Democrats fear they are missing the moment to remake the party

Several dozen Democratic political operatives had just gathered to discuss the party’s future at an upscale resort nestled along the Potomac River when the very first speaker unleashed a blistering address about the “hard truths” they needed to confront.

“Now is not the time for taking refuge in comforting platitudes,” said Jonathan Cowan, the president of the centrist group Third Way, which had organized the private event last week. “Now is not the time to bet on the other guys” messing up “so badly that we win simply by not being them.”

The remark, with a much coarser term than “messing,” reflected a deepening distress, shared by a wide range of Democratic strategists, lawmakers and donors, that the party is at risk of missing a critical window for introspection and reform in the aftermath of the devastating 2024 election.

The fear is that Democrats are squandering one of the few silver linings of losing: the chance to learn lessons from defeat.

“You have a come-to-Jesus moment as a team — and that’s very useful,” said Maurice Mitchell, the national director of Working Families Party.

Unless, of course, that moment doesn’t come about.

The fretting spans the party’s ideological spectrum, from the Third Way moderates who met at the Lansdowne Resort in Leesburg, Virginia, to former supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ left-wing presidential bids. All are eager to rearrange the party more to their ideological liking, though their views of how to fix what went wrong are often diametrically opposed.

There is almost universal agreement on a diagnosis of the party’s problem with the working class. The question is if there will be any consensus on a treatment plan.

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. Already, a blizzard of organizations are holding focus groups, conducting polls and studying voting patterns to assess the severity of the situation, especially the party’s worrisome decline with groups where it once held sizable advantages, like younger voters and Latinos.

The pressure for Democrats to push back on President Donald Trump’s expansive agenda further complicates any prospect of a unified, rigorous “autopsy” like the one Republicans conducted in 2012. Opposing 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.

Rep. Ro Khanna of California, who was a co-chair of the 2020 Sanders campaign, framed the party’s choice in terms of its ambitions: settle for simply being the opposition, and hope that is enough to win the House narrowly in 2026, or boldly reinvent the party altogether.

“If you’re just a tactician, then you say, ‘OK, let them overreach,’” Khanna said in an interview. “If the Democrats aspire to more than just getting back control, if we actually aspire to building a governing majority and trying to solve the fundamental divides in this country, and the fundamental anger, then we need to recognize we have a lot of work to do.”

Whatever tensions there are between aggressively battling back against Trump now and a broader rebranding, the reality is that how the current fight unfolds is most likely the first chapter in the new party’s story.

For disillusioned Democrats, too much of the postelection focus has been on tactics, and too much time has been spent second-guessing past decisions — Should former President Joe Biden have dropped out sooner? Should former Vice President Kamala Harris have gone on Joe Rogan’s podcast? — when what is needed is a deeper discussion of whether the party’s policies and priorities are repelling voters.

A recent Quinnipiac University poll showed favorable views of the Democratic Party at their lowest level ever, and favorable views of the Republican Party at their highest.

“Everyone has their pet theory for why the Democratic Party is in crisis,” said Waleed Shahid, a progressive strategist, who urged leaders to sit with rank-and-file workers to better understand their anger and aspirations.

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