They say the first step in solving a problem is admitting you have one. If that's true then the Democrats are in deep trouble. Despite the overwhelming evidence of the last election, they don't seem able to admit they have a problem, at least not one that goes deeper than public relations.

Case in point, Joe Biden gave an exit interview to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell yesterday and his takeaway from the 2024 loss was that his party didn't take enough credit for all of the wonderful things they accomplished.

“The mistake we made was — I think I made — was not getting our allies to acknowledge that the Democrats did this. So, for example, building a new billion-dollar bridge over the river, we’ll call it the ‘Democratic Bridge,’ figuratively speaking,” Biden said in an interview that aired Thursday with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, his final TV sit-down before he leaves office. “Talk about who put it together. Let people know that this was something the Democrats did, that it was done by the party. That’s different than me writing a check and me signing a check and saying I did it.”

Biden was asked if he considered putting his name on COVID checks the way President Trump did at one point. The assumption behind this question was that Biden just wasn't as aggressive as Trump in taking credit for things. But as CNN helpfully notes, Biden did exactly the same thing in 2021. 

Letters signed by President Joe Biden have begun to go out notifying beneficiaries of their direct payments under the administration’s Covid relief package, CNN has learned...

“My fellow American, On March 11, 2021, I signed into law the American Rescue Plan, a law that will help vaccinate America and deliver immediate economic relief to hundreds of millions of Americans, including you,” the letter from the IRS reads. “This fulfills a promise I made to you, and will help get millions of Americans through this crisis.”

Maybe Joe forgot about that? In any case, he's convinced that the real problem is he's not enough of a "huckster."

“I’m not a very good huckster. I mean, and that – it wasn’t a stupid thing for him to do. It helped him a lot. And it undermined our ability to convince people that we were the ones that were getting this to them,” Biden said. “And so – but I don’t think – ironically, I almost spent too much time on the policy and not enough time on the politics..."

So there you have it. Biden's takeaway from four years of failure and disappointment with his leadership is that he wasn't selling himself enough. In a word, that is delusional.

But he's not alone. The DNC is currently holding a contest to determine who will take over there and guide the party to a glorious comeback. Politico reports all of the candidates have one thing in common. They all think the party's big problem in 2024 was communications and, to some degree, the media.

Jason Paul, a long-shot candidate from Connecticut and now living in Massachusetts, placed the blame at the feet of the media, garnering a loud round of applause from the crowd. “Our problem is we trusted you all,” Paul said...

Democrats have long maintained their problem isn’t what they’re selling — but how they’re selling it. Don’t expect much of a change no matter who’s elected chair. Instead of an overhaul of party priorities, candidates cast themselves as change agents who could spark a party rebrand...

There was Martin, accusing the party of relying too heavily on celebrities to do voter outreach. “We have so many … spokespeople out there that we should be tapping into,” Martin said. “Instead of sending celebrities out, we should send workers out to talk to workers.”...

It’s a diagnosis of the problem that any number of Democratic strategists recoil at, arguing the party has substantive problems that go beyond communications. But at the DNC, it’s still the common refrain.

If only the media had been in their corner, they would have won. Incredibly that's what many of these people really believe. No one wanted to talk about Joe Biden's age or his decision to run for reelection despite obvious indications he had lost a step. No one wanted to talk about the border crisis or the party's commitment to far left positions on race and gender. It was all just about bad PR.

Even if you step back from Joe Biden and his multitude of problems, it should be obvious that there's more going on here than a PR problem.

Left-wing parties are more unpopular now than at any time since the end of the Cold War, The Telegraph has assessed...

Right-wing groups emerged as the worldwide winners after more than 1.5 billion people voted in more than 70 countries in 2024, the most on record in a single year.

Leftist parties suffered a record low average vote share of just 45.4 per cent in each democracy’s latest election, according to Telegraph analysis of elections in 73 democracies.

This is a global pattern and the only country that seems to have recently bucked the trend is the UK, though that isn't going very well for Keir Starmer at the moment. There are various reasons the left has lost but anger about immigration seems to have played a role in many countries, including the US and Canada. Wokeism also seems to be playing a role both in stoking opposition to things like trans athletes and in making it difficult for left-wing organizations to accomplish anything as they are weighed down by internal squabbles over these same identity politics issues.

Bringing this back to America, Joe Biden's goose may have been cooked by inflation but there's little doubt that uncontrolled immigration and trans issues helped seal his fate. These were not PR problems, they were bad choices in a country where some of these are still 80-20 issues. If Democrats ever want to come back they need to admit they have a far-left/woke problem and then do something to mitigate it.

A real solution to this problem would look less like Democrats complaining about PR and the media and more like an AA meeting in a church basement: Hello, my name is Tim Walz and I'm a wokeaholic. It has been nine weeks since I called a stranger a racist transphobe.