The Autopsy Can Wait As Democrats Marinate In Their Feels

Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) watched the entire “Lord of the Rings” trilogy with her chocolate lab to relieve her stress. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) told his social media followers in a cathartic direct-to-camera video that he’s experiencing the “full range of emotions.” And former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) just feels “terrible.”

A week after the election that put Donald Trump back in office, Democrats are feeling many feelings. Anger. Frustration. Sadness. Anxiety. Dread.

And it’s not just lawmakers going through it — shell-shocked Democrats are taking time off of work to process the election, skipping holiday celebrations to avoid their family members who voted for Trump and sharing renderings of a weeping Statue of Liberty over group text.

Vice President Kamala Harris, during last week’s concession speech at her alma mater, Howard University, gave her supporters — but in particular “the young people who are watching” — permission to be upset. “It is OK to feel sad and disappointed. But please know it’s going to be OK,” Harris said.

Democrats were hoping they’d be sending the first woman of color to the White House next year. Instead, they’re coming to terms with losing the presidential election to Trump, falling frustratingly shy of a majority in the U.S. House and losing three U.S. Senate incumbents. The GOP will begin 2025 in Washington with a governing trifecta on the heels of its first popular vote victory in 20 years — an absolute disaster for Democrats that will ice them out of power for, at the very least, the next two years.

Party leaders will eventually need to confront the root causes of their stunning defeat at the ballot box and the nation’s reembrace of Trump. But the looming autopsy of what went wrong is still a ways away.

After arguing that Trump’s return to power would threaten the very rule of law and usher in a new fascist regime in the United States, Democrats are publicly reckoning with, as many see it, the worst possible electoral outcome with platitudes and self-soothing.

Smith wrote on X, formerly called Twitter, that she spent the weekend glued to the couch with her dog before heading back to D.C. “We all deal with stress in different ways,” Smith wrote, sharing a picture of her chocolate lab, Moose. “I watched the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Extended edition. With Moose the dog. And now, I’m ready to get back to work.”

Booker leaned into being relentlessly upbeat and earnest in a message to his followers over the weekend. “Like many of you in this moment, I think I have felt the full range of emotion — shock, hurt, anger, fear, pain. And I’ve done my fair share of introspection. It’s hard to work through the consequences of this election,” Booker said from what seemed to be his living room, wearing a cozy Rutgers University sweatshirt.

“We should feel grief, but never despair. We should be angry, but not bitter. Sad but not cynical. This is a defeat, but we are not defeated,” the senator added.

Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, the only Democrat to mount a semiserious primary challenge against Biden, posted on X the day after the election: “My view this morning; hazy but bright. When I ran for President I discovered we are not as divided as the political angertainment industry would have us believe.”

“So turn off the tv, put down the phone, go on a walk, and say hello to some neighbors,” Phillips wrote, signing off with an American flag emoji.

Pelosi told CNN this week she simply felt “terrible” after the election. That comment followed Pelosi, who pressured Biden to drop out of the presidential race over the summer, telling The New York Times that Democrats may have performed better had Biden gotten out of the way sooner and allowed for a true primary. Pelosi also clapped back at Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) for declaring the Democratic Party lost the election because it had stopped being the party of the working class.

Sanders is one of a handful who’ve unflinchingly blasted his own side in the wake of the election. Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy (D), in another direct-to-camera manifesto, channeled another common Democratic emotion: frustration.

“So Tuesday was a cataclysm, let’s not kid ourselves. An electoral map wipeout,” Murphy said in his X video. “While nobody has the answers right now — I certainly don’t — what’s most important is that we not kid ourselves. This is not a moment for small reforms or changes. This is a moment for a fundamental rebuild of the left.”

Americans seemed to choose Trump based on concerns about the high cost of things and illegal immigration — and they weren’t especially motivated by emotional pleas about the former president and his party representing a threat to democracy, even when that message came from Republicans.

That isn’t stopping Democrats from looking for ways to safeguard both blue and red states during a second Trump term while still employing a lot of the same soaring rhetoric that turned off swing voters.

“Together, what we’re doing is pushing back against increasing threats of autocracy and fortifying the institutions of democracy that our country and our states depend upon,” said Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D), announcing a new bipartisan partnership called Governors Safeguarding Democracy, or GSD, as Pritzker and his co-founder, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D), called it in a presser with reporters Tuesday.

The organization is focused on combating Trump’s threat of mass deportations and threats to executive power. Not inconsequentially, both Pritzker and Polis are viewed as possible presidential candidates in 2028.

“We founded GSD,” Polis told reporters, “because we know that simple hope alone won’t save our democracy.”

CORRECTION: This story has been amended to correct the name of Governors Safeguarding Democracy.