Three things happened in rapid succession in one 24-hour period that illustrate the promise and the peril that lie ahead for Democrats: a 50-point special election victory, the reemergence of former Vice President Kamala Harris and 2024 recriminations, and the senseless murder of the influential conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

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Taken together, they show a party that is simultaneously well positioned to take advantage of public discontent with President Donald Trump but has learned no lessons from the last election, has no real leaders at the national level, and could be undone by its own base’s uncontrollable anger.

First, the good news for Democrats. Democrat James Walkinshaw won the Sept. 9 special election for Virginia’s 11th Congressional District, succeeding the late Rep. Gerry Connolly, with 75% of the vote. (For frame of reference, Connolly received 66.7% of the vote last year.) This further shrank the already slender Republican House majority. “This is the beginning of the end for Donald Trump’s reckless agenda,” Walkinshaw told a crowd of supporters celebrating his victory.

It’s not a swing congressional district by any means, but Walkinshaw’s win probably bodes well for Democrats in this year’s Virginia gubernatorial election. It also suggests that Democrats retain their special-election turnout advantage, which could, in turn, mean they will show up in droves during the midterm elections next year, when the whole House is up for reelection.

Then, the Atlantic published the first excerpt of Harris’s new book, 107 Days — the title refers to the length of her presidential campaign after she was belatedly bumped to the top of the Democratic ticket. Jeffrey Goldberg, the magazine’s editor, endorsed it in a note appended to the excerpt. “I read [Harris’s book] last week, expecting lawyerly calibration and discretion,” he wrote. “This careful Harris is present, but so too is another Harris: blunt, knowing, fervent, occasionally profane, slyly funny. As you will see in the following excerpt — and throughout this newsworthy book — she no longer seems particularly interested in holding back.”

If there was ever a time not to hold back, it’s now. Harris decided against a run for governor of California earlier this year. She still clearly harbors presidential ambitions, though it is unclear she has a second — or really, a third — act in national politics. But if there is to be one, Harris needs to convince Democratic voters that she has learned something from her loss and donors that the result will be different next time.

Harris distanced herself from former President Joe Biden, or at least his team, more than she ever has before. She conceded that it was “recklessness” for the then-81-year-old to plunge forward with a reelection bid with seemingly little deliberation or introspection. “The stakes were simply too high,” she wrote. “This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”

Just don’t blame Harris! “I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out,” she wrote. “He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don’t let the other guy win.”

Harris also felt the Biden White House should have done more to defend her despite the fact that she was running her own campaign. “They had a huge comms team; they had Karine Jean-Pierre briefing in the pressroom every day. But getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible,” Harris wrote.

There was also plenty of fluff, not really containing enough nutritional value to be called word salad. “As vice president I’d been given several roles by Joe Biden,” she wrote. “But one role I created for myself was building up the diverse coalition that our party encompassed.”

The rift now out in the open, Bidenworld swiftly hit back. “Vice President Harris was simply not good at the job,” a former White House official complained to Axios after the book excerpt dropped. “She had basically zero substantive role in any of the administration’s key work streams, and instead would just dive bomb in for stilted photo ops that exposed how out of depth she was.”

This was always Harris’s real problem. She could not convincingly distance herself from Biden’s self-inflicted wounds on inflation and the border — don’t call her the border czar! — without effectively saying she played no meaningful role in the administration. Harris also had to run with a disgruntled incumbent president, who had been all but forced out of the race, looking over her shoulder. In a close race, she could not afford to have even a diminished and unpopular Biden go rogue.

Those were strategic problems that needed to be resolved in 2024, not in retrospect. Now that Harris is suddenly willing to say the heretofore unsayable about Biden, she faces a new challenge: Do Democrats really want to be talking about Joe Biden? The answer is almost certainly no. The latest jobs revisions show that the Biden economy was as weak as the voters thought. Even socialists are campaigning against the high cost of living. 

Biden and, by extension, Harris will be remembered even and perhaps especially by Democrats as symbolizing disappointment and defeat. Yet Harris lingers near the top of the 2028 Democratic presidential contenders in most polling because the party lacks viable alternatives with comparable name identification.

Democrats did not get very far into this new wave of 2024 second-guessing before a gunshot rang out in Utah. The prominent conservative influencer Charlie Kirk was struck in the neck by an assassin’s bullet. As I write this, the shooter’s identity remains unknown. But the Wall Street Journal reported the day after the murder, “A high-powered rifle, including ammunition engraved with transgender and antifascist ideology, was recovered in a wooded area where the suspected shooter fled.”

Mainstream Democratic leaders, including Biden, Harris, and former President Barack Obama, almost universally said the right things in the hours after Kirk’s death. “The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile, and reprehensible,” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who has overtaken Harris in some polls of Democratic primary voters as their top 2028 choice, wrote on X. “In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY form.” (Emphasis in the original.)

