“Insanity,” some wise person said, “is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

If that is so, the Democratic Party has been home to a lot of insane political leaders trying to win presidential elections with the same formula that has failed to impress voters. Its performance in the last 15 presidential elections since 1972 is a clue.

Democrats won only six times, four of them by two candidates winning re-election: Bill Clinton vs. George H.W. Bush, 1992, and Robert Dole, 1996, and Barack Obama vs. John McCain, 2008, and Mitt Romney, 2012. Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford in 1976 and Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in 2020. So only four Democrats have occupied the White House in over a half-century.

Republicans have won nine times, three by candidates elected twice: Richard Nixon vs. Hubert Humphrey, 1968, and George McGovern, 1972; Ronald Reagan vs. Carter, 1980, and Walter Mondale,1984; George W. Bush vs. Al Gore, 2000, and John Kerry, 2004; Trump vs. Hillary Clinton, 2016, and Kamala Harris, 2024. George H.W. Bush served one term. That means five Republicans have been presidents, which is indeed just one more than the Democrats, but they have won more often.

Democrats’ excuses include the Electoral College which they insist favors Republicans. That is true, to a point. Hillary Clinton received 48.2 percent of the popular vote to 46.2 percent for Trump in 2016 but he won with 306 Electoral College votes to her 232; Al Gore won 48.4 percent of the popular vote to 47.9 percent for George W. Bush who won with 271 Electoral College votes to Gore’s 266.

Perhaps Republicans’ advantage is due something else. Their party, with its conservative ideology, is known as the political parking garage for elites and many “white” males. The Democratic Party is supposed to be for ordinary Americans, who are the majority, and they should be the winners. But the Republicans are better propagandists. Hence, Trump, with no background in presidential politics but a lot of personal baggage, defeated the spouse of a two-term president.

Also, Democrats have not always offered candidates suited to the moment. McGovern was no match for Nixon, who won 60.7 percent of the popular votes and 520 electoral votes to his 37.5 percent of the popular votes and 17 Electoral College votes. Carter was not the strongest candidate against Reagan, who won 50.7 percent of the popular votes and 489 Electoral College votes to his 41 percent of the popular votes and 49 Electoral College votes. Mondale fared even worse, collecting 40.6 percent of the popular votes and 13 Electoral College votes against Reagan’s 58.8 percent of the popular votes and 525 Electoral College votes.

The re-election bid by Carter, who died recently at age 100 and who had injected compassionate Christianity into the presidency, suffered from the backlash against his aborted attempt to free the hostages in Iran. The campaign of Harris, poised to break the White House glass ceiling, was too short-lived. Biden obviously waited too long to quit and endorse his vice president, giving her just 107 days to campaign, compared to more than 1,400 for Trump.

Republicans are also better at dirty tricks, such as the back-channel contacts of Reagan’s handlers with Iran that delayed the release of the hostages. Republican operatives instigated the dispute in the George W. Bush-Gore contest that sent it to the Supreme Court, which, by a one-vote majority, handed the presidency to Bush. Kerry’s challenge to Bush’s reelection could not overcome the character assassination campaign by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth denigrating the patriotism of a veteran awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. Clinton’s campaign against Trump suffered from attacks on her record as Secretary of State and use of personal computer equipment for official work. (Trump was aided also by then FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that she was still under investigation just 11 days before the election.)

Democratic leaders, apparently failing to learn from those experiences, appear shell-shocked by the breakneck speed with which Trump is fulfilling his promise to lay waste to the federal bureaucracy. They are still to confront the president as he dismantles their party’s legacy, especially creation of the social safety net in the 1960s and policies to deal with institutional biases.

Diversity-Equity-Inclusion (DEI) programs, the more effective bogeyman successor to Critical Race Theory (CRT), has been deployed in the move to create a maximum leader. Using DEI as the scapegoat, there is no need to declare a national emergency and activate the military to forcibly shut down entire departments and fire millions of workers. Rather, partisan zealots are being installed, along with political mercenaries, such as Elon Musk. Instead of guns, they wield executive orders as they lay siege to critical bureaucracies such as the Department of Justice and the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – and indulge in petty racially tinged acts such as banning celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and African American History Month.

It is all “about rolling back the gains of the Civil Rights Movement” and “re-establishing, re-entrenching a form of racial and gender hierarchy,” Melissa Murray, a New York University law professor and MSNBC legal analyst, declared on Ali Velshi’s show.

At a meeting on Saturday, party leaders elected Ken Martin of Minnesota chairman of Democratic National Committee (DNC). He called on Democrats to, as Politico put it, “take a more pugilistic stand against a Republican-controlled Washington,” telling reporters, “This is a new DNC. We’re taking the gloves off.” But, Politico pointed out, Martin, who has “little national profile,” will head “a party still sorting through the wreckage of 2024. … with no clear national leader or strategy on how to push back on Trump’s agenda.”

But there may be reason for Democrats to start feeling hopeful. During the debate on a new DNC leader, “left-wing protesters,” as HuffPost called them, from the Sunrise Movement staged several interruptions, “shouting slogans about climate change and billionaire influence” before being escorted out of the venue.

“In a leadership contest that has been largely void of explicit ideological debate, the chaotic interruption felt like a metaphor for a party that can’t permanently ignore its internal policy debates and activist passions,” HuffPost remarked.

But party leaders also elected David Hogg as DNC vice-chairman. The 24year-old Floridian who survived the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas school mass shooting has become a loud voice for the Gen Z generation. The Harvard graduate told HuffPost, “Part of the issue is that we’re surrounding ourselves with people who tell us what we want to hear instead of what we need to hear. I get that it is uncomfortable to be told what you don’t want to hear but we need to build that culture as a party.” He added that the party is “choosing to live in a comfortable delusion a lot of the time of where the country is actually is, rather than an uncomfortable reality of where it is.”

Hogg’s is not a lone voice. Democratic strategist Christy Setzer told The Hill that the party leadership “acts like it is permanently 2006 when, yes, we took back the Senate, but before the Republican Party found a cult leader and lost its collective minds. We don’t live in that world anymore; we have a lifelong conman and convicted felon in the Oval Office who tried every day to turn this country into a dictatorship.”

And Michelle Cottle, a New York Times columnist, reported that Americans “remain in a surly mood” toward the Democratic Party which, she said, citing a recent Quinnipiac University poll, now has its highest unfavorability rating, 57 percent, while the Republican Party is at its highest favorability rating, 43 percent.

In trying to reverse that trend, Democratic leaders can take a cue from Alan Jackson’s 1998 “Little Man” song. It is a country tune that is a lament for much of today’s America. Ignoring the plight of the little man will only perpetuate the insanity.