SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – Exactly one month after losing to Donald Trump in every battleground on the map, Democratic Party leaders from across the country moved to one of the states that rejected them and fought their way out of their slump.
At a Hilton hotel outside Phoenix, where Christmas carols played in the lobby, the state Democratic chairmen gathered for their annual winter meeting. They weren’t frantic as they had been after Trump’s first surprising victory. They were exhausted. Even after Trump tapped people like Kash Patel and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to staff his administration, they still weren’t ready to take to the streets or tune into liberal networks.
But they were inching toward the anger phase of the grief cycle as they gathered in ballrooms and swapped theories about what went wrong. They pointed the finger at those they considered overpaid consultants, expressed despair that working-class voters of all stripes had abandoned them, and regretted having lectured voters instead of listening to them.
“We need to get the House back, not fund consultants who want to buy a new house!” said Ken Martin, president of the Association of Democratic State Committees, in a speech to hundreds of attendees.
While waiting for pizza after hours of meetings, Judson Scanlon, political director of a PAC that produced “White Dudes for Harris” hats, confessed to being one of the Democrats who stopped watching MSNBC after Trump returned to power.
“Since 2016, all we’ve heard about is the crazy things this guy does when he’s president and when he’s not,” Scanlon said. “I’m sick of it.”
This collusion marked one of the first major meetings of top Democrats since last month’s disastrous election. They had once hoped to finally be able to celebrate the end of the Trump era here. Instead, as the recriminations continued, they urged each other to put on a brave face despite losing the White House to a convicted felon and being banned from both chambers of Congress.
Liberal network ratings have plummeted since Trump’s return to power, one of several signs that Democrats are in something of a retreat as they try to get their bearings, sifting through reams of data and hot takes in hopes of figuring out what led them to lose. the popular vote for the first time in 20 years. Many progressives have abandoned social media platform X and are not planning for the massive marches that took place after Trump’s first victory.
“Why don’t you see the marches? Black women right now are tired. They’re really tired,” said Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee who announced after Trump’s victory that he would not run for re-election. “Many of them put everything they had into this race to have one of their own elected president of the United States.”
Perhaps because they don’t have the energy for it, Democrats in Arizona were also in no mood for the kind of protracted ideological battle they waged after 2016.
That was clear in the way the four candidates to lead the Democratic National Committee tried to persuade state party leaders to vote for them in next year’s election.
In their speeches, none of the Democratic National Committee chair candidates argued that Democrats should undergo a radical change in their worldview. Unlike some progressive parts of the Democratic ecosystem, no one argued that Trump’s victory shows that they need to embrace a bold, concrete promise like Medicare for All or, from the other end of the party spectrum, that they need to urgently shift to focusing on issues transgender.
Instead, most presented themselves as competent managers and presented technical solutions.
Martin, who heads the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, said he helped lead his state’s Democrats out of a crisis after the 2010 midterm elections that then-President Barack Obama called a “beating.” He argued that “our party does not need to be torn down and rebuilt.”
He has entered the race as an early favorite, securing about half of the endorsements needed to win. In Arizona, their fans were sporting “YES WE KEN!” bellmen and set up a makeshift war room called “Ken Quarters.”
Like Martin, Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler told the crowd that he had righted the ship in his state, where “we have been able to win seven of the last 10 state elections.” He called for a “permanent campaign” with an omnipresent national organization.
When the candidates for chairman of the Democratic National Committee called for changes, they talked more about transformative tactics than ideological reforms.
Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley said in his speech that the party needs to do things differently to win. But, he said, “the good news is that the change is really just a return to ourselves to be a party of workers across America.”
And O’Malley also said he was a “proven operational change leader,” noting that President Joe Biden had trusted him to revamp the Social Security Administration when he named him his commissioner.
James Skoufis, a little-known senator from New York state who represents a Trump-loving district, was the furthest advocate for transforming the Democratic National Committee. But he spoke more about strategies than ideology and said he would appear on Fox News and Joe Rogan’s podcast, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris’ decision to reject the program whose interview with Trump had 52 million views on YouTube.
He also promised to end “sweetheart deals” and “contracts with vendors that have been defrauding the Democratic National Committee for cycles.”
Some big-name Democrats who could swing the race for Democratic National Committee chairman, such as U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel or Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, could still decide to run.
At times, some Democrats argued that they needed to stay the course on cultural issues.
In a fiery speech, Harrison lashed out at critics of his party who want to move away from “identity politics.” Democrats began their meeting Thursday with a “land acknowledgment,” a symbolic gesture guaranteeing that the land a person is on previously belonged to Native Americans, who conservatives have derided as “woke.”
As Democrats tried to find a way forward, some here had a quiet sense that they wouldn’t be out of power for long. It was a stark contrast to others in his party who fear a realignment could rob them of power for years. After all, these Democrats reasoned, Americans had voted for Trump before and then quickly tired of him, as evidenced by the 2018 midterm elections and then again in the 2020 presidential election. They were comforted by the fact that the Voters this year supported liberal ballot initiatives and Democratic Senate candidates in states Trump won.
“Something had to work for Ruben Gallego to win a Senate seat right here against someone who was a Trump sycophant in Kari Lake terms,” Harrison said. “Those mixed results do not say that this was a landslide victory. “It doesn’t say it’s an existential crisis for the Democratic Party.”
Peggy Grove, vice chairwoman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, said they have a “good chance” of winning the House in the midterm elections.
“Yesterday was the day of the bitch,” he said. “Today the reconstruction began.”