A few cracks appeared. When a Republican member of Congress asked House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) if the moment of silence for Kirk could be changed to spoken prayer, a shouting match with the chamber’s Democrats ensued. Democratic lawmakers contrasted the GOP’s interest in Kirk with a school shooting earlier in the day and reiterated their preference for gun control legislation over “thoughts and prayers” in both instances. “You f***ing own this,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) exclaimed at the Democrats.

Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL) made sure to insert some criticism of Trump into his denunciation of political violence. “And I would just say, [political violence has] got to stop, and I think there are people who are fomenting it in this country,” he said. “I think the president’s rhetoric often foments it. We’ve seen the Jan. 6 rioters who clearly have tripped a new era of political violence, and the president, what did he do? He pardoned them. I mean, what kind of signal does that send to people who want to perpetrate political violence? Not a good one.”

Pritzker is likely to run for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination in the tough-on-Trump lane. Newsom is also instructive here. He initially seemed to want to recapture the voters Democrats had lost, hosting Kirk and former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon on his podcast. But Newsom seems to have found his footing nationally by catering to angry anti-Trump Democrats, his conciliatory remarks in the aftermath of Kirk’s shooting notwithstanding. 

More importantly, we are witnessing extreme manifestations of the intense anger felt by much of the Democratic base. Whatever turns out to be the motive of Kirk’s assassin, the websites Bluesky and Reddit were teeming with left-wing celebrations of his death. It is always difficult to determine how representative the obsessions of the very online are of the real world. But from the Congressional Baseball Game practice shootings that wounded House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) to the assassination attempts against Trump, at least some people are prepared to act on these sentiments.

A recent NBC News-Decision Desk poll found that between a fifth and a quarter of respondents were “furious” about the things the second Trump administration has done since the president returned to office. This is on top of another tenth who are merely “angry.” Taken together, that is a lot of negative energy in the electorate.

That sentiment could help Democrats in future elections. The “resistance” often shows up when other voters stay home, precisely because they are so angry at Trump and want to take it out on someone. But the anger and radicalization have to be managed by Democratic leaders, if not for the sake of the country, then at least to avoid a political backlash. The killing of Kirk could prove a major motivator for Republicans, just as the Butler shooting of Trump was in 2024. 

Kirk doesn’t have quite the same stature as Trump or the highest-profile victims of assassinations during a similar wave of violence in the 1960s (think John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.). But he had major cultural resonance with young conservatives and played a crucial role, along with Elon Musk, in turning out low-propensity young male voters for Trump in 2024. Kirk and Musk went up against the vaunted Biden-Harris turnout machine in the battleground states and won.

So, where does that leave the Democrats nine months into Trump’s second term? They are favored to win the governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey, though the former appears to be tightening. Democrats seem poised to elect a socialist mayor in New York City. The leading alternative to that outcome is former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Democrats are doing fairly well in the generic congressional ballot, which tests which party voters prefer to control Congress. They lead by 3.3 points, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. History is also on their side because the party that controls the White House has nearly always lost House seats in the midterm elections going back to 1938. In Trump’s first midterm election in 2018, Democrats gained 40 seats, teeing up two impeachments.

Forty seats would be tough to pick up in 2026. There aren’t as many swing seats in play. Last time, Republicans were defending more than two dozen districts won by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016. Only three currently represent districts Harris carried last year. Most House Republicans hail from districts Trump won in a landslide.

At the same time, the House majority is so small that it wouldn’t take much for Democrats to flip it. That’s why there is a fight over redistricting across multiple states, especially red Texas and blue California. But the Democrats have lost ground to Republicans in voter registration in all 30 states that register voters by party, suggesting Kirk’s 2024 get-out-the-vote work may outlive him. The Democratic Party also keeps polling at record lows.

“The Democratic Party is less popular than the Republican Party,” NBC News political analyst Steve Kornacki told viewers. “Neither is doing great, but the Democrats [are] more unpopular. We did not see that during Trump’s first term. We are seeing that during Trump’s second term.”

Congressional Democrats may head into the fall picking a government shutdown fight with the Trump administration. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) triggered a revolt when he worked to avert a previous shutdown rather than fight Trump. He does not appear interested in risking that backlash a second time.

A lot can change by 2026, especially with so much uncertainty in the economy and global affairs. But at the moment, the leaderless Democrats’ best-case scenario may be a midterm election that is like 2022 in the sense that the party out of power experiences modest gains, resembling the wave elections of 1994 or 2010 only in the sense of not telling us much about the subsequent presidential race.

HOUSE FLOOR ERUPTS IN CHAOS AFTER MOMENT OF SILENCE FOR CHARLIE KIRK

Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama lost big in those midterm elections but went on to win reelection. Trump’s trajectory might have been similar if not for the pandemic. Now he is back and set to be a term-limited incumbent.

If the electorate tires of Trump, Democrats may benefit because they are the only option. But they still have a lot of work to do.

W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.