It’s not just that Donald Trump will be the next president — polls showed the chances of that happening were a coin flip.

But beltway insiders find themselves shell shocked at the scale of Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss, having improved in very few counties nationally compared to Joe Biden in 2020, and facing finger-pointing condemnation towards Harris and the party as a whole.

In Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Democratic Party Chair Bob Brady who has held the role since 1988 and served as a congressman for two decades accused the campaign of running a flawed race and neglecting the city, saying Biden would have been a better candidate. He also called its nationwide concert a “four-day traffic jam” in an interview with Fox News’ Bryan Llenas.

National figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders charged that 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, adding that “First it was the white working class and now it is Latino and Black workers as well.”

While Harris won the Latino vote, as polls suggested she would, the party continues its downward slide with these voters and finds itself at a crossroads, top Latino party strategists said.

“Donald Trump made a better case with the American people that he was the change agent,” said Chuck Rocha, a former senior advisor to Sanders 2020 presidential run, who served as a senior advisor to Rep. Ruben Gallego, who stands to become the first Latino U.S. Senator from Arizona. “Harris was in the race for 100 days but she didn’t make the case.”

While many who came of age during the Obama era may think of change in a “hope and change” framing, as we know, a wrecking ball is also a change agent. “They see Donald Trump as a disruptor, which is particularly what makes him popular with Latino men and Black men,” Rocha told LATINO Magazine. “They want a bull in a china closet.”

Kristian Ramos, a Democratic consultant who has advised the White House, had a similar take: “I don’t think anyone figured out how to thread the needle from a robust economic recovery created by Biden to communicating how it benefited working class Latinos and Black people in a real way. Ultimately Latinos were affected the most by COVID and inflation and Democrats provided solutions to help them but the party wasn’t able to show them what we’ve done while pointing to a brighter future.”

Rocha said there is work to do but there are bright spots. “We have to return to the values of the party that made young men like me join the party, with an economic populist message that says we’re fighting for you,” he said. “Latinos don’t think we’re fighting for them like Bernie, Ruben Gallego, and Gabe Vasquez did.”

Maria Cardona, a veteran Hispanic leadership voice with the Democratic Party, who serves as a CNN commentator and was close with the Harris campaign, criticized the post-election focus on lackluster exit polls with not enough respondents, and said it is important to stress that Kamala Harris won Latinos, both men and women.

“We have to avoid the whole pointing the finger and blaming Latinos for her loss!” she said. “That is not correct.”

While exit polls showed Harris with a slim margin with Latino voters and losing Latino men by 10 points to President-elect Donald Trump, AP VoteCast (which has more respondents) said she won the Latino vote 56% to 42%, but only garnered 50% support of Latino men, compared to 47% for Trump.

In a statement, Equis Research co-founders, Stephanie Valencia and Carlos Odio wrote that they were gravely concerned about the conversation and rhetoric surrounding Latino voters in the wake of the election results, noting that they signal a need to contend with the reality of Latino voters but that what happened in this election is larger than Hispanics alone.

“The magnitude of the gains Trump made in places like New York, New Jersey, and Texas – states that don't decide the presidential race – were surprising and point to deeper discontent and broader trends,” they said, stressing that Trump did make big gains with Latinos, but those gains are not what decided his victory.

“The support Trump received among Latinos in the battleground states should not have been a surprise to anyone who was paying attention. Those shifts were present in polling throughout the cycle and since the early days of the Biden presidency. Harris ultimately had the support she needed with Latinos to win, if all else held according to plan,” they wrote.

Trump’s win, on the other hand, came from a broader erosion of support in key battleground states. “Latinos in the battleground states are a critical part of winning but they do not alone determine the outcome,” they continued. “Blaming the outcome of this election on the Hispanic electorate is simply not supported by the electoral math in the blue wall states. To say otherwise is not only irresponsible, it is bad political analysis.”

Polls throughout the cycle suggested Harris would have lower support than Biden enjoyed in 2020 when he beat Trump, but the scale of Harris’ defeat has put renewed focus on Democratic Party losses with Latinos.

“There’s no path to gaining majorities for the long term if we don’t fix the problem with reaching out to working class Americans, which Latinos are a major part of,” Rocha said. “We’ve got to get back to having conversations with people outside the coalition if we’re going to grow it.”

Daniel Garza, the president of the Koch-backed LIBRE Initiative, said in a Telemundo interview after the election that Republican surrogates had an outsized impact compared to Democratic boosters. He mentioned billionaire Elon Musk’s X platform, formerly known as Twitter, Joe Rogan’s popular Spotify podcast, which hosted a Trump interview but could not come to terms with the vice president for a similar sit down, and the coalition and backers of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who now seems primed for a major role in the forthcoming Trump administration.

According to him, Democrats countered with Harris surrogates that were disconnected from the pain Americans are feeling: “This is the working class rejecting the political class, the Hollywood entertainers they don’t relate with when it comes to the effects of the economy, who were told they weren’t feeling the pain they were feeling. Latinos and Blacks make up 45% of the working class and Latinos felt the pain of inflation the most. This is the Latino middle class refusing to be ignored shouting ‘I don’t want what you’re selling.’”

Leslie Sanchez, a longtime Republican strategist and CBS contributor, said the topline of the outcome was that Trump exceeded expectations for Latino support and garnered the highest Latino support in the history of Republican presidential candidates.

“A lot of conversation was around could Trump be competitive, could he win the Latino vote?” she said. “He needed to be in the low 40’s to win statewide in some of these battleground states with large Latino populations, and there was a domino effect once he reached into the low 40’s.”

Clarissa Martinez, a longtime advocate for UnidosUS, which backed Harris, said her main takeaway was that Republicans had a historic night. “Unquestionably, the most potent factor in this election is that it was a referendum on the economy, which always goes against the incumbent,” she said. “While the majority of Latinos ended up in the Democratic column, Republicans made gains. And priority number one through four were pocketbook issues for Latino voters.”