-reflection — and, many party insiders tell us, entirely new leadership.
• White House officials were dismissive of reporting about screwups. When journalists held up a mirror, they often looked away.

President Biden, 81, has faded even before his job is done. Harris' team didn't even want him to campaign. Impossible to imagine Democrats turning to him for sage advice on what's next.

• Harris just lost what Democrats considered an eminently winnable race, despite relatively light scrutiny and more money than any candidate in U.S. history. Hard to see her guiding Democrats out of the wilderness.
• The party's two most popular figures — Barack Obama and Michelle Obama — are happy to help in the waning moments of elections but aren't going to lead a revival.

Look to the states, Democrats will say: Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania ... Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan ... Andy Beshear in Kentucky ... newly elected Josh Stein in North Carolina.

• Other Democratic future faces: Senator-elect Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, and Ruben Gallego, who leads in the race for U.S. senator in Arizona.
• All are from states Trump just won. They're certainly politically smarter than the Washington crew. The evidence: They didn't lose.

Democrats will now start the predictable cycle of blame-casting and bellyaching. Every losing party does it. Then, they'll turn to a more serious autopsy: why they're bleeding support virtually everywhere.

• Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), who campaigned for Harris every single day the House was out of session, told us that if you were out there listening to union members, to Black voters, to men, to young people, to working women and men struggling to pay for groceries ... you knew what was coming. "Democrats shouldn't do the blame game," she said. "They should do: 'What aren't we doing right — all of us?'"

Doug Sosnik, a wise, clear-eyed Democratic strategist who bases analysis on empirical data, not emotion, is a good place to start.

• He sent us a post-election deck attached to a one-word email: "bloodbath."

Sosnik's report captures the blunt reality: "The 2024 election marks the biggest shift to the right in our country since Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980. ... [Trump's victory this week] was due to support from a multi-racial working-class group of voters." The coalition includes:

• One in three voters of color voted for Trump.
• Trump increased his support with Hispanic voters by double digits compared to 2020.
• Trump carried Hispanic men by 10 points.
• Trump improved his support with voters ages 18-29 by 10+ points.

Column continues below.

Top Democrats tell us the party needs to dig deeper into root causes — and to reach back to COVID to truly understand why many of these voters revolted, Jim and Mike write.

• It was the COVID era when many voters felt elites were lecturing them on wearing masks, hiding at home and shutting down their businesses. This preachy, judgmental tone alienated many former and would-be Democrats.
• Word-policing escalated.

This invigorated the non-legacy media and started pushing Hispanic and Black men away, starting in the last presidential election. Centrist Democrats tell us this is why even big cities turned redder this month.

• The political correctness movement calmed. But Biden, then Harris, could never find words or ways to convince working-class voters they had policy ideas to make prices lower, jobs more lucrative, the future brighter.

Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), a moderate, told Axios' Andrew Solender: "We have to stop pandering to the base and we have to start listening to the people ... People are sick of extremism."

• Ezra Klein, the popular liberal New York Times columnist, wrote yesterday: "I do think a lot of Democrats have alienated themselves from the culture that many people, and particularly many men, now consume. I think they lost people like Rogan by rejecting them, and it was a terrible mistake."

The country has moved right on immigration and energy, and Democrats need a new approach — fast.

• The Senate border bill that Harris repeatedly pointed to was "an insider talking point that was too disconnected from what Americans had witnessed in their own communities for the past four years," former Biden adviser Andrea Flores wrote on X. She says Democrats urgently need fresh ideas.

👀 What we're watching: There'll be a strong tug back to the blue-collar-focused politics of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). He sounded more like Trump than his party elites. And Sanders was quick out of the gate with a scathing critique of his party's rich, educated ruling elite.

• "It should come as no great surprise," Sanders wrote, "that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."

Hard to see Democrats losing bigger chunks of the working class and winning elections. So Sanders makes a great point. But Trump often sounds more like the socialist Sanders than a Mitt Romney.

• A real fight to best serve the less educated and less wealthy seems good for a nation divided by education and income, operating in a system tilted decisively to the latter.

