Well, the answer to this is no.
They should have been told that years ago.
Whatever a person thinks of the result of the Presidential election one way or another, overall, the General Election was a Democratic disaster.
Going into the election the Democrats were opposing the most disliked President in recent history. A person would have to go all the way back to Herbert Hoover to find a sitting President facing an election who was disliked more. Probably more analogously, the Democrats would have to go back to Richard Nixon to find a Republican President who was so disliked that the voters were set to sweep him out of office and his party with him. That didn't happen to Nixon, of course, but it did the Republicans. The voters took it out on Gerald Ford and Republicans in Congress.
And todays' Democratic leadership ought to know that. They were in office then. Schumer entered the New York State Assembly in 1975. Pelosi was elected to the Democratic National Committee in 1976.
And that's the problem.
You can't really be a young vibrant party if you are run by old, old, highly established individuals.
The GOP has this problem too, but this past election it was smarter about it. The Republicans made inroads in Hispanic populations and actually did fairly well, in context, with other minority groups. The Democrats just seemed to figure that they owned that vote and ran the same playbook there that they have since the 1930s.
And according to the Press, going into the election, Nancy Pelosi was concentrating on making gains in state legislatures so that she could parry any Republican effort to reverse close results there. As it turned out, the administration seemingly has made such an effort, but it was the courts that stopped it, not the Democrats. The Democrats didn't make gains in state legislatures and it seems that at least to some extent, the reverse is true.
At this point, there's a lot of hand wringing about what all this means in the next Congress. The Democrats lost ground in the House, where Pelosi and its unknown, right now, whether or not they'll take the Senate. There's all sorts of discussion on whether Joe Biden will be able to reach across the aisle, but given as Barack Obama wasn't, why would Biden be able to?
Indeed, the Republican leadership in both houses has been really successful. We don't hear much about Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader, but at age 55 he's a child compared to Pelosi, who is 80 years old. Mitch McConnell, at s79, isn't a spring chicken, to be sure, but he's singularly successful, love him or hate him.
Usually after a failed election, there's a reckoning. This hasn't been the case for the Democrats for a long time. After 2018 it managed to put down its own insurgent elements. That didn't seem to work for it in 2020. Or, in actuality, it might have, by preventing a worse election disaster, but it's certainly not a history of success.
It'll be interesting to see if any of that matters in terms of their leadership.
In real terms, it seems like it might. The Democrats have taken the Oval Office, but not really with enough of a Congressional margin in order for that President to really do much. That might be the way the voters wanted it, but it can't be the way the Democrats did.
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