The Democratic National Committee will spend the next two months picking through the wreckage of the 2014 midterm elections.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., who chairs the DNC, announced Saturday a top-to-bottom review of the election to determine how the party needs to improve in translating success in presidential years to midterm campaigns.
In a video sent to supporters and the press, Wasserman Schultz argues that Democrats are right on the issues and it was only their execution in the campaigns that cost them the Senate and led to historic Republican gains in the House.
“We know we’re right on the issues,” she says in the video. “The American people believe in the causes we’re fighting for. But the electoral success we have when our presidential nominee is able to make the case to the country as a whole, doesn’t translate in other elections.”
“That’s why we lost in 2010, and it’s why we lost on Tuesday,” she says. “We’ve got to do better.”
The video fails to acknowledge that presidential elections are largely nationwide popularity contests between two personalities, whereas congressional contests tend to serve as a referendum of incumbents’ performance in Congress — or at least on how voters in a particular state or district view the last person to represent them in Washington.
In the coming weeks, Wasserman Schultz said she will appoint a committee of Democratic party organizers, activists and strategists to review what happened with the goal of releasing the report at the DNC’s winter meeting early next year.
“We are going to look at where we fell short. We’re going to identify our mistakes,” she says in the video. “And we’re going to talk to the smartest people in our party and the most dedicated Democrats in the country to build on what we’ve done that works and find solutions for things that are broken.”
