Any politician who is not a stranger to the truth will tell you that an election loss is very demoralising. When that defeat gets into the realm of a wipeout, the despondency is even worse.

No one, therefore, should be surprised at the feud now engulfing the Democratic Party in the United States after its crushing defeat in last Tuesday’s election.

The election night disaster, which saw Republican Mr Donald Trump beating US Vice-President Mrs Kamala Harris for the biggest prize — the presidency — was accompanied by a Republican “red wave” in the Senate.

And, with counting still ongoing, neither party, up to yesterday morning, had the required 218 seats to claim control of the House of Representatives. At the time of writing, the Democrats had 200 seats to the Republicans’ 211.

The election results have proved to be somewhat of a Rorschach test for the Democrats as rival factions have been advancing reasons for the defeat.

The responses have been swift and scathing. For instance, on Wednesday, left-wing Senator Mr Bernie Sanders said, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”

He added that the haemorrhage of the “white working class”, which had stunned observers during Mr Trump’s victory over Democrat Mrs Hillary Clinton in 2016, extended this year to “Latino and Black American workers”.

That elicited an angry rebuke from Democratic National Committee Chairman Mr Jaime Harrison, who dismissed Senator Sanders’s thesis as “straight up BS” and posted a long list of President Joe Biden’s achievements for low-income families.

At the same time, New York Congressman Mr Ritchie Torres blasted what he saw as smug political correctness on the left, insisting that Mr Trump had “no greater friend” than activists alienating voters with “absurdities like ‘Defund the Police’… or ‘Latinx’.”

We are told that exit poll data compiled by the Edison Research Center revealed that Mr Trump won support from 56 per cent of people without college degrees, compared to 42 per cent for Mrs Harris.

The economy, too, played a major factor in the election results as Vice-President Harris was blamed for inflation that has eroded living standards after four years in office, during which consumer prices surged due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Additionally, the pro-Democratic public opinion research centre Blueprint pointed out in a study posted on X that the third-most cited reason voters in swing states had turned away from Mrs Harris was that “she focused more on cultural and social issues, like transgender rights, rather than helping the working class”.

It will take some time for the Democrats to divest themselves of the anger and recrimination. The reactions are natural and part of the painful reckoning process. They should remember that the Republicans were in a similar position after the historic 2008 election that saw the country elect it’s first black president, Mr Barack Obama, and again after his re-election in 2012.

The Democrats, therefore, will need to do some deep soul-searching and reform themselves in time to regain public support at the next midterm elections in two years.