Democrats have been wallowing in the despair of last November’s elections for months, unable — or maybe unwilling — to crawl out of the pit of public opinion they find themselves in. “It’s hard to win if you don’t know why you lost,” Axios’s Alex Thompson observed. But it’s even harder, some would say, if you know and do nothing about it.

To most people, the solution to the party’s problems is simple. After a year of losing ground with virtually every demographic — men, Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, young people, Independents, suburban moms — the polling all points to Democrats being completely out of step with everyday voters. So why not just abandon the extremism Americans rejected? For the party of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the answer is much more complicated.

The crisis facing Democrats isn’t about their identity; they have one. The crisis is that they can’t moderate their ideology — or embrace it — without severe consequences. As National Review’s Rich Lowry put it, “The reason Joe Biden won in 2020 is he didn’t seem like a progressive, and one reason that his party lost in 2024 is that he governed like one.” For Democrats, ideological extremism is their kryptonite and their lifeblood. It’s what excites the base and repels the populace. In other words, it’s a recipe for long-term political disaster.

And yet, in several instances, the Democrats who’ve tried to soften their positions or build a temporary bridge to sanity have been beaten back into conformity. After the election, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) dared to say he didn’t want his daughters to play sports against biological boys — like 80% of his country — only to turn around and vote against his girls three months later. “I was just speaking authentically as a dad about one of many issues where I think we’re just out of touch with the majority of voters,” he explained to the angry mob in November. “… I stand by my position.” Or at least he stood by it until the time came to act on it, Americans learned.

But lately, even the barest hints of compromise are punished. Look at the hysteria over Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who needs increased security simply for voting with Republicans to stop a government shutdown — something his own party argued would be a disaster for hard-working families a month earlier. For sticking to that position, there’ve been furious calls for his ouster and a leadership mutiny in party ranks.

Then, there’s California Governor Gavin Newsom (D), who tested the waters earlier this month with his whiplash comments on Title IX. Sitting down with Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk on his podcast, the governor was asked about the issue of trans-identifying athletes in girls’ sports. To most people’s surprise, the progressive replied, “I think it’s an issue of fairness. I completely agree with you on that.” He emphasized his point by adding, “It’s deeply unfair.”

Newsom, who, by his own admission, has been a “leader” in the “LGBTQ” movement, encouraged his party to admit that a lopsided playing field is cause for concern. He said, “We’ve got to own that. We’ve got to acknowledge it.” His sudden openness to a broader discussion was met with horror on the Left and deep skepticism on the Right — a perfect illustration of the conundrum facing Democrats.

As California Family Council President Jonathan Keller pointed out on a recent episode of the “Outstanding” podcast, “He’s trying to set it up in such a way that … he’s going to look like he’s a moderate.” But frankly, Keller said, “I’m not positive that’s actually going to be an effective strategy from him. I think what it may be effective in doing is getting him destroyed in the primaries,” he said, referring to the root problem for Democrats, which is that what wins primaries is the same thing that loses general elections.

In Newsom’s case, even an insincere shift to the middle is next-to-impossible to pull off, thanks to years of activist baggage. As Kirk wrote after the interview, “I’m under no illusions about why I was invited: Gavin Newsom wants to run for president in three years, and he thinks that talking [to] conservative figures like me increase his recognition, help him present as a centrist, and cast him as a champion of the Left in a time when the [L]eft has no real leaders. … We shouldn’t fall for this… ” he warned. “[A]nd fortunately, swerving to the center won’t be that simple for Gavin. … He knows his current record can’t win him the White House, and so he’s trying to rewrite what that record is.”

Polling proved the governor’s flirtation with rationality didn’t help his case. Of 1,000 California voters, only 24% said the podcast helped them see Newsom as more moderate, while 17% insisted it made them less likely to see him as a moderate. A majority, 59%, said it made no difference. Americans are not so easily fooled. A few soundbites does not a record make.

“Like the national Democrat[ic] Party and the legacy media,” John Nolte stressed, “Newsom has painted himself into a corner where the only way to survive is through the fealty to the 20 percent of hard leftists that make up the left’s base of activist and financial support. … With all their lies and lunacy in support of things like open borders and this transsexual nonsense, Newsom, Democrats, and the corporate media have alienated all the Normal People, probably forever. So that 20 percent is all they’ve got.”

The foot soldiers of the Democratic Party grasp the paradox. They’ve tried, unsuccessfully, for the last nine years to turn the heads of leadership to mainstream positions on things like gender, immigration, education, and energy. “I don’t want to be the freak show party like they have branded us,” one DNC member from Florida complained after the election when it was obvious the Left’s social radicalism had cost them every lever of power in Washington. “When you’re a mom with three kids,” she pointed out, “and you live in middle America, and you’re just not really into politics, and you see these ads that scare the bejesus out of you, you’re like, ‘I know Trump’s weird or whatever, but I would rather his weirdness that doesn’t affect my kids.’”

