-by Patrick Toomey
None of us know what might happen in the 2026 election cycle— much less what will happen in the 2028 cycle. For starters, none of us know whether there will be a reasonable facsimile of free and fair elections in those 2 upcoming cycles. None of us know what civil liberties will still exist by then or how effectively the DoJ will be weaponized or how much more hostile our federal courts will be to voting rights by then.
One thing that I am willing to publicly predict now is that the Democratic Party, as it existed from roughly 1992-2024, is dead. The party of the Clintons, the Consultants & “CHANGE” likely breathed its last as returns came in on November 5. It resembles the dead parrot of this legendary Monty Python sketch.
“This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!”
The Democrats have run against Donald J. Trump in 5 straight election cycles now. They lost in 3 of them (2016, 2022, and 2024). In this last cycle, in which Trump’s manifest unfitness was most obvious, they suffered their worst defeat of those cycles.
They did so with over $1 billion (and, apparently, more like $1.5 billion) at their disposal. This abject failure did not occur in a vacuum.
Dissecting the donkey’s latest failure has become a cottage industry. While sifting through this wreckage, I re-reviewed 3 DWT pieces that offer some new perspective. The first was published on March 6, when the party was circling its wagons around the visibly struggling Joe Biden
That piece concluded:
All of us are utterly terrified by the prospect of Trump II. At this stage, we can be equally concerned that the Democratic standard-bearer who now appears to be last barrier against Trump II is simply not up to the task. It’s past time to acknowledge the fact that 237 years of constitutional traditions cannot rest in such shaky hands.
In early March, fealty to Biden was an essential sign of being a loyal Democrat. Rep. Dean Phillips was openly shunned for his attempts to point out that the emperor had no clothes:
“Phillips announced his candidacy for president on October 27, 2023, challenging President Joe Biden in the New Hampshire primary. He was harshly criticized as “arrogant,” a “pariah,” “traitor” and a “chaos agent.”
On April 17, this post addressed Team Biden’s vapid puff piece advertising that featured a tribute from a grade school classmate 70 years earlier. That’s right— a re-election campaign that was suffering from the (well-founded) perception that its candidate was past whatever prime he once had actually ran an ad highlighting his age. At that time, I begged the Dems to take on Trump with aggressive attack ads.
Even more amazingly, when this piece was published on July 11 (2 weeks after his disastrous debate performance), Biden was still grimly hanging on as standard-bearer:
Thankfully, Biden finally did withdraw 10 days later. At that point, there was no time to have a nomination contest— Kamala Harris was the only viable option. There also was no time to retain new campaign staff— the same staff that had led the party to the brink of disaster at that point would run the party’s campaign the rest of way.
The point is that multiple seeds were lain for this loss during the months leading up to Harris taking over control of the horse in midstream. A previously failed presidential candidate took over a campaign that was visibly dying without her actually running in a single primary. The party that was running on “democracy” as one of its main memes had a thoroughly undemocratic nomination process that led to its nominee being chosen by fiat largely because no other viable options existed.
While countless others have belabored the various failures of the Harris campaign, it is worth noting that, like the Biden campaign, it failed to run effective attack ads against a convicted felon who incited insurrection and whose misfeasance/malfeasance led to tens of thousands of preventable Covid deaths. As poster Paul Lukisiak noted here, Trump’s net favorables actually improved by 3 points while over $1 billion was being expended on behalf of the Harris campaign.
My April 17 post specifically cited LBJ’s devastatingly effective 1964 “Daisy” ad that helped convince voters that Barry Goldwater was not fit for office. Nothing remotely similar was attempted with Trump. The country was blanketed with ads attacking Harris’ past support for transgender surgery, but there were no counter-attacks highlighting Trump’s manifest unfitness for office.
It’s also worth noting that the utterly indefensible Cheney Pivot late in the campaign had its historic antecedents. It was of a piece with both Biden and Obama publicly making nice with George W. and Laura Bush.
The cozy and incestuous “bipartisan” ethos that has been such a huge part of the 1992-2024 Democratic Party has always proven to be counterproductive, and it was particularly counterproductive in this campaign. The fact that Team Harris turned to it at crunch time and the fact that it ultimately failed were all but predictable.
In short, the party as a whole visibly failed in 2024, and the rest of us are suffering the consequences of that failure. The people who led this republic to this political abyss should suffer consequences as well. They haven’t had an original idea since 2008, and they mishandled this campaign from day 1 to day last. They need to be removed from power without further delay.