“Democrats in the Wilderness,” blares the headline from Politico, as the sub-headline promises to take us, “Inside a decimated party’s not-so-certain revival strategy.”The piece explains the terrible verdict of the election: “What’s clear from interviews with several dozen top Democratic politicians and operatives at all levels…is that there is no comeback strategy—just a collection of half-formed ideas, all of them challenged by reality.”But this apocalyptic portrait wasn’t published in 2024. It was in January of 2017. And we all know what happened next. Democrats won special elections in House districts that Trump had won, as Trump showed his dangerous self. And a blue wave in the 2018 midterms gave Democrats control of the House, winning 40 seats. This was after prognosticators had said in late 2016 it would be very difficult for Democrats to take the House, and that if they did, it would be a very narrow win. By 2020, Democrats won the White House and the Senate, while they still retained the House. And they would go on to get an enormous amount done—including keeping Republicans from having the much-predicted 2022 red wave even as they won the House, where they got nothing done.Now a new Politico story in 2024, exclusively sharing “focus group” research by the progressive group Navigator Research, tells us it’s “the latest troubling pulse check for a party still sorting through the wreckage of its November losses and looking for a path to rebuild. Without a clear party leader and with losses across nearly every demographic in November, Democrats are walking into a second Trump presidency without a unified strategy to improve their electoral prospects.”In 2016, there was gloom-and-doom story after story telling us about Democrats in crisis and disarray—and with lots of “focus group” research behind them, or just plain old hunches and bad conventional wisdom—just like there are today. We see prominent strategists and political figures warning that Democrats need to do this or that after the 2024 election, still pointing fingers, even after Trump won the popular vote by the smallest margin in 25 years, just 1.5%.NOTUS quotes New York Congressman Ritchie Torres, for example, in yet another story this week that tiredly still positions the issue of trans rights as pivotal in the election when it was not.I’m often not shy about expressing opinions, but for me, it’s actually politically the hardest issue. I have no good answers. I am not clear; you know, it just simply could be the case that it’s a losing issue for Democrats. I have not figured out what message would be effective at neutralizing that issue politically.But Torres, co-chair of the Equality Caucus in the House, should know better as a gay man. There was a time when Democrats thought gay marriage was the ongoing complete disaster for a party that, at that time, tepidly defended LGBTQ people. That was when John Kerry lost in 2004 narrowly to George W. Bush, who’d championed a federal marriage amendment, using it against Kerry and Democrats even as Democrats themselves didn’t support marriage equality. Republicans won the White House, the Senate, and the House.After that 2004 election, we saw the same media headlines we saw in 2016 and in 2024 about Democrats. But then Bush’s mishandling of the Iraq War continued. He squandered his win on a reckless campaign to privatize Social Security that galvanized Democrats. They trounced in the 2006 midterms. Bush, meanwhile, badly mishandled Hurricane Katrina.And then came the Great Recession, built on the banking crisis caused by Bush and the GOP’s deregulation and the billions spent on the war. And then Barack Obama, a Black man, became president, winning by a larger margin than any president in recent times (followed by Joe Biden). And the Democrats won both the House and the Senate—with a filibuster-proof majority. LGBTQ activists and others pushed Democrats to run on equality—not run away from it—and Obama changed minds as the country embraced same-sex marriage.There was so much more. The point is, don’t count Democrats out, nor the base of the party. And, while being energized, organized, and clear-eyed, don’t count on Trump being able to do as much as we feared, as quickly as we feared, because he’s shown he had no blowout and is exposing his weaknesses. It will not be years of wilderness, nor is there a special soul-searching needed now. As I’ve written several times, the overreaction risks an overcorrection that could actually dampen the base.Whether there were almost insurmountable issues in the presidential race that played out in many other countries post-pandemic, or mistakes in campaigns and among strategists and candidates, it’s paramount that it’s all discussed. And of course there is much Democrats can and should learn from a devastating loss—and it was devastating to have Trump re-elected. No one is sugar-coating that.But Trump had no coattails, and Democrats are well-positioned—much better than in 2016—to showcase Trump’s reckless actions, as the GOP struggles with the narrowest House majority in a century. Those Democratic politicians and progressive activists and pundits who are now trying to reach out to Trump and MAGA—whatever their motives—will surely be burned.Trump is already showing how chaotic, mismanaged, and dangerous his administration will be. The shutdown fiasco, which revealed him as being in the grip of Elon Musk and the billionaire class, was followed by the Matt Gaetz nomination meltdown. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg—Trump is not even president yet. Now that the Gaetz report is public, we see how Trump was ready to put this predator in charge of the Justice Department.And Trump is hellbent on putting one—Pete Hegseth—at the Defense Department. And then there are all of the other nominees and the batshit crazy stuff Trump is saying, like taking over Greenland and Panama.The issues that Democrats championed, and which President Biden delivered on, are broadly popular. The issues that Trump has promised to deliver on, from mass deportations to tariffs, are broadly unpopular. “Majority of Americans oppose Trump’s proposals to test democracy’s limits,” The Washington Post reported on its poll last week. A Reuters poll from last week found Trump with only 41% approval coming into his presidency, while he had 51% at this point in 2016.Polls, of course, are just polls, as I always caution, and there are others showing Trump with a bit more support. It’s real numbers, however, that we have to follow. And on that, the issues of abortion, threats to democracy, and civil rights did not suddenly disappear. They brought Democrats victories in special elections and down-ballot in 2024 itself, where Democrats held onto or flipped key Senate, House, state legislative seats and state court races.These and other issues are still massive for Democrats and many other Americans, as we watch what Trump and the GOP will do. To be sure, we rightly warned Trump would be a fascist, and that a second term could end democracy. So I know it seems incongruent to say we shouldn’t be dooming. And we surely want Democrats to continue to sound the alarm that Trump is dangerous instead of normalizing him, as some are doing (and predictably getting called out by the GOP for having previously said he was a fascist).But there are two kinds of dooming. One is constructive, a fear that motivates people to action. The other is paralyzing, with no sense of hope. That’s not only not a way out of this; it’s actually wrong in this moment because of how narrowly Trump won and how impulsive and yet feeble he’s showing himself to be.No one knows for sure how things will play out, but judging by the past, those fighting for rights and freedom are not giving up. So it’s time to stop the doom and gloom.NOW READ: New lessons for progressives — from the far right
