SCOTTSDALE, Arizona — Exactly one month after losing to Donald Trump in every battleground on the map, Democratic Party leaders from across the country decamped to one of the states that rejected them and struggled to pull themselves out of their funk.
At a Hilton hotel outside of Phoenix, where Christmas carols piped into the lobby, state Democratic chairs gathered for their annual winter meeting. They weren’t frantic like they had been after Trump’s first stunning victory. They were exhausted. Even after Trump tapped the likes of Kash Patel and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to staff his government, they still weren’t ready to demonstrate in the streets or tune into liberal networks.
But they were inching toward the anger phase of the grieving cycle as they huddled in ballrooms and traded theories about what went wrong. They pointed fingers at what they cast as overpaid consultants, expressed despair that working-class voters of all stripes had abandoned them, and lamented that they had lectured voters instead of listening to them.
“We need to win back the House, not fund consultants who want to buy a new house!” said Ken Martin, president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, in a speech to hundreds of attendants.
Waiting for pizza after hours of meetings, Judson Scanlon, political director of a PAC that produced “White Dudes for Harris” hats, fessed up to being one of the Democrats who has stopped watching MSNBC after Trump returned to power.
“Since 2016, all we’ve heard about is the crazy crap that this guy is doing when he’s president and when he’s not,” said Scanlon. “I’m fed up with that.”
This confab marked one of the first major gatherings of top Democrats since last month’s disastrous election. They had once hoped they would finally celebrate the end of the Trump era here. Instead, while the recriminations continued, they urged one another to put on a brave face despite losing the White House to a convicted felon and getting locked out of both chambers of Congress.
Liberal networks’ ratings have plummeted since Trump’s return to power, one of several signs that Democrats are in a kind of retreat as they try to get their bearings, poring 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 left the social media platform X, and they aren’t planning the massive marches that took place after Trump first won.
“Why don’t you see the marches? Black women right now are tired. They are really, really tired,” said Jaime Harrison, the chair of the Democratic National Committee who announced after Trump won that he wouldn’t run for reelection. “Many of them put everything they had into this race to see one of their own be elected president of the United States.”
Perhaps because they don’t have the energy for it, Democrats in Arizona also weren’t in the mood for the kind of drawn-out ideological battle they undertook after 2016.
That much was clear from the way that the four men running to lead the Democratic National Committee tried to persuade state party leaders to vote for them in next year’s election.
In speeches, none of the DNC chair hopefuls made the case that Democrats should undergo a sweeping shift in their worldview. Unlike in some progressive parts of the Democratic ecosystem, no one argued that Trump’s win proved that they need to adopt a bold, concrete promise like Medicare for All — or, from the other end of the party’s spectrum, that they must urgently move to the center on transgender issues.
Instead, most sold themselves as competent managers and pitched technical solutions.
Martin, who heads the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, said he helped pull Democrats in his state out of a slump after the 2010 midterm election that then-President Barack Obama famously called a “shellacking.” He argued that “our party doesn’t need to be torn down to the studs and rebuilt.”
He has entered the race as something of an early favorite, locking down about half of the endorsements needed to win. In Arizona, his fans sported “YES WE KEN!” buttons and he set up a makeshift war room dubbed the “Kenquarters.”
Like Martin, Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told the crowd that he righted the ship in his state, where “we’ve been able to win seven out of the last 10 statewide elections.” He called for a “permanent campaign” with omnipresent national organizing.
When DNC chair candidates did call for change, they talked more about transforming tactics than overhauling ideology.
Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley said in his speech that the party needs to do things differently to win. But, he said, “the good news is the change is really just a return to our true selves to be a party of working people all across America.”
And O’Malley, too, said that he was a “proven operational turnaround leader,” pointing out that President Joe Biden had trusted him to revamp the Social Security Administration when he tapped him as its commissioner.
James Skoufis, a little-known New York state senator representing a Trump-loving district, went the furthest in making the case for transforming the DNC. But he talked more about strategies than ideology, saying that he would go on Fox News and Joe Rogan’s podcast — a reference to Vice President Kamala Harris’ decision to rebuff the show whose interview with Trump boasted 52 million views on YouTube.
He also promised to end “sweetheart deals” and “contracts with vendors that have been ripping off the DNC for cycles.”
Some bigger-name Democrats who could shake up the DNC chair race, like U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel or Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, could still decide to run.
At times, some Democrats argued they needed to stay the course on cultural issues.
In a fiery speech, Harrison lambasted critics in his party who want to walk away from “identity politics.” Democrats began their meeting on Thursday with a “land acknowledgement,” a symbolic gesture that grants that the land a person is standing on previously belonged to Native Americans, which conservatives have derided as “woke.”
As Democrats tried to figure out a path forward, there was a quiet sense among some here that they wouldn’t be out of power for long. It was a stark contrast from people elsewhere in their party who are worried that a realignment could rob them of power for years. After all, these Democrats reasoned, Americans had voted for Trump before — and then quickly grew tired of him, as evidenced by the 2018 midterms and then again in the 2020 presidential election. They took comfort in the fact that 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 somebody who was a Trump sycophant in terms of Kari Lake,” said Harrison. “Those mixed results don’t say that this was a landslide. It doesn’t say it’s an existential crisis for the Democratic Party.”
Peggy Grove, vice chair of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, said they have a “good chance” at winning the House in the midterms.
“Yesterday was the bitch day,” she said. “Today started the rebuilding.”