Finally, Dems need to grapple with their denialism. Democrats let their hatred of Trump put them in a state of denial about Biden and the party's unpopularity — confident that Trump's toxicity was enough. They didn't believe their own eyes when staring at polls.

• So they got crushed. Now they have dilemma and opportunity: In a 50-50 country, how do they articulate a theory of the case to win back voters — and power?

The bottom line: This will be the Democratic story of 2025.

• Go deeper: Explore Doug Sosnik's deck ... Share this column ... Axios' Alex Thompson contributed reporting.

Whether he becomes the House's speaker or its minority leader in the new Congress, Hakeem Jeffries is vowing to lead the Democratic resistance, Axios' Hans Nichols writes.

• Why it matters: Jeffries, the current House minority leader, promised his biggest donors yesterday that House Democrats will "hold the line" on any potential threats to democracy from President-elect Trump, Axios has learned.

At the same time, he said he'll rely on his growing relationship with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to ensure that the basics of governing, such as funding the government, are completed, according to Jeffries' allies and advisers.

🔬 Zoom in: In a private video call with donors yesterday afternoon, Jeffries said Democrats will win at least 214 seats.

• That would be two more than they hold in the current House, and five short of enough to make Jeffries the speaker.
• He noted that House Democrats have outperformed Vice President Harris in many of the party's "Frontline" districts, with its most vulnerable incumbents.

Between the lines: Trump intensely dislikes former Speaker Pelosi, but privately he respected her political skills as House speaker.

• Jeffries was one of the impeachment managers in Trump's second trial, but it's unclear whether Trump thinks of him as a worthy adversary.

👂 What we're hearing: Jeffries is a more cautious leader than Pelosi, his colleagues say.

• "He starts with a carrot, but he's not afraid of pulling out the knife," one Democratic lawmaker told Axios. "He's a big-tent, pragmatic guy, and he understands how to get things done."

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Vice President-elect JD Vance will head into the White House with a tight-knit circle of loyalists who were with him during the campaign and, in many cases, came to the U.S. Senate with him from Ohio.

• Why it matters: Like Vance, most of his advisers and staff are from the GOP's populist-conservative wing. Since President-elect Trump can't run again, Vance will be viewed from Day 1 as a likely 2028 candidate.

Here's a first look at Vance's likely vice-presidential team, obtained by Axios from a source close to him:

Expected inside players:

• Jacob Reses: Reses, a longtime personal friend of Vance, has been his Senate chief of staff since his inauguration last year.
• James Braid: Braid, Vance's deputy chief of staff in the Senate, is the most influential policy mind in Vance's operation.
• Bryan Gray: Gray — the first hire on Vance's Senate campaign, where he was political director — is one of Vance's closest political advisers.
• Will Martin, Taylor Van Kirk and Luke Schroeder: Vance's three longtime communication gurus are all expected to join him at the White House.

Key outside players:

• Andy Surabian: Surabian, perhaps Vance's closest political adviser and strategist, is a veteran of all three Trump campaigns. Surabian, who's well-connected in corporate and political circles, was a senior adviser on Vance's Senate run and oversaw his V.P. operation on the Trump campaign. He is credited with building the bridge to Trumpworld that helped lead to Vance being selected as V.P. Surabian is also a close political adviser to Don Jr., and played a senior role on multiple successful senate campaigns this cycle.
• Jai Chabria: Chabria — a longtime friend of Vance, and a partner at the PR and lobbying firm MAD Global Strategy — is Vance's longest-serving political adviser, and was the general consultant on his Senate campaign.
• Luke Thompson: Another longtime friend of Vance, Thompson ran the main super PAC that backed Vance in his GOP Senate primary. Thompson, an expert in building organizations, has deep ties to several major GOP techworld donors. He is an NRSC alumnus and has held senior roles in dozens of statewide races nationwide.
• Arthur Schwartz: Schwartz, a top adviser to Don Jr., has built a close relationship with Vance. Schwartz is known for his deep Rolodex of GOP power players, his crisis expertise and his aggressive presence on social media.

Full bios.