Dems worried party won’t learn anything from 2024 defeat: NYT report
Some Democratic Party operatives fear that their party is not going to learn anything from their historic 2024 defeat at the hands of President Trump.
The New York Times published a report this week detailing the “deepening distress” some have that their party will not internalize what went wrong and what they need to fix following the 2024 election.
“The fear is that Democrats are squandering one of the few silver linings of losing: the chance to learn lessons from defeat,” Times political reporter Shane Goldmacher wrote on Monday.
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Critics in the Democratic Party don’t believe newly elected DNC chair Ken Martin will bring the changes necessary for the party to become strong in the new Trump era. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr.)
In the piece, Goldmacher focused on a recent meeting of “several dozen Democratic political operatives” where they discussed “hard truths” that the party needs to confront.
Jonathan Cowan, the president of the more centrist Democratic Party group, “Third Way,” which led the meeting, addressed attendees, saying, “Now is not the time for taking refuge in comforting platitudes.”
According to the report, he added, “Now is not the time to bet on the other guys” messing up “so badly that we win simply by not being them” – with Goldmacher noting he used a “much coarser” phrase than “messing up.”
Goldmacher quoted another leader at the meeting, Working Families Party National Director Maurice Mitchell, who said the party has to “have a come-to-Jesus moment as a team.”
Much hay has been made by prominent Democratic strategists in the media out of the point that the party has doubled down on the woke ideas that cost it in 2024.
Longtime Democratic Party strategist James Carville recently shredded the Democratic National Committee meeting last month that called upon the body to implement and uphold woke gender rules regarding its membership.
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Liberals have been trashing the Democratic National Committee for the far-left gender rules it implemented in its recent meeting. (AP Photo)
“And it’s like, there’s a, a plant somewhere in quote, progressive, unquote America, that just to seize how many jacka–, stupid things that they can embrace, it’s stunningly stupid,” he said during a recent MSNBC appearance.
Longtime liberal media pundit Joe Klein savaged the continued insistence on prioritizing woke thinking present at the meeting, writing in his Substack column that it could be proof that the party is broken beyond repair.
“Yes, friends, still crazy after all these years… and the encroaching dementia is not benign. Can this party be saved? I have my doubts,” he wrote.
Goldmacher wrote that multiple Democratic groups across the “party’s ideological spectrum” are looking to reform the party but their “views of how to fix what went wrong are often diametrically opposed.”
He noted that most concerned liberals understand that they have a “problem with the working class,” but there isn’t a consensus on how to address it.
“Some favor shedding unpopular policies or reprioritizing new ones. Others focus on improving the messages deployed to sell those policies to voters — or on how to deliver the party’s message, whatever it turns out to be, in a fractured media environment,” he wrote, adding that trying to fight back against the current Trump agenda threatens to stymie any unified approach to fixing the party.
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“The pressure for Democrats to push back on President Trump’s expansive agenda further complicates any prospect of a unified, rigorous ‘autopsy’ like the one Republicans conducted in 2012. Opposing Mr. Trump has been the Democratic Party’s greatest unifying force for nearly a decade. But the 2024 election showed that its coalition of resistance is no longer a majority.”
Goldmacher continued, noting that Democratic figures do not agree with new DNC chair Ken Martin’s assessment that it’s “wrong” for the party to come up with a “new message.”
“The line has ricocheted through the party, leaving many Democrats shaking their heads in dismay and concluding that Mr. Martin will defend the status quo,” he wrote. The author quoted a Democratic contributor from Florida named John Morgan, who said, “That whole group of people that they elected to the D.N.C., to me, means they have learned absolutely nothing in the shellacking of Kamala Harris.”
“Swing Left” executive director Yasmin Radjy was quoted on how voters are also tired of the “endless freaking fund-raising emails and texts” from party leaders and liberal groups, which they feel are “remarkably tone-deaf and anger-inducing in this moment.”
