Democrats are starting the new year on a high.
A series of 2025 victories, in red and blue states alike, was marked by a striking improvement over the party’s 2024 showing. That over-performance, to use the political term of art, means candidates — including even some who lost — received a significantly higher percentage of the vote than presidential candidate Kamala Harris managed.
That’s a strong signal ahead of the midterm election, suggesting Democratic partisans are energized, a key ingredient in any successful campaign, and the party is winning support among independents and perhaps even a few disaffected Republicans.
If history is a guide and the uneven economy a portent, Democrats will very likely seize control of the House in November, picking up at least the three seats needed to erase the GOP’s bare majority. The Senate looks to be a longer — though not impossible — reach, given the Republican lean of the states being contested.
In short, Democrats are in much better shape than all the black crepe and existential ideations suggested a year ago.
Yes, the party suffered a soul-crushing defeat in the presidential race. But 2024 was never the disaster some made it out to be. Democrats gained two House seats and held their own in most contests apart from the fight for the Senate, where several Republican states reverted to form and ousted the chamber’s few remaining Democratic holdouts.
Still, Democrats being Democrats, all is not happiness and light in the party of Jefferson, Jackson, Clinton and Obama.
Campaigning to become the party’s chairman, Ken Martin last winter promised to conduct a thorough review of the 2024 election and to make its findings public, as a step toward redressing Democrats’ mistakes and bolstering the party going forward.
”What we need to do right now is really start to get a handle around what happened,” he told reporters before his election.
Now Martin has decided to bury that autopsy report.
“Here’s our North Star: Does this help us win?” he said in a mid-December statement announcing his turnabout and the study’s unceremonious interment. “If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.”
There is certainly no shortage of 2024 election analyses for the asking. The sifting of rubble, pointing of fingers and laying of blame began an eye blink after Donald Trump was declared the winner.
There are prescriptions from the moderate and progressive wings of the party — suggesting, naturally, that Democrats absolutely must move their direction to stand any chance of ever winning again. There are diagnoses from a welter of 2028 presidential hopefuls, declared and undeclared, offering themselves as both seer and Democratic savior.
The report Martin commissioned was, however, supposed to be the definitive word from the party, offering both a clear-eyed look back and a clarion way forward.
“We know that we lost ground with Latino voters,” he said in those searching days before he became party chairman. “We know we lost ground with women and younger voters and, of course, working-class voters. We don’t know the how and why yet.”
As part of the investigation, more than 300 Democrats were interviewed in each of the 50 states. But there was good reason to doubt the integrity of the report, even before Martin pulled out his shovel and started digging.
According to the New York Times and others, there was no plan to examine President Biden’s headstrong decision to seek reelection despite his advanced age and no intention to second-guess any of the strategic decisions Harris made in her hurry-up campaign.
Which is like setting out to solve a murder by ignoring the weapon used and skipping past the cause of death.
Curious, indeed.
Still, there was predictable outrage when Martin went back on his promise.
“This is a very bad decision that reeks of the caution and complacency that brought us to this moment,” Dan Pfeiffer, an alumnus of the Obama White House, posted on social media.
“The people who volunteered, donated and voted deserve to know what went wrong,” Jamal Simmons, a former Harris vice presidential advisor, told the Hill newspaper. “The DNC should tell them.”
In 2013, Republicans commissioned a similar after-action assessment following Mitt Romney’s loss to President Obama. It was scathing in its blunt-force commentary.
The 98-page report said a smug, uncaring, ideologically rigid party was turning off voters with stale policies that had changed little in decades and was unhelpfully projecting an image that alienated minorities and young voters.
Among its recommendation, the postmortem called on the party to develop “a more welcoming brand of conservatism” and suggested an extensive set of “inclusion” proposals for minority groups, including Latinos, Asians and African Americans. (DEI, anyone?)
“Unless changes are made,” the report concluded, “it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future.”
Trump, of course, won the White House three years later doing precisely none of what the report recommended.
Which suggests the Democratic autopsy, buried or otherwise, is not likely to matter a whole lot when voters go to the polls. (It’s the affordability, stupid.)
That said, Martin should have released the appraisal and not just because of the time and effort invested. There was already Democratic hostility toward the chairman, particularly among donors unhappy with his leadership and performance, and his entombing of the autopsy report won’t help.
Martin gave his word, and breaking it is a needless distraction and blemish on the party.
Besides, a bit of thoughtful self-reflection is never a bad thing. It’s hard to look forward when you’ve got your head stuck in the sand.
Commentary: Even Grok thinks Elon Musk’s claim that white men are persecuted is bull
Who the hell appointed Elon Musk to be the loudest defender of white men?
From the moment the South Africa native took over what was once called Twitter in 2022, the wealthiest human being on Earth has let neo-Nazi accounts flourish while repeating their insistence that white men are an endangered species as the world grows more diverse and minorities assume positions of power.
