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, Va., to former supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders’s 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.
