Mark Reed: Democrats must forgo the pity party and take a new track

Ban The West Wing.

And if Saturday Night Live’s answer to the recent US election result is to allow Kate McKinnon to sing another sad song at the start of the episode, ban that too.

Or audit everyone involved in the show, as Trump and his team have already threatened to do.

While I understand that people will feel the need to wallow in their emotions a bit after the Democratic Party’s careless misplacing of the fifteen million votes that secured Biden victory four years ago, there is a point when it becomes unhelpful.

It is unhelpful to blame voters who sided with Trump. It’s unhelpful to blame Trump.

The Republicans did not win this election. The Democrats lost it. The 15 million votes missing from their pile between 2020 and 2024 did not migrate over to the red corner. At the time of writing this, President Trump has 72.6 million votes. Four years ago, when he lost, he got 74 million. He may wash up somewhere around the same margin.

But Harris is currently nestled under 68 million, with a possible final tally of 69 million. Biden secured 81.2 million votes.

This is not a column claiming hindsight that Biden should have stayed in the hunt, far from it. The numbers looked bad for a long time. His debate performance was arguably the worst in Presidential history. He should have bowed out.

And he should have signaled that soon after re-election. He had initially declared himself a “transitional” figure — a one-term President, in search of a succession plan. “We all get taken out in a box!” was a Keating line. Paul should have texted Joe before it was too late. It turned out 100 days was *not* enough time for a black south Asian woman to run a winning campaign for the highest office in the world, in a country that has grappled with race since Columbus landed in 1492.

“Oppositions don’t win government; Governments lose them.” We think that was Churchill, but this is a post truth world these days, so I’ll take credit.

The Democratic Party lost with its failure to transition Biden out of the running at the appropriate time. It lost in its failure to tie Trump to the economic and health chaos that Biden spent four years struggling to clean up: a chaos wrought by the Donald’s incredibly cack-handed administration of the pandemic response. It lost because it thought you could reheat the Clinton campaign, as long as you removed the key ingredient, Hillary.

It couldn’t tell a story, it couldn’t show progress, and it couldn’t paint a clean and compelling picture for a way out of the quagmire. All the other guy had to do was stand on stage, tell a few jokes, dance badly, and not get shot.

Tick, tick, tick and tick.

If the campaign review doesn’t address that, then they are starting from behind for 2028. And no amount of portentous Aaron Sorkin scripted TV dramas will fix that.