Poor Ken Martin doesn’t know which way to turn. First, the DNC Chair commissions a report from a Washington insider consultant (always a great idea!) to review why Democrats lost in 2024. Then, after he sees a draft and doesn’t like it, he announces nobody may see what he doesn’t like. Now last week for some reason he goes ahead and releases the damn thing anyway, even while disavowing it. And, on top of it all, the report is useless because it doesn’t even begin to address what’s fundamentally wrong with the party. It’s also poorly written.
So, as a service to my party (the Democrats are still my party, pending further review and a deep search into my soul scheduled for this summer), I am providing Ken with YSDA’s own analysis produced by our research and analytics division up on the sprawling tenth floor of YSDA Tower. Here goes:
The Democrats’ problems in 2024 started in 2020. Joe Biden made a mistake by first announcing that he would pick a Black woman to be his running mate and then choosing an especially bad vice president in Kamala Harris. This was a mistake on two levels. First, by announcing in advance that his choice had to be a Black woman, he signaled to voters that race and gender were of primary importance to the Democratic Party. That’s very unpopular. It was also insulting to Black women because it made his choice inevitably appear to be one where actual merit was only a secondary consideration, at best.
Then, even so constrained, Biden had much better choices than Harris. Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, for example, had a record of accomplishment in running one of America’s biggest, most vibrant and most diverse cities. She was also from a competitive state. Yet, for reasons that defy explanation, he chose Harris. Maybe, as a long-time senator himself, he had an out-sized appreciation for senators. In any event, what he didn’t appreciate was that her long record as a California Democrat assured that she had taken positions that would be far out of step with most voters. And, in fact, the most effective ad against her highlighted a statement she had once made in favor of taxpayer funded transgender operations for California prisoners.
Things only got worse when Biden and Harris took office. Shortly into his administration, moderate Democratic House member Abigail Spanberger (now Virginia’s governor) observed that, “People wanted Joe Biden to be normal. Nobody elected him to be FDR.”
But Biden was, first and foremost, a politician who could not stop running or clinging to public office. He moved to the left because that’s where the power is in the Democratic Party and he had every intention from the start of running for a second term. So, he blindly embraced the entire hard-left canon — open borders, transgender rights, identity politics, paying off everybody’s college loans, spending like there’s no tomorrow and more.
And also, crucially, he catered to the left by racing to get out of Afghanistan — even ahead of the timeline Trump had set. As a result of that hasty withdrawal, things went badly. The withdrawal was such a deadly mess — 13 American soldiers were killed — that it recalled the disastrous end to America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Biden, who had based much of his campaign on simple competence, saw his poll numbers plummet. They never recovered.
Then, of course, despite these awful poll numbers, Biden insisted on running for a second term for no other reason than he loved being in the White House and, as a lifelong politician, he didn’t know what else to do. His family and his aides covered up for his impairments until they couldn’t be denied after his disastrous debate performance in June of 2024.
Now, here’s a twist on the common narrative. This did not handicap Harris. Quite the opposite. Because there was no time for a primary, the party quickly rallied behind her. Money and endorsements poured in. Had she had to run in a primary, she still would have gotten the nomination because this party simply would not deny it to a Black woman who was next in line. But the primary would have been bruising and expensive and she would have had to spend time mending fences.
Harris actually ran a good campaign. She tried mightily to move to the center, but her fate was sealed from the start. She could not erase the things she said as a liberal California politician. (This, by the way, should be a rule going forward: nominate no one from California.)
The story of what happened in 2024 is emblematic of the fundamental problems faced by the party. The problem, as the late Barney Frank pointed out, is that our progressive activists are out of step with the bulk of voters. And it’s the progressives (“hard-left” is a better description as they are hardly progressive) that are the root of the party’s problem. As long as people think of them when they think of us, we lose.
Moreover, we can’t shake the hard-left. They define us and they won’t go away and they won’t shut up. Thus, while we should do well in November simply because Democrats will show up and Trump voters won’t, in the long-run we’re screwed.
But we do have a recommendation, which is simply this: split the party. Split the party into the Progressive Democrats and the Moderate Democrats. Not third parties, but parties within in a party. Each sub party would have its own platform and nominate its own candidates in primaries, but each would vow to support the other’s candidate should they prevail. And every four years the party would still come together in a joint national convention.
The advantage to this is that both parts of the party could feel that they are being fully represented and neither side’s candidates would have to pull their punches to avoid alienating the other faction. To be honest, we propose this in part because it’s likely to favor the moderates in the end. After all, going too far with moderation is something of an oxymoron. But progressives, already barely tethered to reality, will just fly off the planet. Moderates will win more primaries and then more general elections.
And there you have it, Ken. Pay us whatever you think is appropriate in a free will offering.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 