Bob Casey's Election Autopsy: Trump Was the Strongest Republican Candidate I've Seen in My Lifetime

Vice President Kamala Harris performed poorly because President-elect Donald Trump was “as strong a Republican candidate as they’ve had for president in my lifetime,” outgoing Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) said Sunday.

The Democrat party is widely debating why it lost the presidential election. Casey’s election diagnosis centered around Trump and his ability to appeal to the American worker.

“I think we’ll know a lot more over time, but obviously, when President Trump was running as strong as he ran, that was going to, and it did, affect the results all across the ticket,” Casey told NBC News about Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania. “So that’s certainly one, what I would call a substantial factor.”

“I think it’s probably premature to make an assessment as to whether we’re going in one direction decidedly or the other. But I will say there were factors in this election that won’t be at play, or won’t be relevant in 2028,” Casey continued. “And one of them [is] Donald Trump will not be a candidate for president. … I think he’s about as strong a Republican candidate as they’ve had for president in my lifetime.”

Democrats worked hard to stop Trump. His political foes tried to imprison him, bankrupt him, assassinate him, remove him from the ballot, and make him politically irrelevant by introducing a partisan committee to investigate January 6.

Casey also said the Biden-Harris administration’s economy and border security really hurt Democrats.

“There was a sense among folks that the economy was better under his administration,” he said of Trump. “There’s no question about the fact that border security was a major issue, and we heard about that all the time. But I think if you had to boil it down to one or two words, it’d be ‘costs’ or ‘cost of living.'”

Casey’s analysis of the Democrats’ election loss appears to contradict the autopsy performed by other Democrats.

One takeaway for some on the radical-left side of the Democrat party is to blame Hispanic and black voters as misogynists. That theory was first pushed by MSNBC co-host Joe Scarborough, who claimed on Morning Joe that Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss was because many black and Hispanic men have “race issues” and “misogyny.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) also endorsed the idea of misogyny as “very very real in this country.”

Former President Obama claimed the loss was due to the pandemic and soaring costs, but he did not fault the administration’s policies that facilitated inflation. Costs increased about 20 percent on average across the board after the Biden-Harris administration took power. Harris was a deciding vote in the Senate on a spending measure that fueled inflation.

The “pandemic and price hikes … created headwinds for democratic incumbents around the world, and last night showed that America is not immune,” Obama wrote Wednesday, without faulting the administration’s policies.