The Democratic National Committee has decided that there are no lessons to be learned from the 2024 elections. If anything, it is lining itself up to back a Kamala Harris rerun.
All of the candidates to replace outgoing DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison supported the notion that “racism and misogyny” played a key role in Harris’s electoral defeat, showing that the strategy of blaming voters for being bigots was going to persist no matter who the DNC selected to lead it. The new DNC chairman, Ken Martin, said the party already has “the right message” for voters.
The selection of Martin is the biggest sign yet that Harris will be back at the top of the ticket in four years. The Democratic establishment’s choice was Ben Wikler, who had the backing of all the major players: former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), possible presidential candidate Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), and multiple Democratic megadonors including George Soros’s Democracy PAC.
The big name not to endorse was Harris, who got exactly what she presumably wanted; Martin was the vice chairman of the Harris-Walz campaign. The DNC also heavily rewarded Harris’s former running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN). Martin was a Minnesota state party leader, and the DNC heeded Walz’s endorsement and chose gun control activist David Hogg as one of its vice chairs, a big Walz booster who relentlessly pushed the Harris campaign to choose him as her running mate. The campaign that lost in embarrassing fashion to Donald Trump, complete with losing every single swing state, was just cemented as the power central of the next iteration of the DNC.
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Most notable of all, there is no self-reflection to be had among Democrats. Harrison did not think former President Joe Biden should have gotten out of the race sooner, and Martin doesn’t want to relitigate that debate either. Martin thinks the Democratic Party only has a “brand” problem, continuing the perpetual Democratic complaint that voters just don’t understand how perfect all the policies they support are. There is no real change in messaging or policy on the horizon and no real change in leadership either.
The DNC has chosen to close off all avenues of self-reflection, maintaining that Biden’s collapsing candidacy overstaying its welcome and Harris’s identity politics-drowned campaign were exactly what they wanted to offer voters. Democrats want to stick with their identity obsession and ignore any problems with the mediocrities they rallied around last year, and they are gearing up to run it all back in the next election cycle.