ATLANTA – On the day before Democratic National Committee members elected a new chairman to carry the party's torch into an uncharted era of Trumpism, they clung to one last opportunity to relive their triumphant past.

But a video honoring former President Barack Obama beamed on and then abruptly zapped out – not once, but twice – due to a technical short-circuit. It felt like an apt metaphor for a party meandering in the minority.

"I don't want to blame it on the Russians just yet," interim DNC head Donna Brazile quipped, breaking the awkwardness inside the room only slightly.

A day later, a narrow majority of DNC members, 54 percent, chose former Obama Labor Secretary Tom Perez as Democrats' new figurehead – a job that is part cable-news mouthpiece and part political ambassador, but most of the time equates to being a fundraiser. Perez's defeat of Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota was another frustrating setback for progressives, who felt that if nothing else, Hillary Clinton's shocking loss to Donald Trump finally would convince the party it needs a radical transformation at the top. Instead, it chose a more conventional path back out of the wilderness, if only marginally.

At a time when it is in search of a unifying and guiding light amid Republican dominance at all levels of government, what's abundantly clear is that the Democratic Party belongs to no one at this juncture – not Obama, not Clinton and not Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, even with his rising tide of Berniecrats.

Yet while that can be perceived as an immediate weakness, it may actually be the key to the party's long-term revitalization. In order for Democrats to navigate the 2018 midterms and then eventually the 2020 presidential contest, they not only must make a clean break with the past, but have an internal reckoning that permits their future leaders to ascend based on merit and message, rather than legacy and lineage.

The end of the Obama-Clinton era, and to some extent, the defeat of the Sanders blockade at the DNC meeting, will allow for this. In some ways, a Clinton defeat – however staggering and unsettling – was the only way to force the party to look forward and outside its familiar confines.

That it was Trump who vanquished her makes the task even more urgent.

"The party, in so much of the last few decades, was an insider affair. A lot of times Democrats didn't vote because they didn't feel a connection to the candidates. We've got to overcome that," New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio tells U.S. News in an interview. "Change is in the wind. What's in the air, in my opinion, is a transformation of the party."

In conversations with more than a dozen Democrats, they named as many potential party leaders as there are options. Perez is at the helm now, some say, given his newly minted position atop the largest organizing committee. Congressional Minority Leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi remain steady and strong lieutenants, others assert, given their experience in the Capitol Hill trenches. Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Cory Booker of New Jersey also were cited as having elevated perches in the party due to their hypercharged invective against Trump.

Warren and Booker, both potential 2020 White House contenders, also conjure up a positive visual comparison to the Clinton-Obama embarrassment of riches the party boasted a decade ago.

"She's a badass," Casey Steinau, head of the Alaska Democratic Party, says of Warren. "She's very good at taking incredibly complex things – especially finance – and boiling it down to basic concepts that we all get. We don't have to have a CPA to understand why the banks are screwing us. She just says it."

Fred Hudson, a vice chairman of the Virginia Democratic Party, appreciates the unbridled ferocity that Warren and Sanders bring to the fight against the Republicans, but fears their voices will wear on the masses.

"There's a shrillness about both he and Warren that I think will not play good over a long period of time on a national scene," he says.

These are the kinds of debates being had right now across the country – and Clinton's loss has fostered a more open and candid conversation about the type of message and messengers the party needs in order to rebound out of its current rut.

"There's a lot of leaders. We're being run by committee," acknowledges Gilberto Hinojosa, the Texas Democratic Party chairman. He adds: "I don't think we need one person to lead the party. The thing that is helping us more than anything else is a guy by the name of Donald Trump."

One floor below last weekend's official DNC proceedings inside the downtown Westin hotel in Atlanta, a throng of progressives met to sort out their own vision of the future. And some of the participants weren't natural allies of the party.

A panel session informally branded "The New Frontier of the Democratic Party" included Winnie Wong, who coined the #FeelTheBern hashtag; Alicia Garza, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter; Nelini Stamp of the Working Families Party, who already has organized a demonstration outside Schumer's Brooklyn home; and a national co-chair of the Women's March on Washington, who as a woman decided to change her name to Bob Bland.

While many of these activists don't feel like they belong to the formal structure of the Democratic Party, they do realize the need to organize the emerging progressive movement that has hatched and poured into streets and town halls in response to the shock and awe of the Trump administration.

These activists will not always align themselves with Democrats, and sometimes will vigorously and vocally oppose them. But they believe they can harness more power and influence if they take on the party from the outside, while lending it support when they share a common goal.

