Behind the Curtain: Deep Democratic depression

Why it matters: Top Democrats, including Harris advisers, tell us they feel like a lost party. Come January, they'll have scant power in the federal government, and shriveling clout in the courts and states.

• The traditional media structure sympathetic to their views, and hostile to Trump's, was shattered.

The big picture: In our volatile, 50-50 America, where voters seem to swing fast and hard against the ruling party, resurrection and resurgence are often an off-year election away.

• But the road to the Democrats' Damascus requires deep, honest self-reflection — and, many party insiders tell us, entirely new leadership.
• White House officials were dismissive of reporting about screwups. When journalists held up a mirror, they often looked away.

President Biden, 81, has faded even before his job is done. Harris' team didn't even want him to campaign. Impossible to imagine Democrats turning to him for sage advice on what's next.

• Harris just lost what Democrats considered an eminently winnable race, despite relatively light scrutiny and more money than any candidate in U.S. history. Hard to see her guiding Democrats out of the wilderness.

• The party's two most popular figures — Barack Obama and Michelle Obama — are happy to help in the waning moments of elections but aren't going to lead a revival.

Look to the states, Democrats will say: Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania ... Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan ... Andy Beshear in Kentucky ... newly elected Josh Stein in North Carolina.

• Other Democratic future faces: Senator-elect Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, and Ruben Gallego, who leads in the race for U.S. senator in Arizona.
• All are from states Trump just won. They're certainly politically smarter than the Washington crew. The evidence: They didn't lose.

Democrats will now start the predictable cycle of blame-casting and bellyaching. Every losing party does it. Then, they'll turn to a more serious autopsy: why they're bleeding support virtually everywhere.

• Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), who campaigned for Harris every single day the House was out of session, told us that if you were out there listening to union members, to Black voters, to men, to young people, to working women and men struggling to pay for groceries ... you knew what was coming. "Democrats shouldn't do the blame game," she said. "They should do: 'What aren't we doing right — all of us?' "

Doug Sosnik, a wise, clear-eyed Democratic strategist who bases analysis on empirical data, not emotion, is a good place to start.

• He sent us a post-election deck attached to a one-word email: "bloodbath."

Sosnik's report captures the blunt reality: "The 2024 election marks the biggest shift to the right in our country since Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980. ... [Trump's victory this week] was due to support from a multi-racial working-class group of voters." The coalition includes:

• One in three voters of color voted for Trump.
• Trump increased his support with Hispanic voters by double digits compared to 2020.
• Trump carried Hispanic men by 10 points.
• Trump improved his support with voters ages 18-29 by 10+ points.

Between the lines: But top Democrats tell us the party needs to dig deeper into root causes — and to reach back to COVID to truly understand why many of these voters revolted.

• It was the COVID era when many voters felt elites were lecturing them on wearing masks, hiding at home and shutting down their businesses. This preachy, judgmental tone alienated many former and would-be Democrats.
• Word-policing escalated.

This invigorated the non-legacy media and started pushing Hispanic and Black men away, starting in the last presidential election. Centrist Democrats tell us this is why even big cities turned redder this month.

• The political correctness movement calmed. But Biden, then Harris, could never find words or ways to convince working-class voters they had policy ideas to make prices lower, jobs more lucrative, the future brighter.

Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), a moderate, told Axios' Andrew Solender: "We have to stop pandering to the base and we have to start listening to the people ... People are sick of extremism."

• Ezra Klein, the popular liberal New York Times columnist, wrote Thursday: "I do think a lot of Democrats have alienated themselves from the culture that many people, and particularly many men, now consume. I think they lost people like Rogan by rejecting them, and it was a terrible mistake."

The country has moved right on immigration and energy, and Democrats need a new approach — fast.

• The Senate border bill that Harris repeatedly pointed to was "an insider talking point that was too disconnected from what Americans had witnessed in their own communities for the past four years," former Biden adviser Andrea Flores wrote on X. She says Democrats urgently need fresh ideas.

What we're watching: There'll be a strong tug back to the blue-collar-focused politics of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). He sounded more like Trump than his party elites. And Sanders was quick out of the gate with a scathing critique of his party's rich, educated ruling elite.

• "It should come as no great surprise," Sanders wrote, "that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."

Hard to see Democrats losing bigger chunks of the working class and winning elections. So Sanders makes a great point. But Trump often sounds more like the socialist Sanders than a Mitt Romney.

• A real fight to best serve the less educated and less wealthy seems good for a nation divided by education and income, operating in a system tilted decisively to the latter.

Finally, Dems need to grapple with their denialism. Democrats let their hatred of Trump put them in a state of denial about Biden and the party's unpopularity — confident that Trump's toxicity was enough. They didn't believe their own eyes when staring at polls.

• So they got crushed. Now they have dilemma and opportunity: In a 50-50 country, how do they articulate a theory of the case to win back voters — and power?

The bottom line: This will be the Democratic story of 2025.

• Axios' Alex Thompson contributed reporting.