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Pod Save America host Jon Favreau interviewed DNC Chair Ken Martin yesterday after months of criticizing Martin's leadership on the podcast. Martin apparently requested an appearance to defend himself, but the attempt backfired severely. Favreau's discontent stems from the DNC's unwillingness to release their "autopsy" on Kamala Harris' loss in the 2024 presidential election - a viewpoint Ken Martin once claimed to agree with during his Chair campaign.
Obviously Martin is in a difficult position (indeed, I wouldn't envy any white man attempting to lead the Democratic Party) because 1) everyone knows the autopsy will be humiliating for Harris, 2) Harris may be a future presidential candidate, and 3) donor funds rely on the DNC or their candidates not being revealed to have acted incompetently.
But really, Martin going back on his campaign promise is not of note here - keeping the autopsy to themselves is likely the right move to retain any dignity. More interesting is the bellwether progressive media mouthpiece openly targeting their ideological and sociopolitical wellspring. Favreau seems to conflate the burial of the autopsy with peril in future elections, as if 1) the Democrats have a history of being honest and confessional and 2) the mistakes of the DNC in 2024 are not apparent. I often question whether PSA are true believers or the modern equivalent of César Chavez's "don't want to hurt the cause" club, but here Favreau radiates (or pretends to radiate) true-believer-dom to a naive and childish extent. Of course he wants to see his party be honest - they're the good guys.
In the end, Ken Martin looks like Jerry from Fargo and Favreau looks like a kid struggling to accept that Santa Claus isn't real. But I don't expect either to leave their post - Martin is too valuable as a scapegoat and Favreau has a comfortable incentive to just keep swimming.
Democrats face a few short-to-medium-term political problems if they can't correct course:
Winning the midterms is not enough to solve these problems. Control of the House would give Democrats the power to open investigations into Trump officials and start waging more of an active war against the administration. But it doesn't solve any of these deeper problems. (And who knows, the Trump admin could win any war over public opinion: Democrats are still unpopular.)
So they need to win the Presidency.
One way for Democrats to win is to half-repudiate peak woke. Admit some things went too far, stop talking about censorship and trans rights, pivot to healthcare and industrial policy, loudly promise not to let in thirty million illegal immigrants, quietly promise to be lefter than Trump. Voters might not trust this pitch, but they could be convinced if Democrats really did learn their lesson. Voters could be sold "let's be nicer to illegal immigrants" if it really isn't a workaround for open borders.
Another way for Democrats to win is to do the same thing over again and expect a different result. Everything is fine, identity politics, DEI, trans kids, amnesty, Democratic policies have always been correct about everything and there are no trade-offs for anything.
Enter Harris.
Kamala Harris represents, more than anything else, the fantasy that Democrats didn't do anything wrong. If Kamala wins the Presidency, one can imagine the world without Trump. Kamala was fated to win all along, Trump's win was just a moment in time, Trump has finally aged out of office, everything Republicans did in the interim was a temporary fate, Trump can finally be defeated. Kamala is the good timeline. If anyone else wins, it implicitly acknowledges that Trump did win after all, the Democratic party has had to change and accommodate itself (even if as opposition). And Harris was supposed to win. It's nice to imagine that Democrats were right all along. The only problems with 2024 were some technical quibbles about where to best spend the ad money and that whole thing with only having three months to run her campaign.
The problem is that Kamala remains a bad candidate. She was always a bad candidate. Everybody, left and right, acknowledged that she was a bad candidate right up until the moment Biden conceded and Democrats suddenly all discovered at the same time that Kamalalala was a great candidate all along -- and a black woman no less!
Outside of the Democratic bubble though, Kamala remains a bad candidate. She's a weak speaker. She endorsed unpopular hard left positions and never walked them back, except to explain that she's a moderate now. She's not especially smart and has no special grasp of the issues. She doesn't have a special vision for the country or a special relationship with the voters. She's a weak campaigner and a weak politician. She has all of Hillary Clinton's vices and none of her virtues. And she's a black woman, which means that under the social rules of DEI she cannot be criticized on any of these terms.
Well, Democrats could run her again and they could win. Maybe they get lucky, maybe 2024 was just unlucky. But it doesn't speak well of their chances if they can't have hard and honest conversations like "Kamala Harris is a bad candidate and the only reason we have her is DEI decorum that made Biden pick her as a VP". Because voters really don't like this stuff. And then the victory plan has to be that voters just dislike whatever Republicans are offering more.
