"It Was Already Over": Doug Sosnik's Brutal 2024 Election Analysis

**Michael Smerconish** (0:00)
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**Michael Smerconish** (1:04)
Welcome to The Smerconish Podcast for Independent Minds.

**Michael Smerconish** (1:09)
How do you account for the loss?

**SPEAKER_4** (1:10)
Because I think a lot of Democrats felt the way you did.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:13)
Why did Donald Trump win again?

**SPEAKER_6** (1:15)
I don't know. You have to ask other Americans that, because I truly don't know.

**Michael Smerconish** (1:22)
Well, I'm ready to ask another American that question. That would be Doug Sosnik, who has advised President Clinton, as a matter of fact, did so from 1994 through the year 2000 He's advised governors, members of Congress, corporations, nonprofits, universities. Writing recently for The Washington Post, Doug begins this way.
Jill Biden had the chance to come clean.
She could have used her new memoir, View from the East Wing, to write about the former first family's role in allowing Donald Trump to return to the White House. Instead, the public has learned that the Bidens live in an alternate universe in which they made no mistakes and the country isn't paying for their decisions. Doug Sosnik, welcome back to the program. You say, here's the real Democratic autopsy. There are three reasons why they lost. Please run through the first.

**Doug Sosnik** (2:18)
Good morning, Michael. I think the backdrop is, I don't think that the Bidens probably really had an understanding of why they won in 2020 And I think that was part of the problem. But I think the three main reasons that we lost in 2024 was the first that Joe Biden went back on his initial commitment to be a one-term president and a transition figure.
The second was the decisions that were made in the Biden White House in the first seven months of 2021 And then lastly, the reaction by the Democratic Party after the 2022 midterms, in which we did far exceed historical precedents of doing well. But I think we completely misread the reasons that we did well in 2022 and allowed Biden to frame the results as a reaffirmation of the success of his presidency and thereby making it much more difficult for anybody in the Democratic Party to primary.

**Michael Smerconish** (3:22)
Why do you say that the Bidens don't realize why Joe Biden won in 2020? What do they think is the rationale or reason and why did he really win, according to Doug Sosnik?

**Doug Sosnik** (3:35)
Well, I'm not sure what they were thinking. I assume they thought that he won because he ran and got a mandate to govern. But I think that the fact is that he was really, I think, primarily, to some extent, circumstances enabled him to become, in a sense, almost an accidental candidate in the sense that the election was largely a referendum about Trump in his four years. And of all the Democratic candidates running, the party quickly coalesced around Biden despite the fact that he really did not do very well in the early primary states until he won South Carolina. But the party coalesced around Biden within the first, within 10 days of Super Tuesday in 2020, out of fear that Bernie Sanders was going to be the nominee. So he was essentially backed into the nomination out of fear of Sanders. And then the general election was really about Trump. And the fact that we had COVID at that time and he was able to not be on the campaign trail and was largely able to be in a controlled environment enabled him to narrowly be elected. But he was elected really without a affirmative positive goal of what he wanted to achieve as president other than removing Donald Trump from the presidency, which incidentally is an enormous achievement.