In 2024, the Democratic Party experienced a months-long internal struggle over whether or not to back then-incumbent President Joe Biden for reelection. Most Democratic voters who were planning on casting ballots for Biden were doing so not because they liked the 81-year-old former senator and vice president, but because they didn’t like his opponent, Donald Trump, now the current president. Realizing that Biden’s presence would likely have a negative impact down-ballot, thus endangering their chances of securing seats in either the House of Representatives or the Senate, Democratic Party elites ousted Biden but, before they could settle on a replacement to run against Trump, were saddled with Biden’s deputy, Kamala Harris.

Ultimately, Harris lost the White House to Trump, who achieved victory in all seven swing states, the electoral college, and the popular vote, but the Democrats’ quick coalescing around Harris as their party’s unelected nominee may have been the last time that Democrats were actually united. The 2024 election showed Democrats that their party was hemorrhaging support from even traditionally-blue voting blocs. Male voters, especially young men, and Christian voters had repudiated the Democrats in the voting booth, as had American Catholics and a growing contingent of black voters. Since November, the party has been thrown into chaos.

Recent polls have demonstrated that Democrats are “pessimistic” about their party’s future, deeply disappointed in congressional Democrats, and completely alienated from Christian voters, the largest voting bloc in the nation. In some cases, blue voters have been frustrated by their elected representatives’ failure to curb Trump’s agenda. In other cases, voters feel that their elected representatives don’t represent them at all, embracing far-left agenda items like abortion and transgenderism instead of addressing kitchen-table issues like inflation and crime. Party elites have been conflicted over how to confront the growing Democratic dissatisfaction, devolving into infighting and ideological contention.

According to recent reports, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has been at the heart of much of the chaos. In an effort to bring new life to the party, the DNC elected new leadership earlier this year, picking former president of the Association of State Democratic Committees and DNC vice chair Ken Martin as the new chairman, alongside a cadre of vice chairs, including 25-year-old gun control activist David Hogg. Almost immediately, Hogg sparked controversy, threatening to primary incumbent establishment Democrats, who he described as having been “asleep at the wheel,” in an effort to regain some of the demographics Democrats had lost at the polls. After failing to reach an acceptable compromise with Martin, Hogg was ousted as DNC vice chair: the vice chair election was voided on the grounds of insufficient “gender diversity.”

In an interview this week, Hogg warned that DNC elites “don’t want to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth, which is that we have to dramatically change as a party, and what brought us here is not what’s going to get us out.” Although he did not point to specific policies, he did confirm that he and his organization Leaders We Deserve are involved in Democratic primaries across the country. He stated that the Democratic Party’s failures, especially in 2024, would not be fixed by “the same cast of characters that brought us here.”

With Hogg’s controversial departure from the DNC, Martin has finally been freed up to do what he was elected to do: analyze the Democrats’ 2024 shortcomings and fundraise. However, even Martin’s handling of these tasks has been criticized by DNC insiders. The Democratic chairman’s 2024 postmortem may yield nothing of substance for the party, some worry, as The Washington Stand has previously observed that Martin’s leadership of Minnesota Democrats has seen support for the party in the state wane, and he has committed himself to the current ideological platform which has caused so much damage for the Democratic Party. “It is a messaging problem and a brand problem. Those voters are not connecting our policies with their lives,” Martin said shortly after his election to head the DNC, referring to why voters were abandoning the party.

As far as fundraising goes, The New York Times reports that the DNC may need to take out a loan to cover its expenses. While Martin has increased spending — sinking $1 million a month, for example, into state parties — Democratic donors have been reluctant to refill the DNC coffers. Between January and April, the party’s cash reserves were depleted by $4 million, totaling less than a third of the Republican National Committee’s (RNC’s) on-hand funds, and only three donors had given $100,000 or more to the DNC in that time, although the party now claims that three more donors have contributed six-figure donations. Despite the DNC’s cash flow drying up, Martin gave himself a $50,000 raise.

Martin himself acknowledged that the failed Biden and Harris campaigns last year significantly damaged the DNC’s credibility with donors. “People invested more money than they ever had before, they dug deeper than they ever had, and they are quite frustrated by the result,” he said, adding, “They want answers. I don’t take it personally. I wasn’t in charge.” What Martin did not acknowledge, according to NYT, is that his DNC chairmanship campaign included harsh criticism of party megadonors, including billionaires Alex Soros and Reid Hoffman.

In reference to the DNC’s turmoil, FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter told The Washington Stand, “It is only logical that the political party which promotes chaos in the family by redefining marriage and gender, chaos in our cities with soft on crime policies and riots, chaos in our immigration system with an open border, and chaos with the cost of living with nonsensical energy policies, would experience some of that chaos themselves.”

He continued, “There are rumblings from Democrat think tanks and members of Congress that the party needs to at least distance itself from some of the more extreme elements in their base, if not outright jettison those factions from their camp altogether. How the party settles these differences at the DNC-level today will shape how the party looks five, 10, 20 years from now.”

“The 2024 election was a clear repudiation of their agenda of abortion-on-demand, transgender ideology, and open borders,” Carpenter concluded. “If they learn a lesson from that election, they can spare themselves a generation in the political wilderness. If they don’t, they risk becoming irrelevant at the national level for years.”