So Jon Favreau has to fight for open access to things like the 2024 autopsy. Because that's how you start talking about whether Kamala Harris is really the best candidate for Democrats to win in 2028.
Ultimately, I'm skeptical it will be anybody but Harris. The fantasy she exercises that Trump can be banished to marginalia of history is powerful for Democrats. Elite Democrats still run the party on more or less the same terms they did in 2016 and 2020 and 2024 and can be negotiated with to put their thumbs on the scale. And neither high nor low is convinced they ever did anything wrong. (Try asking any of them if it was wrong to support Biden in 2024 -- they'll refuse to concede the point and will immediately attack Trump over his age instead. I've never gotten a different answer.)
This is exactly the consultant-brained nonsense that the DNC is likely to continue doubling down on and losing with. "We're almost as Republican as the Republicans!" is not a winning message for anyone other than the DNC donors who want Republican policies and there to not be an effective opposition to them. Voters presented with "Republican-lite" or "Republican" on the ballot are going to continue to vote Republican or stay home.
Woke social policies are not popular. The Democrats under Biden let in tens of millions of illegal immigrants after allowing a crisis at the border, and refuse to own up to it. The Democratic party brand is tarnished with the idea of trans kids, health care for illegal immigrants, lax policing and crime, homeless junkies in public parks, Israel-Palestine divisions, DEI racial and sexual discrimination against whites and young men, and above all their refusal to debate any of these preferences openly. The Party lives in such a bubble that they could not do anything about Joe Biden until his debate performance was so obviously senile that he had to be replaced, which could not even be admitted in public. Which was followed by Kamala Harris, a mediocre candidate everybody disliked who was promoted to VP solely because of her sex and race, which could also not be openly discussed by Democrats anywhere.
Realistically, at the same time, Democrats could have lots of popular successes on other issues. Trans kids are not popular but a mild trans toleration is more in line with American tastes than a trans crackdown. Same with immigration, and guns. Democrats who could convincingly project moderate positions on these social issues -- that are not assumed to be covers for more extreme positions -- would be popular. This would give Democrats lots of room to push their economic agenda, which is broadly popular. Democrats could have healthcare, tariffs, and infrastructure. This is basically what someone like Josh Shapiro did. A national platform along these lines would probably be very successful. In fact, I think if Democrats had adopted something like this all along they would never have lost to Trump in the first place.
Well, it's your choice. But I have correctly identified that you have two options: on woke you can back down or double down. That's what the public dislikes about Democrats the most. That's the most salient issue Democrats could change. It's not the other policies that need working, voters don't like woke. At best you can offer them other policies that make the poison pill go down sweeter. Which requires that whatever Republicans do is worse to voters than woke. Well, maybe it will happen that way. But it's not much of a choice. Double down and hope that Republicans screw up. Good luck!
This is basically the Tony Blair approach to government, and indeed it worked gangbusters for 15 years.
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They can't, though; the well is truly poisoned. That's why the strategy nowadays is more to energize the base than than to woo the normies, with the second prong of the strategy to try to scare the normies away from the other side.
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I'm old enough to remember when "almost as Republican as the Republicans" meant forgetting about economic leftism, and pretending the wokeness is what made the Democrats "left". It's also peak cope to act like anti-wokeness is consultant brained - all over the world it's unpopular with voters, but popular with the elites.
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I would bet on either a blue-state governor like Shapiro or Newsom, or a young chud like Piker or Mamdani being the 2028 DNC nominee over Harris, but I think the broad strokes of your analysis are sound.
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Kamala is not going to be the nominee regardless.
Why not? It's too soon to really predict confidently but: she polls extremely well among the base, has a national profile few other Dems can match, is already integrated the party elite and can fundraise / network / cut deals etc., she's demographically correct in a party still hesitant to challenge DEI orthodoxies, and she has made indications she's interested in running. She's probably the front-runner.
Gavin Newsom is probably the closest real competitor he has issues that can't be papered over with his bad impression of Trump on twitter. An outcome just as likely is somebody we aren't really thinking about yet going on a barn burner. That's how we got Bill Clinton and Obama.
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