For all the handwringing over how Democrats lost to Trump, the people most responsible for the party’s collapse have largely escaped scrutiny: Biden’s inner circle. His top advisors—Mike Donilon, Anita Dunn, Steve Ricchetti—were the architects of a failed strategy that kept Biden in the race until the last possible moment, ignored glaring warning signs, and left Democrats without a viable alternative. And yet, in the postmortem, the focus has been everywhere but them. The media obsesses over left-wing activists, “The Groups,” Harris’s campaign struggles—but not the strategists who bet everything on a president who couldn’t finish the race.
Their defense? Loyalty. "I think the party lost its mind," Donilon said, still justifying the decision to keep Biden on the ballot even as his poll numbers cratered. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre put it even more bluntly: "Instead of coming together to really be unified and trying to figure out how do we save our democracy, how do we fight back, that's what I was seeing." But the truth is, the problem wasn’t that Democrats turned on themselves too late—it’s that Biden’s team refused to listen early enough.
For all their rhetoric about protecting democracy, their actions told a different story. If Trump’s return to power was an existential threat, why did they cling to a strategy that ignored voter concerns, dismissed Biden’s declining approval, and gambled everything on defying political gravity?
The signs were everywhere. Voters worried about Biden’s age? A media creation. Sagging approval ratings? A messaging problem. Rising costs of living? Just bad vibes. Internal reports on Biden’s stamina? A distraction. Every warning was waved away, every internal concern cast as cowardice rather than a legitimate crisis. The result was a campaign that was slow to adapt, incapable of pivoting, and utterly unprepared for the inevitable reckoning.
The debate disaster wasn’t a fluke. It was the logical outcome of a leadership team that had spent years insulating itself from reality. Nowhere in Biden’s advisors postmortem was an acknowledgment of the core failure: the failure to acknowledge the public’s deep concerns about Biden’s age earlier on, to prepare for obvious risks, to allow a competitive primary that could have produced a salient nominee, to actually listen to voters.
All of it sidesteps the fundamental truth: Biden’s advisors steered the Democratic Party for years. They had every chance to adjust course. They didn’t. And now, rather than facing accountability, the architects of one of the worst political miscalculations in modern history will glide into fellowships at the Center for American Progress, corporate gigs at Uber, or contributor slots at MSNBC—offering postmortems on their own failures as if they were mere observers, not the ones who set the party on this path.
Without real accountability for the people at the top, we’ll keep parsing the wrong details—focusing on polling crosstabs, media spin, and voter turnout models while ignoring the most consequential decision of the race and the culture that enabled it. The architects of this loss—Biden’s inner circle, the operatives who bet everything on defying time—remain untouched, their reputations intact, their next jobs secured.
This isn’t just about one election cycle. It’s about a media and political establishment that confuses proximity to power with wisdom, that treats deference as strategy, that believes institutional inertia is the same as political resilience. The problem is a party elite that built a fortress around Biden, mistook their own faith in him for the public’s, and assumed voters would adjust to their reality rather than the other way around.
The Democratic Party has no shortage of postmortems. But the hardest truth—the one that rarely makes it into the polite retrospectives—is that political establishments, like all entrenched institutions, protect their own. They turn failures into footnotes, miscalculations into unfortunate circumstances, and insiders into sages. If Democrats want to rebuild, they need to break this cycle. That starts with naming the real mistakes, holding the right people accountable, and dismantling the culture that allowed them to fail upward. Otherwise, they will keep repeating the same errors—only next time, with even less credibility.
In the end, this wasn’t just a campaign failure; it was a failure of priorities. If Biden’s team truly believed democracy was at stake, they would have governed their choices accordingly. They would have planned for contingency, acknowledged political gravity, and treated voters as participants rather than an afterthought. Instead, they protected their own position, insulated themselves from reality, and bet everything on inertia holding just a little while longer. It didn’t. And that’s why they lost. That’s why we all did.
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