Democrats in denial

Stop whining. Abandon your delusions. Ignore every distraction. Just. Focus. On. Winning.

An anti-Trump protest.
(Image credit: Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images)

"The whole Democratic Party is now a smoking pile of rubble."

Matthew Yglesias wrote a column for Vox with that memorable headline last November, two days after the general election. Was it overstated? Sure. But the exaggeration was salutary. Democrats needed to wake up to the fact that the party got (as Yglesias put it) "annihilated" from top to bottom on Election Day. Donald Trump didn't just manage to (barely) win the presidency. The GOP ran the table, holding onto both houses of Congress, ensuring the Supreme Court would continue to lean right for years to come, and taking control of two-thirds of state legislatures, two-thirds of governorships, and 24 states outright. Democrats lost in nearly every way imaginable.

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.