I also caught up there with former Labor Secretary Tom Perez, one of her rivals for the post. “What voters heard from Clinton,” he told me, “was not ‘I feel your pain’ but ‘Vote for me because he’s crazy,’ and that’s not a message.”

By the time of the Houston event, the field of contenders for the D.N.C. chairmanship was up to 10. I sat down with more than half of them, and noticed a contradiction between their rightful worry about focusing too much on Trump and their continued focus on … Trump.

That dynamic was reflected in a recent poll showing that while 41 percent of Democrats were unfamiliar with their party’s Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, only 29 percent were unfamiliar with Trump’s apocalyptic guru, Steve Bannon. Democrats at all levels are clearer on their enemies than on their agenda.

And they’re constantly swerving from vision to process: It’s a tic they can’t control. In Houston I was told that the party needed a more transparent presidential nominating system. And better voter-registration drives. And increased coordination between the D.N.C., the D.C.C.C. and the D.S.C.C. I supped on an alphabet soup.

“We didn’t make house calls,” said Perez.

“We abandoned the 50-state strategy,” said Keith Ellison, a Minnesota congressman also running for the chairmanship.

All of that’s true. But none of it gets at larger challenges that were much less frequently mentioned, if at all: the necessity of grooming and rallying behind candidates who can forge an emotional connection with voters and are in sync with the moment; the imperative of studying the map, identifying every Senate and House seat that could possibly swing to Democrats in 2018 and playing a ruthlessly pragmatic game of chess; the articulation of a down-to-earth, visceral message that resonates with as many voters as possible. “I’m with her” didn’t cut it.

Another of the D.N.C. candidates, Raymond Buckley, the chairman of the Democratic Party in New Hampshire, acknowledged to me, “Sometimes we try to impress ourselves too much by talking about issues that are overly complex when the populace really wants you to boil it down to a much more simplistic message.”