What is the opposite of an autopsy?
That’s what I wondered last night as I watched the candidates for chair of the Democratic National Committee discuss their plans for the future while showing very little interest in examining what went disastrously wrong in the very recent past.
Outside the ornate Georgetown hall where eight candidates lined up for their final forum before the party picks a new leader tomorrow, Washington was lurching from crisis to crisis. Hours earlier, President Trump had stepped into the White House briefing room to suggest without evidence that diversity programs were to blame for the deadly air crash that killed 67 people. Federal employees were receiving new emails encouraging them to leave their jobs.
What was happening onstage, though, was hardly a deep reckoning with what Democrats did wrong to lock themselves out of power. In a race that has been marked more by the similarity of the front-runners — Ben from Wisconsin and Ken from Minnesota — than any serious clash over vision or ideology, this felt more like a gentle pep rally than soul-searching at the crossroads.
When Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, described the Democrats’ last-minute swap of former President Joe Biden for former Vice President Kamala Harris as their party’s nominee, the party officials in the room cheered. When Jen Psaki, one of the moderators, asked another leading candidate, former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland, if Democrats had erred in spending $175 million on ads related to abortion, he dodged the question.
The candidates were quick to point their fingers at outside forces, like the influence of billionaires as well as the effect that racism and misogyny had on the chances of electing the nation’s first Black female president. They talked about Republicans’ dominant messaging operation and Democrats’ bad branding.
But when it came to evaluating the party’s own role in its failures, or promising a detailed look at what went wrong? Not so much.
“We’ve got the right message,” said Ken Martin, the leader of Minnesota’s Democratic Party, who is widely seen as the race’s top contender. “What we need to do is connect it back with the voters.”
Institutional loyalty
Insiders argue that the structure of the party itself means it is not set up for a reckoning. When a Democratic president controls the White House, that person picks the D.N.C. leader and the party essentially functions as an arm of the president’s re-election campaign — just as President Trump has turned the Republican National Committee into a political operation that he controls.
As a result, Democratic Party officials have sidestepped bigger questions about whether Biden should have run for re-election — and whether the party should have eased his path by reordering primary states to his benefit — by saying it was simply their job to be loyal to him.
Neither Biden nor Harris has made an endorsement in the race, but Harris has spoken with all three leading contenders, a person familiar with those calls told my colleague Reid Epstein. The person said that Harris expected to work closely with the winner of the race, and that all of the front-runners expressed gratitude to her for her commitment to remain involved as a party leader.
That’s another sign that major change may not be on the horizon.
What will emerge from the ashes?
If there is ever a time for a political party to shake things up, it is at a moment like this — when the party is out of power and not beholden to the White House.
That’s what happened in 2005, when former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont took over the party in the wake of John Kerry’s loss and instituted a “50-state strategy” that cast out Washington insiders and focused on rebuilding the party’s infrastructure in the states.
Dean thinks that’s what Democrats, who lost all seven swing states in November and watched red states turn redder, need to do now.
Compared with 2005, though, “I think the task ahead of us is harder because campaigning has become much, much more sophisticated,” he told me. “We’re not going to rebuild state by state. We have to rebuild community by community and legislative district by legislative district.”
Tom Perez, who took over the D.N.C. in 2017 after its core infrastructure had rusted during the Obama presidency, suggested that the effects of the Trump presidency would help Democrats rebuild.
“We will hold them accountable to their broken promises, just as we did in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020,” he said.
And Donna Brazile, who has twice served as the Democrats’ acting chair, said it was not too late for the party to take a serious look at what went wrong. The chair race, she said, just isn’t the right venue for that.
“You can’t run for chair of the party and say, ‘I know what happened.’ It just doesn’t work that way. We need memos,” Brazile said, before referring to the Biden and Harris campaign chair. “We need to see what Jen O’Malley Dillon was looking at every day. We need to see what the pollsters were looking at every day.”
“This is a party that has transformed itself several times, even in my lifetime,” she added, “and I’m looking forward to the party that emerges from the ashes.”
A Democrat who says the party is doing great
One man who recently sat at the nexus of some of the biggest moments in Democratic politics is Sam Cornale, 37, the D.N.C.’s executive director, who will leave his role shortly after the election of a new chair on Saturday. Reid Epstein spoke with him about how Democrats can fight back against Trump and what went wrong in 2024.
What is your advice for the next D.N.C. chair?
In an environment where you don’t have the White House, resources are finite. I think it’s really important that you home in on the two, three, four or five things that you’re going to do and do them really well. Others have to pick up some slack.
Why did Kamala Harris lose?
I don’t think we know for certain, and I’m not sure we ever will.
Unlike the last time that we lost to Donald Trump, the party apparatus itself is as strong as I’ve ever seen it. And candidates to lead the party are talking about what they’re going to put on top of the foundation that we’ve built.
Do you think that the party and the D.N.C. are expressing the appropriate urgency given what Trump is doing with his executive authority so far?
While urgency is important, it’s even more important, I think, that we be very focused on what we’re going to say to try to penetrate the attention economy.
Should Joe Biden have run for re-election?
He did. The reality is Joe Biden was the duly elected president of the United States. He was the head of the party. It was his prerogative. Hindsight is 20/20.
I’m incredibly proud not just of our work for President Biden, but also the work he did. When you think about the last time we had to prepare for a Trump presidency, we had one hand tied behind our back. And that’s not the case anymore.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
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