"There are people who have been disappointed in this institution, who have thought that the Democratic Party as an institution . . . just stopped listening to young people, just stopped listening to communities of color," Stamp told the audience, which included both rogue activists and curious DNC members. "There needs to be a progressive faction that can say things and do things that the Democratic Party can't do. There's a role that they're not going to be able to fill and that's OK. Decentralization with structure works. Distributive organizing works."

By the end of the presentations, those more steeped in the traditional party apparatus – like longtime Rep. Barbara Lee of California and Tina Podlodowski, chair of the Washington Democratic Party – were rising to ask what more Democratic leaders could do to lure millennial activists into their tent.

Many activists were open to partnering on local initiatives, issues and campaigns to elect Democratic candidates with progressive bona fides. But some were clear that they eschewed even the most generic label assigned to them.

"Millennials?" Garza sniffed at the buzzy political jargon. "We don't call ourselves that. Y'all think of ourselves that way."

What they were really conveying is that after marshaling thousands into the streets in cities across the country, these activists are tired of being talked at and want equal footing at the table to be listened to. The panel session was a starting point toward that goal, and a tacit symbol that the current power structure inside the party is as diffuse and decentralized as it has been in decades.

"There's some truth and reconciliation going on here," de Blasio says. "To me, what's more important is producing a grass-roots party."

"We need to leave the ladder down for others to climb up," says Rhine McLin, a DNC member and former mayor of Dayton, Ohio. "When a certain group got up there, they kinda pulled the ladder up. I just think that people at the top got comfortable."

If Clinton would have beaten Trump as expected, she would have handpicked her own DNC leader. There would have been no competitive contest, and the run-up to the DNC meeting in Atlanta would've been rather humdrum. Instead, a monthslong campaign activated party members who had not been contacted by DNC leadership in years.

Bert Marley, chairman of the Idaho Democratic Party, isn't usually consulted on national party affairs given the overwhelmingly red nature of the state where he lives. That all changed with this year's DNC elections, during which he was not only bombarded with calls by Perez and Ellison, but with pitches by other candidates for lower positions in the party as well, along with DNC members looking to chat about the barriers to progress at the local level.

"I feel empowered by that process. I'm having conversations with people in years past that I probably would've never had conversations with," Marley says. "This process has created a lot of optimism. It's opened things up."

A Clinton victory also would have prevented Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, from vaulting onto the national scene. Buttigieg, a 35-year-old openly gay military reserve officer who dropped his bid to lead the DNC moments before the vote, won high praise from diverse corners of the party for his low-key earnestness and inclusionary vision.

"There's nothing wrong with our bench," he told DNC members before pulling out of the race for chair. "We just haven't called enough people on the bench off the bench and asked them to get out on the field."

The field is now wide open, and some Democrats are reimagining what their next fleet of candidates could look like. Hinojosa says he'd love to see San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich run for governor of Texas.

"He's one of our best spokespersons," he says.

Run for Something, a group established in January to build an enduring bench of Democratic candidates, said it has acquired pledges from 7,000 individuals under the age of 35 to run for down-ballot races, from school board to state representative. Their pitch: "Donald Trump is president. Trust us, you're qualified to run for local office."

This is not to say there won't be tensions and intraparty conflicts along the way, as marrying independent activists into any formal hierarchy isn't a natural symbioisis.

Rita Bosworth, for example, founded the Sister District Project to pluck activists from solidly red or blue towns and plug them into competitive races where they can make a difference. But when she was making calls to pitch her services, one longtime local party chair in California accused her of being "a secret Libertarian spy" attempting to infiltrate the Democratic Party.

In conservative-leaning Missouri, Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill is openly fretting about a 2018 primary challenge buoyed by a restless progressive movement that is seeking pure and total opposition to Trump.

"There is, in our party now, some of the same kind of enthusiasm at the base that the Republican Party had with the tea party," she told a St. Louis radio station last month.

In the aftermath of the election, Clinton campaign hands made a concerted attempt to delegitimize Trump's victory and excuse their loss, citing inappropriate FBI intervention and Russian meddling. While some Democrats could sympathize with their plight, many quietly viewed it as a face-saving exercise aimed at explaining away a defeat in a race that should've never been that close in the first place.

But as Democrats roamed hotel conference rooms and corridors in Atlanta, there was a notable lack of defensiveness and rationalization in explaining Trump's win. Most understood Obama was a unique, once-in-a-generation talent and that Clinton was an admirable but ultimately flawed figure.

Both are gone, and neither is likely to be replicated.