Disoriented Dems still don’t know what hit them

On Feb. 1, the Democratic National Committee will gather in suburban Maryland to elect a new chair. Every indication suggests they still don’t fully appreciate what happened to them in the 2024 election.

The two main contenders are Ken Martin, who is head of the Minnesota state Democratic Party, which is actually known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, and Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Press reports suggest Martin is running a little ahead of Wikler. A lot of the discussion of the race involves internal party matters, such as the distribution of resources, and not the details of Democratic positions on various hot political issues.

It’s on the big issues that the broader party is currently foundering, and there is no evidence they’ll find their way any time soon.

The fundamental question they face is how to focus and moderate their instinct to fight every single thing President Donald Trump does. The reason is obvious and simple. If some – perhaps many – of the things the president does are popular, then across-the-board Democratic resistance will serve to make Democrats unpopular. Some Democrats see the problem, and want to pick their spots to criticize, but others can’t help themselves.

“There are going to be people that are going to respond to everything that Trump says and want to form some sort of narrative,” Democratic Rep. Marc Veasey of Texas told the Washington Post. “I do think that we have to be careful on which fights we pick with him and what we choose to respond to. … Otherwise, he is going to win to a certain degree if we’re not really careful in that area.”

On the other side, another House Democrat, Rep. Pat Ryan of New York, argued that in Trump’s first week in office, Democrats “set the terms of the fight ahead,” by which he meant an ongoing billionaires vs. the people battle. He advocated constant political warfare. “If post-2016 was like a sort of street fight – a little bit sloppy, a lot of wild swinging – then I think 2025 has to be more like the close-quarters combat that I learned in the Army,” Ryan told Politico Playbook, “which is like a mix of jiu-jitsu and judo and a few other things where you’re using your enemies’ mistakes against them.”

What about those times, like now, when many Americans support what Ryan’s “enemies” – that would be President Trump and his supporters – are doing? The answer is not clear. We’ll see.

As this goes on, the Democratic Party’s media/intellectual base is deeply worried. In an essay headlined, “The Right Is Winning the Battle for Hearts and Minds,” the New York Times’ Thomas Edsall – employing classic Times language – noted that, “The full-scale assault by the conservative movement on liberal domination of the nation’s culture has begun to deliver key victories.”

The Right has moved beyond old strengths like talk radio to new strength in podcasts and social media, Edsall said, to challenge the Left’s domination of “academia, the literary world, the press, television, and streaming video.” That’s no small set of strengths on the Left, and no one should ever suggest that the Right has anything to match it. Nevertheless, Edsall suggests that the Left has been misusing its strengths for the wrong purposes, quoting a professor who said, “The big story from 2010 on is not Republicans growing more effective at messaging but Democrats growing increasingly out of step with the median voter as they catered ever more around the preferences of knowledge economy professionals.”

As all this talk goes on, inside the Democratic Party and its supporting groups, there’s one more thing to consider. As he starts just his second week in office, President Donald Trump is on a roll. On top of a barrage of executive actions, most notably on the border and immigration, Trump scored a victory over the weekend when the socialist president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, unexpectedly refused to accept planes from the U.S. bringing deported illegal immigrants back to their home country. Trump immediately responded with a threat of immediate retaliation – tariffs, visa holdups and more. Within an hour, Petro caved. Trump looked strong, and his adversaries looked weak.

The episode appeared to vindicate everything Trump has been saying – and Democrats have been denouncing – about his strategy to deport illegal border crossers, especially those who have committed additional crimes. Will it profit Democrats to engage in political jiu-jitsu against that? Probably not. The party still has to figure out how to address the new president’s successes.