In 2023, Musk accused South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa of “openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa” because political opponents sang an apartheid-era anti-Boer song during a rally. That same year, Musk posted, “You have said the actual truth,” to a user who claimed Jews supported unchecked migration in order to destroy Western — read, white — civilization.
The mogul ended up apologizing for that babble, calling it the “dumbest post I’ve ever done.” That didn’t stop him from getting dumber ever since.
Last year, X’s Grok feature pushed the white South African genocide claim to users on its own, then insisted the Freudian slip came from an “unauthorized modification” by a “rogue employee” that violated the chatbot’s “core values.” Who that could be, one can’t say for sure. But then Musk opined in September that “relentless propaganda portraying white men as the worst human beings” is what leads some of them to transition into becoming female.
All this garbage was prelude to this month, when Musk twice shared a post that stated nonwhite men “will be 1000x times more hostile and cruel when they are a majority over Whites.”
Say this about Musk: He knows trends. And right now, the idea that white men are the most persecuted group out there is the Labubu of American conservativism.
A widely read essay in the online magazine Compact labeled Gen Z white men “the lost generation,” adrift in a world where workplaces shun them in favor of minorities. The piece earned an endorsement by New York Times columnist Ross Douhat, who added that the “simple” way to not make young white men open to racial radicalization is by “just not discriminating against them” — whatever the hell that means.
White men have fretted about their place in a changing America ever since Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1784 that a divine “revolution of the wheel of fortune” was “probable” against white people for their embrace of slavery. Fear of the sunset of white men has fueled lynchings, legal segregation, laws against immigration legal and not, lawsuits against affirmative action and so much more.
Their supposed plight has been a major plank of Trump’s political career since his first term — but it has become an obsession of his second. His administration’s social media accounts have regularly pushed posts lauding the days of Daniel Boone and Manifest Destiny while using the Ma and Pa American artworks of Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kinkade to push its noxious agenda.
At the same time, as part of his deportation campaign, Trump has pushed the concept of forcing people who weren’t born in this country to go back to their birthplaces. But foreigners aren’t the only ones bringing down the white man, according to this regime.
In December, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Andrea Lucas released a video encouraging white men — not white women, tellingly — who felt they were victims of workplace discrimination to file a claim with her agency. Vice President JD Vance shared Lucas’ request on social media along with the Compact essay, noting in the post sharing the latter that DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) is a “deliberate program of discrimination primarily against white men.”
Trump, for his part, told the New York Times this month that the Civil Rights Act — the 1964 law signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to help nonwhite American citizens fight decades of segregation and discrimination — “was a reverse discrimination” where “white people were very badly treated.”
As a nongringo, I’m as amused as I am sad about this industrial-scale pity party thrown by some of the most powerful men, white or otherwise, on the planet.
A poster showing the Trump Gold Card is seen as President Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office on Sept. 19, 2025.
(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)
When Trump and his allies claim to have the interest of white men in mind, they don’t really mean the sons of small-town Appalachia like Vance’s ancestors; they’re talking about white men like them: wealthy guys who want to get wealthier. They preach racial solidarity while gutting funding for SNAP benefits and healthcare, which will disproportionately affect poor people of all ethnicities.
The Pew Research Center found that 51% of white Republicans with no college degree voted for Trump in 2024 — a significant drop from the 63% who did the same in 2016. No wonder the president and his allies are doubling down on painting minorities as usurpers of the white American Dream. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket,” LBJ said. “Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Personally, I can assure all white men — but especially the blue-collar guys — that the children of Latino immigrants I know don’t plan to treat you all the way some of your grandparents treated our fathers when they migrated to this country in the 1960s and 1970s. Our parents didn’t come for us to turn into chillones — crybabies — seeking revenge for past sins.
In fact, many Latino men sadly did join their white counterparts in the grievance Olympics, as their drift toward Trump in the 2024 election proved.
Cousins and friends who should have known better spent most of 2024 railing to me against trans athletes, Kamala Harris, unchecked migration from Central and South America, and other Fox News talking points when they weren’t talking Dodgers and Raiders. None of them desired to be white, as wokosos insisted in postelection breakdowns of what happened; these rancho libertarians just wanted the fair shake that the colorblind policies would supposedly offer and thus cast their lot with Trump in a history-making decision.
(Insert “The Price Is Right” losing horn sound here.)
To see Trumpworld now limit male grievance to just whites threatens to destroy the Trump coalition in a year where they can’t afford to lose much more support.
Leave it to Grok to back me up on this. After Musk endorsed the post claiming nonwhite men will subjugate white men, a user asked the AI chatbot: “@grok is this true”?
