"As with most complex matters, there can be a lot of answers that are not inconsistent with each other, but overlapping, and different folks will focus on different things,” said New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. | AP Photo Top Democrats plot path forward after November disaster

AVENTURA, Fla. — It was Russian interference. Or FBI Director James Comey’s meddling. A travel schedule that omitted Wisconsin. Years’ worth of disengagement from state-level politics.

The potential explanations for Democratic losses in November are endless, and far from Trump’s inauguration on Friday and the massive marches against the new president on Saturday, roughly 120 of the Democratic Party’s high-level donors and strategists who spent the weekend tucked away at a peaceful golf resort here came no closer to a consensus on what went wrong.


Many of the party's top players flew south to discuss the path forward, and they committed to investing more in opposition research initiatives and war rooms, to pay more attention to state campaigns, and — in a popular decision among a crowd full of Hillary Clinton supporters and absent much Bernie Sanders support — to avoid further acrimony within the party.

But the primary refrain about 2016 remained the same: "What went wrong? Everything."

“As with most complex matters, there can be a lot of answers that are not inconsistent with each other, but overlapping, and different folks will focus on different things,” said New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who advocated greater investment in state legislatures and state-level politics. “I think we’ve moved on, to a certain extent, from the ‘what went wrong’ phase."

Presenters and audience members at the meeting here at the Turnberry Isle hotel went out of their way to underscore the "big tent" nature of the party, stressing the importance of uniting against Trump over any imperative to agree on operational pieces of party strategy. Agreement about whether Clinton was the wrong candidate — or on any of the scores of other possible reasons for her defeat — is not necessary to come together in the future, they suggested.

“Trump is owed the same deference from us that he paid to President Obama in the birtherism smear. Donald Trump famously threw out the political rulebook. If we are to succeed in this period, Democrats must suspend the normal rules of politics as well,” said David Brock, the Democratic strategist who organized the meeting, in his call-to-arms address to the gathered donors. “I’m sick and tired of the Republicans taking advantage of our fundamental decency — that ends today. These times require that Democrats go at the other side with both barrels."

The gathering — and others like it that are percolating across the country — came together at an inflection point for the party, as it debates the shape of its opposition to Trump, its policy agenda and even the identity of its leadership.

“While we’re absolutely going to move forward, we’re not going to forget what happened. We’ll remember James Comey and the Clinton-hating traitors inside the FBI. Virtually every day we’re confronted with more hard evidence that Hillary had an electoral majority on the day Comey issued his letter, and that he stole the election, period. End of story,” said Brock, making a case that just about everything went wrong, in a speech that also faulted the Clinton campaign’s lack of ads featuring workers hurt by Trump’s business decisions.

“We’ll remember the Russians. It’s a frightening world in which mixing the FBI’s abuse of power with the Kremlin’s criminal hacking and vicious propaganda efforts yield the election of Putin’s puppet, Donald Trump. We’ll remember the union-busting in Michigan and Wisconsin that delivered those states to Trump, and the Republican voter suppression efforts in Wisconsin and North Carolina that did the same. We’ll remember the purveyors of fake news."

To some, however, the clearest fault lies with the party’s messaging. “Democratic values haven’t been rejected in the election; we won by 3 million votes, but we do need to be better at articulating,” said strategist Doug Hattaway.

Operative James Carville added, “Persuasion is turnout: your message is turnout."

But to others, like Democratic National Committee chair aspirants Tom Perez and Jaime Harrison, a major problem was the GOP’s ability to out-organize them.

“The reason we lost Florida is because they organized for four years around the state, there was so much coordination between the RNC, the Koch brothers, and so many others,” said Perez.

“If you think about what went wrong in this election, it was when we abandoned the 50-state strategy,” added Harrison.

The frustration of middle-class workers made the proposition of Clinton’s election more difficult than previously expected, said some. “The challenges that face working people — and I’m not talking code for white working people, but all people trying to survive in a 21st century economy [who] have been let down by an approach toward globalization and towards financialization and so forth — that can’t be squared, that has to be acknowledged,” offered AFL-CIO political director Mike Podhorzer.

“You have this great frustration of American workers, our candidate being connected to the decades in which those frustrations took hold, and the Republican breaking the mold,” added Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, the most prominent representative of Sanders’ wing of the party in attendance.

As much as anything else, the weekend gathering was defined by preparations for the fight ahead, as Democrats in attendance found it more productive to plan their battles — Brock’s network of groups set a $40 million budget, he told donors — than to dwell on the root causes of the party’s woes. And the crowd made largely of Clinton supporters agreed that step one was to reduce the remaining tensions with Sanders backers, in defiance of the Bernie vs. Hillary proxy battles raging both at the state level and nationally.

“We need to do a better job of fighting together, not fighting each other,” said Ron Klain, a former chief of staff to former Vice President Joe Biden and a top adviser to Clinton. “There has already been too much internecine [battle]."

After all, went another common line of thinking, it’s not that Republicans are ascendant: “It’s very clear that this election was not a rejection of Democrats,” said EMILY’s List President Stephanie Schriock. “We have to remind ourselves we actually picked up seats in the Senate and the House."

So, with party leaders turning toward opposing Trump at every turn, the calls from Democratic donors, officeholders and activists to come to a unified understanding of the election are fading further into the background. A formal DNC autopsy is still likely to come, but the path ahead is being mapped without it — and that path is defined by opposition to the White House rather than fixing the party's own structural issues.

It's not that Democratic leaders think an audit is superfluous, just not urgent.

“You don't come back from this deep a hole without some serious argument,” insisted Jonathan Cowan, president of the Third Way think tank.

“We’re trying to be clear-eyed about what the problems were and not go off the rails,” added strategist John Neffinger. “But also not throw babies out with the bathwater."