House Democrats returned to the Capitol on Tuesday, dejected and licking their wounds after an election drubbing a week earlier that will put Donald Trump back in the White House and Republicans in control of all the levers of power in Washington next year.

While Democrats in the lower chamber outperformed Vice President Harris at the polls — a dynamic that will leave Republicans with another razor-thin majority in the 119th Congress — that moral victory was a dim consolation for a party that had hinged its campaign on warnings that Trump posed a material threat to America’s foundational democratic traditions.

Faced with Trump’s runaway victory for a second term in the White House, Democrats are now in the early stages of a post-mortem reckoning about what went wrong and how to turn the ship around — a somber discussion that’s already featured plenty of finger-pointing about where the blame should fall.

“It’s catastrophic,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), a 30-year veteran of the House who was the first Democratic lawmaker to call on President Biden to step aside. “There have been other challenges in the past, but this is certainly the greatest one of my political life.”

House Democrats lost a number of members who won’t be returning next year. Many of those are retirements, and some are lawmakers who ran — and won — races for higher office. But others were defeated at the polls last week, including two veteran Pennsylvania lawmakers — Reps. Matt Cartwright and Susan Wild — who had 20 years of experience between them.

Assembled on the House........

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