Democrats, having lost everything to President Donald Trump, have been searching their soul for the past six months — and debating the findings.

Should they moderate, become more populist, lay off the culture-war stuff, or tack in some other direction? Or maybe, the more facile suggest, they simply have a messaging problem.

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Before any of this analysis, though, Democrats need to engage in a journey of self-discovery. Before asking what they should do, they need to understand who they are — and who they are not.

They believe they are the party of the working man, the party of Hispanics, the majoritarian party, and the party of science and competence. They are wrong.

Theirs was an easy self-image to hold on to throughout the Obama years and the first Trump term, but the Biden years and the 2024 election made this self-delusion untenable.

The majoritarians against democracy

For years, Democrats have portrayed themselves as the defenders of democracy. This is an important self-image because it seemingly transcends politics.

If the other side is not merely wrong on policy matters but is in fact a threat to the very constitutional system, then the rules of fair play can go out the window. You can declare them illegitimate, justify censoring them, and liberate the media from pretending to treat them fairly.

Their recurring claim for decades is this: Whenever the majority gets to speak, Democrats win; Republicans only win by subverting the will of the majority. This self-image wasn’t born with Trump’s violent refusal to accept his 2020 election loss. It goes back far earlier than that. They have been claiming for years that all of their losses were due only to undemocratic forces.

In 2000, of course, Democrats claimed that the Supreme Court stole the election from former Vice President Al Gore.

After losing in 2016, Democrats again claimed that they really should have won. Their first point was factually true: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote. That’s akin to pointing out that your team scores more runs than the other in the World Series while losing 4 of 6 games.

More improbably, they tried to claim that the election was hacked by Russian President Vladimir Putin. They convinced most of their voters that Putin actually altered the vote tally.

Again, the point of this exercise was to convince themselves that if a majority actually got to speak, they would clearly pick Democrats.

Around the same time, Democrats and the liberal media started making an even more creative argument: They deserved control of the Senate even though Republicans had won most of the seats.

USA Today even ran a news story on this, and the New York Times started tracking the meaningless Senate popular vote (only for two cycles, before returning to relevant data).

Liberals objected to the filibuster as a counter-majoritarian tool, and it became an object of faith that Republicans were “a noisy minority” who relied on minority vetoes and whose project required “cementing minority rule.”

Democrats also claim they are the true majority by complaining about Republican gerrymandering.

It’s a flattering and useful self-image, and being the Democrats, they got much of the news media to believe it.

There were always holes in this argument, of course — Democrats made perhaps the most blatant gerrymanders, Clinton didn’t win a majority of the popular vote, either, and the idea of a national popular vote for the Senate is laughable. But the last couple of years have made it impossible to maintain this illusion.

Democrats have lost their claim to majority status and have attached themselves to antidemocratic institutions.

The centerpiece of the Democratic campaigns in 2022 and 2024 was defending Roe v. Wade, which was the most significant antidemocratic Supreme Court decision of the past two generations. Roe overturned state laws on abortion and stripped abortion from the realm of democracy for decades. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, by overturning Roe, didn’t ban abortion. It gave state legislatures and Congress, the democratically elected branches, the power to set abortion law.

A party whose top priority is keeping a divisive and substantive area of law out of the hands of legislators and voters cannot honestly claim to be the pro-democracy party.

In 2020, conservatives took a 6-3 majority in the Supreme Court, and Joe Biden took the White House, so Democrats shifted their counter-majoritarian tactics. They turned instead to the bureaucracy, converting the executive into a legislature to pass laws that couldn’t pass through Congress, such as student debt forgiveness and national mask mandates.

Now, Trump won the Electoral College and the popular vote, Republicans won both legislative chambers, and Democrats lean again on the unelected bureaucrats to undermine the actual elected executive, the president. And of course, Senate Democrats filibuster everything they can.

There are valid debates here: Not everything should be up to the majority, and the unitary executive theory and the idea of congressional supremacy interact in some complicated ways. But Democrats are consistent counter-majoritarians nowadays, which must be hard for them to swallow.

Democrats’ demographics

Democrats cherish few things more than their perceived demographics. Since the Civil Rights Movement, Democrats have been the party of racial minorities. For about as long, they have imagined themselves the party of the working guy. In turn, Republicans were supposed to be the party of the rich white guys.

The notion that the GOP was the party of the rich was always overblown. By the Obama era, the wealthiest counties in America were all D.C. suburbs, and they all were blue counties.

By 2024, though, the Democrats had to drop the act. Former Vice President Kamala Harris, according to exit polls, won six-figure earners by 4 percentage points, and those earning more than $200,000 she won by 6 points. Yet she still lost the popular vote because she lost the working and middle classes by an even larger margin. Trump, the exit polls suggest, won voters earning under $50,000.

Why? One thing Democrats learned this election is that the working class rejects left-wing culture warring. Harris had stated that the taxpayer should cover the cost of gender-transition procedures for criminal illegal immigrant men who identify as women, and vice versa.

Transgenderism, critical race theory, and DEI are luxury beliefs. So are the efforts to undermine marriage and the family. Rejection of family and tradition has wreaked havoc on the middle and working classes, and this isn’t lost on voters.

Most shocking to Democrats’ self-image in 2024 were Trump’s gains among nonwhite voters.

Democrats and the news media spent the days before the election promising a massive anti-Trump tidal wave among Hispanic voters because a comedian at a Trump rally called Puerto Rico an island of garbage.

There was no such reaction. Instead, late breakers in the election favored Trump. The most Hispanic precincts in America tacked hard to Trump. Trump won Hispanic men, according to exit polls.

This revealed how little Democrats and the news media understood nonwhite voters — and how little Democrats understood themselves.

The competence delusion

Perhaps the most painful realization of the past year involved facing their own incompetence at governance.

Conservatives are skeptical of government only because they believe everyone runs things as poorly as they do, Democrats thought. They adjusted to becoming the party of the wealthy by reframing this formerly despised demographic as the highly educated class.

Remember Barack Obama’s first election and inauguration. Remember how much the media fawned over the intelligence and technical proficiency. They bragged about being “wonks” and “nerds.” When Obama promised to “remake America,” he excoriated those “who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans.”

They saw themselves as the smart set. The pandemic was only as bad as it was because incompetent Trump was in charge.

The Biden years cured themselves of this last delusion.

First, Biden created a border crisis and a migrant crisis through incompetent and ideological policymaking.

Then, he caused massive inflation by overspending in an effort to become Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His spending yielded few results: Approximately zero charging stations were installed, for example.

These were both totally predictable problems caused by bad White House decisions.

At the same time, Democratic states crumbled into disarray. The bad governance of California, New York, and Illinois has led to crime waves, homelessness problems, urban doom loops, budget catastrophes, and a high-speed rail line that now promises to connect Palmdale to Gilroy by the year 2045.

And the saner members of the Democratic Party had to watch silently as their party line demanded the recitation of obviously untrue things: that men can have babies and periods and that Biden was sharp as a tack.

It took ideologically driven self-delusion to believe these things. Most Democrats didn’t believe them but recited them anyway.

NEWSOM SUGGESTS ‘GASLIGHTING’ VOTERS DAMAGED THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

With these myths shattered, Democrats can finally face who they are: They are a multiethnic party, but they are not the multiethnic party. They are the party of the wealthy suburbs. They have a competency problem. And they rely on minority rights to advance their agenda.

These are not things to be ashamed of, but they are hard truths for many liberals to swallow.