I'm going to start by telling you the honest truth that I've heard from conversations with people

across the country, smart Democrats, some still Democrats, some disaffected Democrats who say that

the party has to address some really tough questions. I haven't heard anybody with a list like this,

and it's a list that I put together getting kind of the consensus view of a

number of very smart people, some of whom have left the party, as I said, but some of whom really

want the Democrats to be able to not just win the White House back, but to build the kind of a sustained

coalition or kind of movement that Donald Trump has built to try to figure out how things have gone. The real problem that these

Democrats see is not that the party is weak in every way. We'll talk about that. The real problem

they see is the party has its head in the sand, enabled by the people in what I call the dominant

media who are not wanting to ask the hard questions because they're hard and they're embarrassing in some cases.

They're difficult. Instead of doing that, they just have their masks and their shields on,

their Trump derangement syndrome inside their blue bubble. And they're not even asking the right questions,

let alone trying to figure out what the answers to those questions are. So again, these aren't my questions.

These are the questions that really smart people who have been involved in Democratic politics

at the highest levels, at the grassroots level, are saying the party has to face.

It's a fact the Democratic Party has moved to the far left, farther left than it's been in our lifetimes.

And that is a big part of the challenge the party faces to figure out what does it mean now to be a Democrat and how they can compete with Donald Trump.

Donald Trump's poll numbers are down, but the Democrats numbers are not good either.

The state of the Democratic Party is not good. As weak as Trump is, most of the things that have happened good to the Democrats,

most of the things that they're anticipating in the spring, summer, and fall and into the midterm year are because they're

expecting Donald Trump to mess up. That's not good enough for a lot of the Democrats I'm talking to.

They say the problems are too big to count on Donald Trump and the Republicans messing up.

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