Democrats who are in a state of shock and grief over Donald Trump’s (and his party’s) return to power are understandably acting as though the political world has been transformed forever. They’ve lost the Blue Wall! They’ve lost the working class! They’ve lost Latinos! They’ve lost a lot of Black men, young people, and suburban women! They’re hemorrhaging votes in California, New York, and New Jersey! They’re pointing fingers at one another and shifting blame! And they have no acknowledged leader to shepherd them out of the wilderness!
One of Washington’s most enduring traditions, the “Democrats in disarray” narrative, is morphing into “Democrats in despair.” And that’s even before the Trump administration takes office with its unprecedented plans to kick ass, take names, and wreck the “deep state” built up since World War II to do good things.
We are not in an era characterized by much interest in political history (unless there’s a podcast on it that I’ve missed), but you don’t actually have to go back that far to find a moment when Democrats were similarly afflicted. In some ways, Election Night 2004 was even more painful for partisans of presidential nominee John Kerry thanks to faulty early exit polls showing him winning. Kerry-Edwards campaign adviser Bob Shrum famously said to the candidate shortly after the polls closed, “May I be the first to say ‘Mr. President?’”
The ultimate results of the Bush-Kerry contest should look pretty familiar to today’s anguished Democrats. George W. Bush’s national popular-vote........