The conventional wisdom before the 2016 presidential election was that Republicans had made a huge mistake in nominating Donald Trump. Trump had no prior experience in political office, and his polarizing behavior and rhetoric put a low ceiling on his electoral support. Trump’s win shocked everyone, but especially the Democratic Party. In the aftermath, Democrats engaged in a process of soul-searching, inquiring where they had gone wrong and how they could do better next time.

In this engaging book, Seth Masket presents a deeply researched and illuminating analysis of the Democrats’ 2020 presidential nomination contest, tracking in real time the struggle of the party’s donors, officeholders, activists, and ordinary voters to come to grips with their 2016 loss and plot a new path forward. The book draws on an impressive array of evidence about public opinion, media coverage, endorsements, and campaign finance. It also makes use of survey experiments and an extensive network of contacts among Democratic Party activists from around the country.

Democrats’ 2016 defeat kicked off a debate about whether “identity politics” had contributed to the party’s debacle. Just one week after the 2016 elections, humanities professor Mark Lilla published an op-ed in the New York Times criticizing the Clinton campaign and Democrats generally for “appealing to narrow demographic subgroups of the electorate at the expense of the whole” (p. 190). To see how this debate played out within Democratic Party circles, Masket polled 60 party activists between December 2018 and February 2020, gauging their sentiments every two months. He found that the identity politics critique had some purchase; more than a quarter of this group gave it some credence. But activists attributed the loss to numerous other causes, including campaign mistakes, exogenous events, racism and sexism, damage from Bernie Sanders’s campaign, Clinton’s personal traits, and the voters’ mood. Over time, he shows, no single narrative of Democrats’ 2016 loss emerged as a consensus explanation either within the party itself or in media coverage more generally.

Looming over the 2020 nomination contest was the overriding desire for a candidate who could defeat Trump. But, as Masket insightfully observes, the electability debate was inevitably “toxic” within such a diverse party (p. 37). The notion that women and minorities are likely to have a harder time getting elected is widely held, despite a lack of systematic evidence for any such generalization. Discussion of “electability” implies that vital members of the Democratic coalition are less capable to serve as the party standard-bearers—a highly unpleasant conversation.

Although the identity politics narrative never became the dominant account of Clinton’s defeat, Masket shows that it likely affected Democrats’ decision making in the 2020 primaries. Through a set of survey experiments designed to measure how the identity politics narrative affected voters’ assessments, Masket finds that “even a fairly modest treatment—a few sentences at the beginning of the survey—showed rather dramatic effects…. It didn’t take very much to get Democratic voters to turn against women and candidates of color” (p. 205). Even briefly raising doubts about the potential negative electoral impact of identity politics easily steered primary voters toward candidates more insulated from such criticisms.

Biden’s nomination was obviously overdetermined. His status as Obama’s vice president alone might have been sufficient to ensure his nomination, but Biden also allayed the party’s anxieties about electability as a white male who had been fixture in the Democratic Party for decades. In this sense, Biden’s victory was not a product of chance, as portrayed by journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes in their 2021 book, Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency. Masket’s analysis shows that Biden was always ahead in the “invisible primary,” even though he did not emerge as the party’s dominant choice until after the South Carolina primary. From a low baseline, Biden always led in endorsements by elected Democrats, in contributions from campaign donors loyal to the Democratic Party, and among polls of Democratic primary voters.

Even though Biden’s selection was overdetermined, Masket makes a persuasive case that his perceived “electability” was a dominant consideration for Democrats of all stripes in 2020 and that it likely undermined women and minority candidates. My one complaint with the book is that I would have liked to see more account taken of interest groups allied with the party. If one views parties as networks of “intense demanders,” those networks of Democratic Party-allied interest groups do not receive systematic attention. The book considers the party from many angles: among elected Democrats, as a formal organization, as networks of donors and activists, and among voters generally. No doubt, the activists surveyed for the book overlap with many of these Democratic groups. But the book does not contain explicit analysis of interest group behavior, endorsements, and preferences per se.

Taken all in all, Learning from Loss offers a compelling, highly readable account of recent Democratic Party history. But it provides far more than that. It also yields deeper insights by setting recent developments in historical context. In a terrific chapter titled “When Parties Try to Fix Themselves,” Masket identifies a representation versus reform schism on internal party rules and organization that has long divided racial minority groups from white party reformers in Democratic Party politics. Of the 1970s party reforms, Masket quotes McGovern-Fraser commissioner Sam Beer recalling, “I went to Massachusetts, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis and Atlanta. I was impressed, at these meetings, by the fact that Negroes and the people in the cities were not the slightest bit interested in this whole thing. [Party reform] was really a suburban, white, middle-class movement” (pp. 126–27). Masket then details how a similar schism played out in the Unity Reform Commission convened after 2016. Supporters of Bernie Sanders wanted to move decision-making power toward rank-and-file voters, including independents, and away from party insiders (superdelegates). Supporters of Hillary Clinton viewed all those reforms skeptically, like the party regulars of the 1970s. Closed primaries and the role of the Congressional Black Caucus as superdelegates give African Americans a large voice in the Democratic Party. “While I’m all for growth and expanding our party,” said a Clinton-aligned DNC member, “I am not for diluting the voting power of the most reliable voting bloc in the Democratic Party” (p. 136). Readers will come away from Masket’s analysis with a deeper understanding of long-standing fault lines within the Democratic Party.

Learning from Loss bridges multiple audiences. As one of political science’s most insightful scholars of party nomination politics, Masket exhibits all the subject matter mastery that scholarly audiences would expect. At the same time, the book will be accessible to readers with no background on the topic. The narrative offers sufficient but not excessive detail, pressing its analysis without oversimplification. Sophisticated survey experiments are explained clearly and concisely. Packed with pithy quotations, the book will appeal to general-interest audiences beyond academia.

Although its title may sound narrow and topical—an investigation of one political party during one moment in time—Learning from Loss will continue to interest scholars and students for many years to come. In the meantime, and if the author is willing, I would love to read a sequel analyzing the post-2020 GOP.