Some of this is typical stuff for a party in the political wilderness, but another factor here is the long tail of the 2016 presidential primary. According to MAGA mythology, the president took on and humiliated the old GOP establishment, replacing it with a more populist party (though Trump has not governed like a populist).

The story of the Democrats’ leadership vacuum is more complicated, partially written by the losers. The left saw the presidential race as “rigged” for Hillary Clinton, who got more votes and delegates than Bernie Sanders but got help from “superdelegates.” In 2020, after the party stopped superdelegates from voting on the first ballot, liberals complained that the presidential race was “rigged” again to consolidate the anti-Sanders vote.

Plenty of other Democrats defend those primaries and outcomes. Sanders got a one-on-one showdown with Joe Biden in the 2020 primaries and got creamed. It’s harder for them to explain 2024, and how the party protected the former president from primary challengers, ending with the break-glass nomination of the vice president by Biden’s elected delegates.

This led to popular, damaging folklore about the Democratic Party — that it has not, in Joe Rogan’s words, “had a real primary since 2012,” and that it has no real credibility to accuse the top-down GOP of threatening democracy.

“I would not say the Democratic Party’s end-run around competitive primaries in 2024 worked in our favor,” said Jesse Lehrich, a veteran party strategist and co-host of the Nobody’s Listening podcast.

The irony: Democrats have overcorrected to fix their “anti-democratic” image. The DNC spent half of last year fighting over David Hogg’s vice chair position because party chair Ken Martin was trying to institute, then enforce, rules that prevented any DNC member from intervening in primaries. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is more hesitant than Trump about endorsing candidates because when it does, the candidates it’s not endorsing run to microphones, denouncing the “meddling.”

“Voters, not the DCCC, should pick Democratic nominees,” the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC told Axios after the committee put a set of swing-seat candidates on its Red to Blue list. The CPC PAC also endorses candidates, of course, but it’s not a party organ.

And the argument goes, for many Democrats, that official party organs should never tell voters who to support in a primary.