Today I read this piece in Vox comparing the 2004 and 2024 elections and discussing what Democrats today can learn about how the Democrats came back from defeat. Author Nicole Narea says Democrats did three things: 1) They pursued a 50-state strategy, 2) They reevaluated their messaging, 3) They sought to become the party of ideas.

There’s some truth to Item #1. A 50-state strategy is absolutely something Democrats should pursue. But none of these three things are actually what happened. And they’re not why Democrats scored two successive wave elections in 2006 and 2008.

The Vox article speaks of a “reckoning” the Democrats had to have then and another “reckoning” they have to have now. I absolutely see red whenever I see people using this word in a political context. In post-election terms, it appears to mean a kind of ash and sackcloth self-criticism session on the part of whoever you have decided is to blame for the Democrats’ loss.

No.

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We’ve been discussing a lot of plans and ingenious new strategies for a Democratic comeback which are variously half-baked, hyperbolic, histrionic or merely silly. Here’s one that I believe is not. It’s not even a strategy. It’s simply identifying a real challenge, or a knot Democrats need to untangle.

A key reason that many people are Democrats today is that they’re attached to a cluster of ideas like the rule of law, respect for and the employment of science and expertise, a free press and the protection of the range of institutions that guard civic life, quality of life and more. On the other side, say we have adherents of a revanchist, authoritarian politics which seeks break all those things and rule from the wreckage that destruction leaves in its path. So Democrats constantly find themselves defending institutions, or “the establishment,” or simply the status quo. Yet we live in an age of pervasive public distrust — distrust of institutions, leaders, expertise. And not all of this distrust is misplaced. Many institutions, professions, and power centers have failed to live up to their sides of the social contract.

In short, Democrats are by and large institutionalists in an age of mistrust. And that is challenging place to be.

I’ve been thinking about this since the day after the election and been going back and forth on whether to say someone else should do it or just do it myself. Still not sure which, but here goes. It would be very beneficial for Democrats to create scorecards right now charting where inflation, unemployment and GDP were at the end of Biden’s term and regularly updating it with Trump’s latest numbers. One of the smaller benefits of this is these three numbers are currently pretty hard to beat. You can only get them slightly lower or higher, depending on which statistic you’re referring to, and you can get them much further into bad territory. I’d also add percentage of people with health insurance, even though that’s not normally considered an economic marker.