Others echoed her alarm. “The progressive wing of the party has to recognize — we all have to recognize — the country’s not progressive, and not to the far left or the far right. They’re in the middle,” said Joseph Paolino, a DNC committeeman for Rhode Island.

It felt like, at least from those comments, that the party was finally going to pivot. “This is basically a rebuild job from the bottom up,” former DNC Chair Donna Brazile emphasized.

But what happened when push came to shove? Against the pleas of their non-elite base, the far-left won even greater control of the party — electing woke, anti-gun, pro-trans, defund-the-police, ICE-abolishing, climate change-pimping DNC leaders in Chairman Ken Martin and Vice Chair David Hogg. To the everyday Democrats, who’d been “begging the party to ditch the radical Left,” it was an astonishing betrayal.

“The weaknesses of Democrats among non-white voters, particularly Hispanic and Black working-class voters, is pretty significant,” authors of a new book, “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” insist. “They’re sort of realizing this is a problem. On the other hand, they’re so invested in this whole vector of cultural issues. They’re worried about the blowback on social media and from the college-educated ‘liberalish’ voters who are increasingly a loyal base of the Democratic Party. Trump understood that and he played upon it. He continues to play upon it. He continues to get votes upon it. And the Democrats are oblivious to it.”

Not all Democrats, it seems. A growing chorus of disillusioned officials are starting to speak up about the continued reckoning that awaits the party in future elections. During snippets of his interview with NPR Monday, Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) sounded outright logical in his assessment. “We can’t just resist. It can’t just be why we’re against Trump and what’s wrong with Trump. … The Democratic brand has been damaged. “

“When you ask people … ‘What do the Republicans stand for?’ They say, ‘Well, Make America Great Again. They want to cut the size of government, they want to give tax cuts, stuff like [that].’” Then, Suozzi said, when you ask, “‘What do the Democrats stand for?’ And I think the people are kind of scratching their head a little bit, they believe in, like, [abortion] and LGBT rights — which I believe in those things too — but I don’t know that you can build a whole party around that.” He talked about running on the border issue in 2024, and his consultants protested, arguing, “‘Well, Tom, that’s a Republican issue. I don’t know if you should be talking [about that].’ I said, ‘No, this is what the people of my district are talking about. We can’t ignore what the people are talking about.’”

Even longtime fixtures of the party are starting to reconsider the wisdom of pandering to a sliver of the country. Trusted Obama advisor Rahm Emanuel took on the misguided messaging of the current party earlier this month, urging local Democrats to beat the drum on “safe streets, strong schools, stable finances. Focus on those three things, and your city’s going to be fine,” he said on “Real Time with Bill Maher.” “Less about the bathrooms, more about the classrooms.”

The party’s fringe had a fit, forcing the ex-mayor to clarify, “I wasn’t looking to have a fight on woke culture. I was looking to have a debate on the failure of eighth graders to read. I don’t think culturally that being not just into the generic woke debate is wrong politically. It’s also [that] the data is pretty clear that people think that’s all we care about.” And in the end, he admitted, “We sunk our party. We’re responsible for that. And we’re also therefore responsible for rebuilding it.”

So far, the Democrats’ only idea for rebuilding has been parading Rep. Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) around the country as the movement’s future standard-bearers. And, yes, CNN polling of the party’s voters did suggest that Sanders and the Squad leader “best represented the Democrats’ core values” — without asking if the majority of Democrats even supported those values in the first place. What they did question is if Democratic leaders are taking the party in the wrong direction, and a majority said “yes.” Either way, Lowry quipped, “If AOC is the Democratic future, the party is even worse off than we think.”

Most of us, FRC Action’s Matt Carpenter observed, “are used to seeing the Democrats operate as a tightly-knit team. For years, they moved in lockstep at the direction of their leaders toward the party’s goals,” he told The Washington Stand. “So it’s a curious thing to see them now rudderless, searching for leadership, searching for an issue to rally around, searching for support from voters and donors, and coming up short. The ground they gained over the years under the leadership of figures like Obama, Pelosi, and even Biden turns out to have left them stranded in the political wilderness.”

Making matters worse, Carpenter pointed out, “They just had their worst performance among minority voters maybe of all time. They are seen as the party of inflation, war, and obsessed with abortion and turning girls into boys and boys into girls. But that’s not even the worst of it for them,” he shook his head. “The worst part of it for the Democratic Party is that they’ve inculcated these ideas into their base. So they cannot retreat from their unpopular positions without watching their base become demoralized, or worse, angry.”

The reality is a painful one for a party in disarray, but Democrats are boxed in without a viable way out — at least for now. They’ve hitched their wagon to a radical, self-aggrandizing Left without looking behind them to see if anyone followed. Now that the wheels have come off, the sobering truth is this: they have no one to blame but themselves.