This is how Grok replied, edited for length but not the thrust of what it said: “No, this claim aligns with the ‘white genocide’ conspiracy theory, which lacks evidence. … It is speculative fear, not fact.”
Musk. Trump. Vance. Powerful white men. Why so afraid?
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Democrats bury 2024 autopsy report, angering some in the party
Democrats are starting the new year on a high.
A series of 2025 victories, in red and blue states alike, was marked by a striking improvement over the party’s 2024 showing. That over-performance, to use the political term of art, means candidates — including even some who lost — received a significantly higher percentage of the vote than presidential candidate Kamala Harris managed.
That’s a strong signal ahead of the midterm election, suggesting Democratic partisans are energized, a key ingredient in any successful campaign, and the party is winning support among independents and perhaps even a few disaffected Republicans.
If history is a guide and the uneven economy a portent, Democrats will very likely seize control of the House in November, picking up at least the three seats needed to erase the GOP’s bare majority. The Senate looks to be a longer — though not impossible — reach, given the Republican lean of the states being contested.
In short, Democrats are in much better shape than all the black crepe and existential ideations suggested a year ago.
Yes, the party suffered a soul-crushing defeat in the presidential race. But 2024 was never the disaster some made it out to be. Democrats gained two House seats and held their own in most contests apart from the fight for the Senate, where several Republican states reverted to form and ousted the chamber’s few remaining Democratic holdouts.
Still, Democrats being Democrats, all is not happiness and light in the party of Jefferson, Jackson, Clinton and Obama.
Campaigning to become the party’s chairman, Ken Martin last winter promised to conduct a thorough review of the 2024 election and to make its findings public, as a step toward redressing Democrats’ mistakes and bolstering the party going forward.
”What we need to do right now is really start to get a handle around what happened,” he told reporters before his election.
Now Martin has decided to bury that autopsy report.
“Here’s our North Star: Does this help us win?” he said in a mid-December statement announcing his turnabout and the study’s unceremonious interment. “If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.”
There is certainly no shortage of 2024 election analyses for the asking. The sifting of rubble, pointing of fingers and laying of blame began an eye blink after Donald Trump was declared the winner.
There are prescriptions from the moderate and progressive wings of the party — suggesting, naturally, that Democrats absolutely must move their direction to stand any chance of ever winning again. There are diagnoses from a welter of 2028 presidential hopefuls, declared and undeclared, offering themselves as both seer and Democratic savior.
The report Martin commissioned was, however, supposed to be the definitive word from the party, offering both a clear-eyed look back and a clarion way forward.
“We know that we lost ground with Latino voters,” he said in those searching days before he became party chairman. “We know we lost ground with women and younger voters and, of course, working-class voters. We don’t know the how and why yet.”
As part of the investigation, more than 300 Democrats were interviewed in each of the 50 states. But there was good reason to doubt the integrity of the report, even before Martin pulled out his shovel and started digging.
According to the New York Times and others, there was no plan to examine President Biden’s headstrong decision to seek reelection despite his advanced age and no intention to second-guess any of the strategic decisions Harris made in her hurry-up campaign.
Which is like setting out to solve a murder by ignoring the weapon used and skipping past the cause of death.
Curious, indeed.
Still, there was predictable outrage when Martin went back on his promise.
“This is a very bad decision that reeks of the caution and complacency that brought us to this moment,” Dan Pfeiffer, an alumnus of the Obama White House, posted on social media.
“The people who volunteered, donated and voted deserve to know what went wrong,” Jamal Simmons, a former Harris vice presidential advisor, told the Hill newspaper. “The DNC should tell them.”
In 2013, Republicans commissioned a similar after-action assessment following Mitt Romney’s loss to President Obama. It was scathing in its blunt-force commentary.
The 98-page report said a smug, uncaring, ideologically rigid party was turning off voters with stale policies that had changed little in decades and was unhelpfully projecting an image that alienated minorities and young voters.
Among its recommendation, the postmortem called on the party to develop “a more welcoming brand of conservatism” and suggested an extensive set of “inclusion” proposals for minority groups, including Latinos, Asians and African Americans. (DEI, anyone?)
“Unless changes are made,” the report concluded, “it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future.”
Trump, of course, won the White House three years later doing precisely none of what the report recommended.
Which suggests the Democratic autopsy, buried or otherwise, is not likely to matter a whole lot when voters go to the polls. (It’s the affordability, stupid.)
That said, Martin should have released the appraisal and not just because of the time and effort invested. There was already Democratic hostility toward the chairman, particularly among donors unhappy with his leadership and performance, and his entombing of the autopsy report won’t help.
Martin gave his word, and breaking it is a needless distraction and blemish on the party.
Besides, a bit of thoughtful self-reflection is never a bad thing. It’s hard to look forward when you’ve got your head stuck in the sand.
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