Please don't. It's been so entertaining to watch what happens to a major political party when they go full #YOLO on the electorate.

Nevertheless, after professing shock, shock at voters consigning them to the wilderness for a couple of years, Democrats have begun a little introspection as to what happened. Did they lose touch with voters by pursuing a radical agenda? Or will voters come back to them if they keep talking about The Bad Orange Man?

Based on this New York Times report, I'd bet on the latter:

Many loud voices in the party are demanding a reckoning, and a reinvention. But others envision less an overhaul than a wait-and-see approach, hoping to harness what they expect will be a backlash of public opinion against Mr. Trump’s ambitious White House agenda to capture the House of Representatives in 2026. ...

“We need deep changes and hard conversations, not nibbling around the margins,” said Representative Pat Ryan, a Democrat who represents a swing district north of New York City and who outperformed the top of the ticket by one of the wider margins in the nation. “At the core, the brand is weakened to the point that, without members running against it in tough districts, we can’t get to a majority, which is structurally untenable.”

Democrats who share this bleaker outlook see statistical signs of the party’s decline everywhere: Blue states are ceding population to red states. Voter registration figures are mostly headed in the wrong direction. More Americans are identifying with the G.O.P. than with Democrats. And Democrats lost ground last year among core constituencies including lower-income, Latino and younger voters as Mr. Trump swept every battleground state.

And the counter to that is ... what, exactly? Staying the course? Just after the NYT declares that "almost no one is suggesting" that, we find that the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee actually is suggesting that. Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA) argues that Democrats lost because of -- wait for it -- gerrymandering:

“Except for North Carolina doing a gerrymander, we’d be in the majority,” she said of a remapping that prompted three Democratic incumbents to abandon hopes of re-election.

That's a great observation! It doesn't explain how Democrats lost the Senate, though, and how Kamala "Joy McBrat" Harris not only didn't carry a single swing state but failed to gain ground in any county over 2020. 

But other than that, yeah ... the problem is gerrymandering in North Carolina. Donald Trump won NC by over three points, by the way. 

Next up, Democrats go into full denial:

Others pointed to the relatively slim 1.5-percentage-point margin of Mr. Trump’s popular vote victory, and to the fact that Democrats won Senate races in four states that Mr. Trump carried — an unusually high number to split their ticket in the current hyperpartisan era.

Er ... sure, Jan. Trump became the first Republican president in 20 years to win the popular vote, with easily the worst personal favorability rating to boot. That has since skyrocketed, but as of Election Day, Trump got a 44.9/51.9 at RCP. Democrats spent four years castigating Trump as a danger to democracy, and that was practically the only message coming from the Joy McBrat campaign for four months -- and Trump still beat Democrats.

As for the senatorial campaigns, there's a slightly better argument, but only slightly. Two of those four states had incumbents running for re-election, and Jacky Rosen only barely scraped by in Nevada. Tammy Baldwin also got a close shave in Wisconsin. Ruben Gallego held onto Kyrsten Sinema's seat in Arizona mainly because of the GOP candidate choice, and Democrats nearly lost Michigan's open seat. Republicans also flipped four Democrat seats, including an incumbent in Pennsylvania who's been running on daddy's name for the last 20 years to disguise his progressive voting record. 

However, if Democrats want to pretend that they lost because of gerrymandering and throw parties because they held onto traditionally blue Senate seats, well, God bless 'em all. We have certainly seen Republicans celebrate losses as moral victories as a method of denial. It's nice to see that Democrats can be the Stupid Party, too.