First step: ditch the big donors and tell the corporate wing of the party to go to hell.

There was never any valid reason to do anything that made the party even look like it was on the side of the rich, and allowed a wealthy scam artist like Trump to pretend to be fighting for the "little guy" when he's never seen the little guy as anything but somebody to evict or rent hike out of his buildings so somebody wealthier could move in- and it's meaningless to get a billion dollars in donations of that billion dollars doesn't guarantee you a landslide victory.

At the same time, he party needs to re-learn how to say "hell no!" and "hell yes!"(that is, passionately committing itself to actual core values), needs to stop blanding its message down to nothing, and stop pretending it could either support "social justice"(in the limited, non-transformative sense of the term Hillary and the conservative wing of the party use) or "economic justice", but not both- it needs to admit that both justices causes go together and that the message should be "Justice For The Many".

It needs to stop treating Black/Brown/labor/LGBTQ+/Indigenous/immigrant voters as if those voters owe it their votes, but the party owes them nothing in exchange- this attitude probably did more than anything else to give Trump 43% of the Hispanic male vote in the last election and cut into Harris’ vote share among other traditional Democratic voting blocs.

And it needs to stop, in a very broad way, sounding as if it looks down on the voters, including most of the voters in its own coalition- half the time, the fall '24 message came across as "vote Harris/Walz or you're an idiot!".

The lesson is clear- anytime Democrats sound dismissive, snobbish and elitist, they will always lose.