WHOOPS! NEVER MIND.

I'm pleased that the mainstream media is acknowledging the significance of the Democratic Party's victories on Tuesday. I'm pleased, for instance, that Nate Cohn of The New York Times is noting that the Democratic gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia appear to have flipped 7% of Trump voters, based on exit poll data. I'm pleased that Hispanic voters' return to the Democratic Party is being widely acknowledged. I'm pleased that some media outlets are acknowledging that the wins weren't limited to blue states and cities.

But I'd like an acknowledgment that the same mainstream media was wrong when it was telling us just before the elections that the Democratic Party couldn't possibly dig itself out of the deep hole it was in without massive policy and messaging changes. Just eight days before the election, we were all reading that Semafor story headlined "Left-Wing Ideas Have Wrecked Democrats’ Brand, New Report Warns." Wrecked! The brand was wrecked! And yet a "wrecked" party romped a little more than a week after that story appeared. It was only a few weeks after a series of Ezra Klein interviews in which he monomaniacally focused on the Democrats' apparent electability crisis, which included a discussion with Ta-Nehisi Coates that should have been about Charlie Kirk's bigotry but was instead hijacked by Klein so he could obsess over the notion that Democrats must jettison some liberal policy positions in order to win elections. Will Klein admit that he was wrong about the hopelessness of Democrats' position? Will the rest of the media acknowledge that maybe young men and Hispanic men weren't lost to the GOP forever when Trump won in 2024? Will they admit that maybe Republicans also have policy positions that make them vulnerable, and that this is particularly a problem when they're in charge, as they are nationwide and in Virginia?

I made some mistakes. I thought the left-centrism of Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia would be uninspiring and would lead to close gubernatorial races in those states. I was wrong about that. But I've always assumed that discontent within the Democratic Party could be coming from a lot of people who'll turn out for the party regardless. I wasn't surprised when I read about an NBC poll conducted just before Election Day in which only 28% of voters said they had a positive view of Democrats, but Democrats had a 7-point lead in enthusiasm about voting in the 2026 midterms, comparable to the 9-point lead they had a year before the very successful 2018 midterms.

The press should have acknowledged that the results of the 2024 election might not be signs of a permanent voter realignment, that grumbling about Democrats might be accompanied by votes for Democrats, and that Republicans are capable of alienating voters, too. Every "Democrats are doomed" story should have come with the caveat that maybe Democrats weren't doomed.

Now we know they weren't, but the people who said they weren't won't own up to their mistakes.