Politico Magazine published a story today looking at the current state of the Democratic Party. The news is not good if you’re a Democrat. It’s not just people outside the inner circle, i.e. the base and the voters, who are angry, it’s also people much closer to the action. The story picks up with a gathering to decide who should lead the DNC into the future.
“How many of you believe that racism and misogyny played a role in Vice President Harris’ defeat?” asked MSNBC anchor Jonathan Capehart. Every candidate raised their hand. “That’s good,” he added. “You all pass.” Later, a DNC member asked, in reference to party positions: “Will you pledge to appoint more than one transgender person to an at-large seat?” Only one of eight contenders kept their hand down.
In response to the stunning start of Trump’s second term, the Democrats campaigning to take the helm of their party hewed to a familiar message, describing the president as a fascist who espoused white supremacist conspiracies. Instead of offering a meaningful plan to confront such danger, critics said, they doubled down on appealing to the faculty lounge set…
“I don’t know if Dems realize how f***ed they are right now as a brand,” said one Democratic strategist who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to speak frankly. “It was a bunch of people politely discussing how many deck chairs on the Titanic should be reserved for transgender people,” said another…
Interviews with more than 30 Democratic elected officials, party leaders and consultants for this story reveal that after suffering their biggest defeat in decades, Democrats are deeply fractured, rudderless, and struggling to figure out at the most basic level what their message and strategy should be. Some longtime Democrats are worried, even enraged, that few of their leaders have reexamined their prior positions — let alone shown a willingness to consider a dramatic break with party norms or practice.
Normally after a big loss the party holds an “autopsy” a grim description for a broad review of why the party’s efforts failed to sway voters. A Democratic autopsy almost always boils down to the same thing, progressives arguing the problem was that candidates weren’t far left enough to excite voters and moderates arguing the party was too far left and scared voters away.
That argument did in fact break out last year and all the evidence I’ve seen suggests strongly that the moderates had it right. One autopsy by the group Blue Rose Research found that Democrats moved left while much of the rest of the country was moving right. The divide was such that it’s no longer true that Democrats would have won with higher turnout. In fact, higher turnout in 2024 would only have helped Trump win by a wider margin.
This problem didn’t exist four years ago. It’s not just that the New York Times readers are more liberal than the overall population — that’s definitely true. It’s that they’re more liberal than they were four years ago — even though the country went the other way. And so there’s this great political divergence between people who consume all the news sources that we know about and read about versus the people who don’t.
As a result of these changes, we’re seeing the reversal of a decades-long truism in American politics. For a long time, Democrats have said, and it’s been true, that if everyone votes, we win and that higher turnout is good for Democrats. But this is the first cycle where that definitively became the opposite.
I have some numbers here: If only people who had voted in 2022 had voted, Harris would have won the popular vote and also the Electoral College fairly easily. But if everyone had voted, Trump would have won the popular vote by nearly five points.
As party autopsies go, this is a pretty clear signal to Democrats to tone down the far left purity tests and meet voters where they are. But if you look around, it’s clear Democrats aren’t listening.
As much as Democrats talk about change, few have seemed actually willing to make the leap. Instead, they’ve called for tweaking their tactics or freshening their message — or the way it’s distributed, by appearing on outlets like Joe Rogan’s podcast — in what amounts to a pitch for better marketing…
Aside from an occasional headline about someone breaking with party dogma, there hasn’t been a broad come-to-Jesus moment over cultural issues, despite the fact that surveys show a majority of Americans do not support liberal policies like allowing transgender female athletes to compete in women’s sports or providing puberty-blocking medicine to children.
A Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania told Politico, “I’m not sure folks are open to learning any lessons.”
Meanwhile, Democrats seem to be leaning into the idea that they are going to retake the House in 2026. Their certainty on that is putting deeper questions about which direction the party should be going on the back burner for now. But even if that works out, it doesn’t mean they’ll have course corrected for 2028 when the big prize is up for grabs again.
“Democrats have signaled they’re taking the approach that it’s not broken, so there’s nothing to fix,” said Joe Calvello, a former chief strategist for Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. “In the midterms, we’ll probably get lucky with inflation and eggs. And we’ll maybe get our ass kicked in ’28.”
So there you have it. For a bunch of reasons, Democrats aren’t really having an autopsy moment. They are moving by instinct and potentially moving left again. Things can change but the clear lesson of the election they just lost is that this isn’t working for them. Maybe it will take another big loss before they get the message.
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