The Nation has the article What Killed the Democratic Party?

In essence, this is the core accusation leveled in “Autopsy”: that the Democratic Party neglected its most loyal voters. It not only forgot to ask for their votes; it ignored the general distress of working people (white, black, and brown). Furthermore, the party didn’t have much to offer those folks in the form of concrete proposals to improve their lives.

Here is the report discussed in the article AUTOPSY The Democratic Party in Crisis. (The website of the report’s authors is Democratic Autopsy.)

I keep trying to tell people that you cannot win an election by just being against your opponent. You have to present your own positive vision of the future. The Democratic Party hasn’t presented such a vision since Barack Obama pretended to have a vision in 2008.

Before that, John Kerry’s positive vision amounted to the fact that he was in the Vietnam War. At that time I tried to warn the campaign that a resume is nice, but you can’t win a campaign on that alone.