For most Democrats, losing to Donald J. Trump was a devastating gut punch that sent them hurtling into the political abyss.
But to hear some party leaders and their allies talk, Democrats had plenty of November victories to be proud of.
Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, wrote a 2,600-word memo to party members last week that pointed to down-ballot triumphs and declared, “Democrats beat back global headwinds that could’ve turned this squeaker into a landslide.”
Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader, wrote in a statement recently that his caucus had “defied political gravity,” a reference to the newly released “Wicked” movie that was soon echoed by Senator Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat.
And further down the ballot, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee wrote in its year-end report that the party’s successes in statehouse races represented “one of the most shocking election results in modern history” — even though Democrats lost majorities in chambers in Michigan and Minnesota.
These sunny-side-up views of the election serve as something of an antidote to the notion that Democrats, humbled by their 2024 mistakes, are about to begin rebuilding their party from the ground up.
They also fly in the face of signs of a broad depression within the party. Ratings are down on MSNBC, the liberal television network that has served as the house organ for Democratic officials, as the party’s voters so far show little inclination to revive their resistance to Mr. Trump from 2016.
What’s more, the positive sentiment lets Democrats blame President Biden — whom many of them publicly defended even after his disastrous debate in June — for the party’s poor showing. By arguing that the party’s problems stem from an 82-year-old president who is about to retire from politics, Democrats can avoid tackling tough questions about why they have lost ground among voters of color and working-class Americans while giving donors who invested billions of dollars something to explain why they lost.
Jessica Mackler, the president of Emily’s List, the largest group helping to elect Democratic women, said on the left-leaning podcast “The Downballot” that Vice President Kamala Harris had saved the party from even bigger defeats had Mr. Biden remained its presidential nominee.
“When she entered this race, Democrats were poised to lose and lose big,” Ms. Mackler said. “The energy that she brought, the way that she was able to evaporate that enthusiasm gap, it really mattered.”
As Democrats throw up their hands and point to political headwinds brought on by inflation and Mr. Biden as the cause of their 2024 plight, many are also eliding the fact that they had been optimistic that Ms. Harris would win.
The Harris campaign’s pre-election data showed her winning in Michigan and Wisconsin and within 0.1 percent of Mr. Trump in Pennsylvania, according to an internal post-mortem campaign analysis, reviewed by The New York Times, that was written by Meg Schwenzfeier, the campaign’s chief analytics officer, and Becca Siegel, a senior adviser to the campaign.
The campaign’s modeling underestimated Mr. Trump’s support by an average of 1.7 percentage points across 13 states where it tracked data.
Top officials from the Harris campaign have also suggested that Mr. Biden bequeathed his vice president a perilous political situation. Last month, David Plouffe, a senior adviser, said on the podcast “Pod Save America” that Ms. Harris’s position was “pretty catastrophic in terms of where the race stood.”
In recent weeks, the Harris campaign has circulated a separate, and unsigned, document titled “Tough Q & A [not to share].” It consists of talking points meant to answer questions that campaign officials and surrogates were likely to face after their defeat.
To the questions “How much of this was Biden’s fault? Should he have dropped out earlier/run for re-election at all?” the campaign document suggests a nonresponse.
“It was up to him whether or not to run,” the document states. “He then made the decision to step aside following the June debate. That was the right decision and it put Democrats in the best position to compete — the ground the V.P. was able to make up proves that.”
Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Mr. Biden, said the president’s assessment was that aftereffects of the pandemic that also hurt incumbent parties in other nations’ elections were “the biggest factor” in Ms. Harris’s defeat.
The Harris campaign talking points spend more time on the Trump campaign’s advertising attacking Ms. Harris on transgender issues than on any other topic. Eleven bullet points explain why the campaign did not go on the air with its own ad responding to Mr. Trump.
“Most voters found the ads troubling, particularly the idea that tax dollars are funding these surgeries,” the document states. “They were quick to say, however, that this was not the most important issue to them, impacted a small number of people and felt it was overblown and overly political.”
Then there are the sometimes tone-deaf solicitations for more money from Democratic donors.
A November email from the Harris campaign under the subject line “Good news and bad news” included the bad news — Mr. Trump won the election — and the good news: The recipient of the email had an opportunity to give $50 to “hold Trump accountable these next four years.”
In the 20 days after the election — from Nov. 6 to Nov. 25, the last day of the most recent campaign finance reporting period — the Harris Victory Fund, the campaign’s main fund-raising vehicle, reported just over $6 million in online donations from nearly 180,000 contributions. That was less than the fund raised in any given day in the final stretch before the election.
On Tuesday, the Democratic National Committee asked for a $3 contribution and a vote on a design for what it called the “Official 2025 Democratic Member Card.” Three of the four options contain the words “PROUD DEMOCRAT,” while the fourth shows a donkey, the party’s longtime mascot.
Democrats without a direct relationship with the Harris campaign have been more likely to declare that the election results were a disaster.
“No, it wasn’t a good night,” Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey said in an interview. “But I was not shocked that he won. How could you be?”
Priorities USA, which was the top allied super PAC for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign but was subsequently passed over by Mr. Biden’s aides, wrote in a post-election presentation that the race had been “winnable” for Ms. Harris and that Democratic messaging on Mr. Trump had “missed the mark.”
“Democrats remain so focused on hatred of Trump, that we can’t grasp why some voters are drawn to him,” the group wrote.
At the same time, plenty of Democrats are quick to note that even though Mr. Trump swept the seven battleground states, he won the White House by a relatively narrow margin. They insist the party remains on the right track.
In his memo to D.N.C. members, Mr. Harrison boasted that Mr. Trump’s margin of victory in the popular vote ranked “44th out of 51 elections since 1824.”
“This is the narrowest margin for a Republican since 1968, excluding the two times Republicans lost the popular vote and won the Electoral College,” Mr. Harrison wrote.
Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party who is running to succeed Mr. Harrison as D.N.C. chairman, said during an interview on “The Daily Show” that “we actually added votes for Harris relative to Biden.”
Wisconsin was, Mr. Wikler said, the state that “came closest to defeating Trump.”
And in a memo summarizing what Democrats in Washington could learn from their state-level brethren, Andrew Grunwald of the States Project, a liberal dark-money group that focuses on state legislative races, wrote that Democrats should not overreact to the 2024 presidential results.
“Even with no changes between now and the 2026 elections,” Mr. Grunwald wrote in the memo, “Democrats are well positioned to make significant gains in Congress and at the state legislative levels.”
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