
Three months after the Democrats’ electoral drubbing, the party is still reeling—leaderless, rudderless, and more unpopular than at any time in modern American history. Only 33 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, the lowest rating since CNN first asked the question in 1992. Republicans have led in party identification for three straight years, which hasn’t happened in nearly a century. And the GOP is outregistering Democrats in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina.
Think party pooh-bahs realize it is time for urgent change? Think again.
Viral video clips from the Democratic National Committee’s election for a new chair this past weekend seemed like outtakes from a humanities seminar at a small liberal arts college. In one, outgoing DNC chair Jaime Harrison explains how the presence of a gender nonbinary candidate affected the committee’s gender-balance rules. (“The nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced.”) In another, every candidate for chair blamed Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump on racism and misogyny.
The DNC settled on 24-year-old school-shooting survivor David Hogg as its new vice chair. Here is Hogg’s take on why Democrats did badly among Gen Z voters: “We had to grow up worrying about dying in a school shooting today, or dying of climate change tomorrow, and then being crushed by student debt and the housing crisis in between. . . and I think on the issue of Gaza in particular, it was emblematic of the fact that people felt like we were not listening to them—that we didn’t care.”
Hogg is almost as out of touch as the winning candidate for DNC chair, Minnesota’s Ken Martin. He confidently asserted: “We’ve got the right message. What we need to do is connect it back with the voters.”
In short, all the early signs point to a party that has learned nothing from defeat. If only the Democratic Party were wearing lapels, because then someone could grab them, shake hard, and yell: “What part of ‘the voters just rejected your fixation on identity politics’ do you not understand?”