“The Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton pretty much communicated what was bad about Trump
but failed to communicate what was great about Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party,” said Sally Boynton Brown, the executive director of the Democratic Party in Idaho.
“That’s an operational failure rather than a message failure or a candidate failure,” said Jaime Harrison,
the chairman of South Carolina’s Democratic Party and another contender to lead the D. N.C.
In one of many recent forums for the politicians vying to lead the Democratic National Committee — and, ideally, the party — out of the wilderness
and into better times, the candidates were asked to distill the importance of fighting Donald Trump to 10 words or less.
Another of the D. N.C.
candidates, Raymond Buckley, the chairman of the Democratic Party in New Hampshire, acknowledged to me, “Sometimes we try to impress ourselves too much by talking about issues
that are overly complex when the populace really wants you to boil it down to a much more simplistic message.”
What might that message be?
“What voters heard from Clinton,” he told me, “was not ‘I feel your pain’ but ‘Vote for me because he’s crazy,’ and that’s not a message.”
By the time of the Houston event, the field of contenders for the D. N.C.
chairmanship was up to 10.
Voters in 2016 made clear their hunger for it, and then the top three Democrats in the House — Nancy Pelosi, 76, Steny Hoyer, 77,
and James Clyburn, 76 — stayed put in their positions.