This was supposed to be a book about Republicans. In the summer of 2016, I had an idea for a book chronicling how the Republican Party dealt with their embarrassing loss to Hillary Clinton. Surely they were going to have to rethink how their presidential nomination system worked, why it utterly failed in 2016, and how a patently unelectable candidate like Donald Trump somehow got the nomination and cost them an election that was obviously theirs to win. It would be a difficult period of self-reflection for the GOP (Grand Old Party), and it seemed like something that would be fascinating to observe in action.

Mark Twain is reputed to have said that “history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.” Bear with me for a moment while I offer an example of a party that went through something like what Democrats went through in the wake of 2016. The example itself actually predates Twain, but its experiences bear a lot of similarities to recent political developments in the United States, and are instructive about what parties can and can’t do in response to a surprise electoral loss.

The previous chapters set the stage for this one. In those chapters, we saw party activists divided over the perceived lessons of 2016. We saw party officers arguing over matters of election interpretation and race. We saw party donors split into factions. We saw media narratives undermining how many Democrats, especially women, saw themselves as fitting into the party and what sorts of candidates they should support.

The first debate of the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination cycle occurred in June of 2019. It was spread across two nights to accommodate 20 candidates in the largest and most diverse presidential candidate field in American history. The last debate was held in March of 2020 in a CNN studio with no audience, consisting of two white men in their late 70s standing several yards apart to avoid virus transmission. Understanding how the former yielded to the latter requires getting a handle on a number of key topics. I’ll review some of those topics and explain just how they’re relevant to current American political parties. I describe them in the context of answering a key question: What is the Democratic Party? What are its constituent parts, and what motivates them? How do we distinguish it from the Republican Party, or even from the Democratic Party of the past? And what role do narratives play in guiding its behavior?

During a visit to Iowa in 2017, I spoke to an experienced political activist in Des Moines who had had a pretty negative interpretation of the 2016 election. “I really don’t think nominating a woman is going to get us what we need,” she said. “The reality is we are an old state and it’s that lack of willingness to accept women in those leadership roles.” The results of 2016 suggested to her that it was risky to nominate a woman for president if the election was likely to be close.

Why did Hillary Clinton lose? That five-word question lies at the heart of every discussion of Democratic party reform and nomination politics since late 2016. For some political observers, Clinton was a poor candidate who ran a dismal campaign. “Hillary Clinton blew the most winnable election in modern American history,” concluded Damon Linker at The Week, “and it’s her own fault.”1 How else to explain Donald Trump being within striking range of the presidency despite his range of unelectable actions and statements? For others, though, Clinton’s loss reflected longstanding biases among the electorate and the commentariat, or was the product of work of outsiders ranging from Jill Stein to James Comey to Vladimir Putin.

As the evidence in the past few chapters suggests, divisiveness within the Democratic Party was a source of substantial concern among party leaders and activists following the 2016 election, and many of the party’s decision in the wake of that loss were motivated by a desire to mitigate such factionalism in the future. These concerns were bolstered by media coverage following the election that suggested that internal divisions would likely plague the party for many years to come. “It’s clear that the party is divided, split on issues including free trade, health care, foreign affairs and Wall Street. They even disagree over the political wisdom of doing deals with Trump,” wrote Philip Elliott.1 Supporters of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and those of her primary rival Bernie Sanders continued to mistrust each other and blame each other for the party’s presidential loss.