On Feb. 1, the Democratic National Committee will gather in suburban Maryland to elect a new chair. Every indication suggests they still don’t fully appreciate what happened to them in the 2024 election.

The two main contenders are Ken Martin, who is head of the Minnesota state Democratic Party, which is actually known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, and Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Press reports suggest Martin is running a little ahead of Wikler. A lot of the discussion of the race involves internal party matters, such as the distribution of resources, and not the details of Democratic positions on various hot political issues.

It’s on the big issues that the broader party is currently foundering, and there is no evidence they’ll find their way anytime soon.

The fundamental question they face is how to focus and moderate their instinct to fight every single thing President Donald Trump does. The reason is obvious and simple. If some — perhaps many — of the things the president does are popular, then across-the-board Democratic resistance will serve to make Democrats unpopular. Some Democrats see the problem, and want to pick their spots to criticize, but others can’t help themselves.

House Democrat Rep. Pat Ryan of of New York argued that in Trump’s first week in office, Democrats “set the terms of the fight ahead,” by which he meant an ongoing billionaires vs. the people battle. He advocated constant political warfare. “If post-2016 was like a sort of street fight — a little bit sloppy, a lot of wild swinging — then I think 2025 has to be more like the close-quarters combat that I learned in the Army,” Ryan told Politico Playbook, “which is like a mix of jiu-jitsu and judo and a few other things where you’re using your enemies’ mistakes against them.”

What about those times, like now, when many Americans support what Ryan’s “enemies” — that would be President Trump and his supporters — are doing? The answer is not clear. We’ll see.

As this goes on, the Democratic Party’s media/intellectual base is deeply worried. In an essay headlined, “The Right Is Winning the Battle for Hearts and Minds,” the New York Times’ Thomas Edsall — employing classic Times language — noted that, “The full-scale assault by the conservative movement on liberal domination of the nation’s culture has begun to deliver key victories.”

The Right has moved beyond old strengths like talk radio to new strength in podcasts and social media, Edsall said, to challenge the Left’s domination of “academia, the literary world, the press, television, and streaming video.”

Trump’s unexpected weekend victory over the socialist president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, appeared to vindicate everything Trump has been saying — and Democrats have been denouncing — about his strategy to deport illegal border crossers, especially those who have committed additional crimes. Will it profit Democrats to engage in political jiu-jitsu against that? Probably not. The party still has to figure out how to address the new president’s successes.