Why did the Democrats lose so badly in 2024? Why don't the elites oppose Trump with even more venom and vigor? Why hasn't there been a reckoning (and presumably, a guillotine) for those responsible for the 2024 debacle?
These are some of the questions being asked by Democratic Party activists in the lead-up to the midterm elections in November.
The activists are "ready to go," reports The Atlantic. "But it’s also demanding a reckoning from its highest ranks that hasn’t come," writes Elaine Godfrey.
“The party needs to be able to answer tough questions,” Susan Polakoff Shaw, a leader of the group of activists at a bar outside of Cleveland, Ohio. A dozen Democrats attended a meeting with Kathleen Clyde, a state party leader, who was peppered with questions like “What are we going to do differently?” and “Why don’t the Democrats have a good message?”
Clyde apparently wasn't expecting the opposition from the activists. “We do have a good message!” she sputtered. “Affordability!”
“How are you going to do that?” one of the activists demanded.
"We’re still pissed that we lost the election in 2024—and we’re pissed at them for not doing a better job of standing up to the Republicans and to Trump," said Polakoff Shaw.
This shouldn't be happening. The political landscape favors the Democrats. Both history and the sour mood of the country should be giving the Democrats an advantage. The party in power usually loses seats in a midterm election, and the nation's grousing about inflation and "affordability" gives the Democrats a decent issue to run on.
But if all you do is scream "affordability" into a microphone and say "Orange Man Bad," the voters are going to wonder if you're really understanding their problems.
Midterms are usually turnout elections, where the party that gets more of its voters to the polls wins. The activists are enthusiastic enough. But what about the average Democratic voter?
Across America, the Democrats’ cup runneth over with activist spirit. Indivisible, the national network of activist groups, says that it now has about 2,800 confirmed active chapters—more than double what it had before the 2024 election. The number of people getting involved during Trump’s second term as president “is dramatically higher” than it was in his first, Leah Greenberg, a co-founder of the group, told me. Similarly, about 80,000 people signed up to run for office through Run for Something in 2025, more than the number who did during the entirety of Trump’s first term, the group told me. Red, Wine & Blue, a group that launched in 2019 to activate swing voters in the suburbs, has welcomed 200,000 new members after Trump’s second inauguration—a faster rate of growth than in either the 2020 or 2022 cycles. Organizers of the third “No Kings” protest, held in March, say they had 8 million participants, which would make it the largest single-day protest in American history.
“In 2018, there was a top-down resistance,” Amanda Litman, the executive director of Run for Something, told Godfrey. “That hasn’t felt true this time.” Instead, the base has led the way. And base voters are furious—partly at Trump, but also at their own leaders."
That's a huge problem because those "leaders" that the base is "furious" with are also running for office.
“The question we hear over and over is, "What are Democrats doing differently than in 2024 to make sure we win?”
This is, of course, the million-dollar question—and there has been no genuine institutional attempt to answer it. Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin has demonstrated an almost impressive inability to reassure and reinvigorate his party after its devastating losses in the 2024 election. Only after a sustained bullying campaign led, in part, by the Pod Save America hosts did Martin release the promised 2024 autopsy. The result? A half-finished report with few clear conclusions.
They couldn't be honest about why they got clobbered up and down the ballot. If they were forced to admit it was their activist base pushing radical gender ideology, reparations, socialism, and other odious un-American ideas, it would anger the radicals who might then break with the Democrats and form their own party.
So, Martin and the Democratic leadership buried the autopsy for more than a year before releasing an abridged version of it. And Democrats are as much in the dark about why they lost as they were the day after the election.
A recent Pew survey found that 59% of Americans believe our best days are behind us. That makes sense since they're fed a constant barrage of propaganda that the country sucks and that Trump is destroying democracy. I don't think anyone can predict what will happen in November. GOP gerrymandering, Democrats' anger at their own party, and the unhappiness in both parties over issues that are important to them leave pollsters guessing about turnout and party sentiment.
At the moment, I'd have to say that Republicans can maintain a tiny majority in the House and lose 1-2 seats in the Senate, leaving them with a smaller majority.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member