These are not the reports Democrats were hoping to prepare.

Instead of transition plans for the incoming Kamala Harris administration, draft executive orders and legislative outlines,

Democrats are producing post-mortem analyses of how their campaign came apart in 2024.

Those Democrats who are honest with themselves are recognising an uncomfortable truth:

as awful, immoral and weird as they consider the Republican Party, the American people considered it to be the better option for governing America.

Dissect the emerging election data and the diagnosis looks even worse than it first seemed.

The Democratic Party's idea of itself as a party of the young, ethnic minorities and the working class has been punctured.

The best available data suggest that, compared with Barack Obama's performance in 2012, Ms Harris did 16 percentage points worse among voters without a college degree,

19 points worse with young voters, 26 points worse with African-Americans and 27 points worse with Hispanics.

"We have only begun to internalise the ways in which all the basic tenets of the emerging Democratic majority have now been completely reversed.

There is not a leg standing of it any more," says Patrick Ruffini, who wrote a prescient book on growing Republican strength among the multiracial working class.

Among Democrats brave enough to believe in their own agency, a much knottier debate has emerged over identity politics.

Throughout the first Trump presidency, elite institutions embraced previously radical ideas of equity over equality, the tyranny of objectivity and the violence of speech.

Democratic politics were downstream of this cultural shift, leading to an embrace of ideas (including by Ms Harris) such as defunding the police, paying for gender-affirming care for illegal immigrants and banning fracking.

Whole ethnic groups were rebranded by those who knew better: Hispanics were now Latinxs; Asian-Americans were now AAPI;

the collective lumping of non-whites as POC ("people of colour") was upgraded to "BIPOC".

By 2022, Democrats realised that such talk, voguish in 2020, was a political liability and began to edge away from it.

By 2024 Ms Harris spoke like a different woman from her previous presidential campaign iteration, revoking her former positions without explanation.

It didn't work. According to a survey of swing voters released by Blueprint, a Democrat-aligned firm, majorities of persuadable voters believed that the earlier, progressive Harris was the real one.

Among those who chose to vote for Mr Trump, 83% believed that she would use taxpayer dollars to pay for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants in prison,

77% believed she would decriminalise border-crossing, and 74% believed that she would ban fracking.

The political advertisement that even Democrats concede was the ad of the century was one that Mr Trump's campaign released that ended with the line: "Kamala's for they/them. President Trump is for you."

Ms Harris's campaign did not rebut it, and tried instead to focus on economic messaging.

But the two "are not completely separate or mutually exclusive…it creates a portrait of a party that's out of touch with ordinary voters, particularly ordinary working-class voters", says Ruy Teixeira of the American Enterprise Institute.

The attempt to jettison that unappealing brand is already under way.

"I personally think that identity politics needs to go the way of the dodo," Elissa Slotkin, the newly elected Democratic senator from Michigan, told reporters.

Seth Moulton, a Democratic representative from Massachusetts, caused a furore by saying that he did not want his daughters to get hurt playing sports with trans girls.