Anxiety clouded a DNC gathering this weekend in South Carolina where Jaime Harrison quoted Beyoncé and another party leader said the 'time for hand-wringing is over'

• Democrats gathered in Charleston for a year-end strategy and training meeting.
• "We're like Beyoncé, we get in formation," DNC Chairman Jamie Harrison said of party unity.

CHARLESTON, S.C.— Jaime Harrison, the Democratic National Committee chair, quoted Beyoncé to his party's leaders on Friday to kick off a weekend of official strategizing and informal commiserating over internal divisions and the brutal 2022 midterm cycle ahead.

"From this moment on, Democrats aren't in disarray," Harrison told the roughly 100 Democrats from 53 of the 57 states and territories who gathered for a meeting with the Association of State Democratic Committees. "We're like Beyoncé, we get in formation."

Harrison—who some DNC members have fretted hasn't been getting the autonomy he needs from the White House to be successful in his role— received a standing ovation.

But Democrats gathered here did not seem to take his admonishment to heart. At the Charleston Marriott this weekend, Democrats tried to publicly quell fears about a blowout in next year's midterm elections, as they attempt to defend majorities in the House and Senate. A Democratic loss in Virginia's off-year 2021 gubernatorial race hung over much of the proceedings.

"The time for hand-wringing is over," Ken Martin—the association's president and chair of Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party—told fellow Democrats.

In conversations over the weekend, outside the rah-rah events on the official agenda, the Democratic hand-wringing continued. Democrats wrung their hands about their 2022 prospects. They wrung their hands about whether Biden would run for reelection (White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has said he intended to do so). They wrung their hands about changing the order of their presidential nominating rules and calendar. They wrung their hands about Republicans taking credit for their legislative accomplishments such as the bipartisan infrastructure law (there was talk of deploying "Democratic truth squads" around the country to correct the record).

Democrats even wrung their hands about how to get their message out on social media. "We're exploring what it might look like to start a TikTok account," Shelby Cole, who leads content and creative for the DNC, told the executive committee on Saturday.

The event itself reflected the dour atmospherics in which Democrats find themselves. At the beginning of Friday's programming, an official announced to the room that two vendors had tested positive for COVID-19—among the 170,000 new cases across the country that day as the Omicron variant surges—silencing the room. Across the nation, Democrats find themselves pinioned by economic forces such as inflation and political crosscurrents resulting from a divided Senate that has made it difficult for them to act on crucial parts of the president's agenda. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released last month showed that a generic Republican enjoys a historic 10-point advantage over a generic Democratic counterpart.

COVID, economy make for a challenging '22

Interviews with nearly a dozen state party chairs and strategists painted a bleak picture ahead of 2022 for the party's chances to defend the House and Senate.

"It would be silly of me if I'm looking at how we are politically with COVID, with the economy, with all these various things that we talked about to say, 'Oh this is going to be an easy challenge,'" a Democratic strategist told Insider.

Others said the party could still be competitive if Congress passes two critical parts of Biden's plan in the coming weeks: the president's $1.7 trillion social spending package and voting rights legislation. "We would have plenty of time if Build Back Better gets passed [within the administration's first year]," said Michael Ceraso, executive director of Winning Margins, a progressive consultancy, referencing Biden's social spending program.

Ceraso's comment came a day before Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia effectively killed the possibility of the program becoming law. "I can't get there," the Democratic senator said in an interview on 'Fox News Sunday.'

Trav Robertson, the South Carolina Democratic Party Chair, told Insider that talk of a Democratic gutting at the ballot box was overblown. "I think that one thing we got to get away from is the Washington insiders or the Washington elite who have this defeatist attitude because they don't live in or visit Middle America or the South or the West," Robertson said. "That's something we talked about, and that's something that we're challenging ourselves to do going forward."

Democrats also previewed a future potential dispute over how to order the presidential nomination calendar—including deciding whether to keep the Iowa-New Hampshire-Nevada-South Carolina lineup—when the party reconvenes in DC for its March meeting.

"Those conversations have started in earnest," a Democratic official said.

Some have suggested moving to a regional rotating primary system rather than giving less-diverse states such as Iowa and New Hampshire an outsized role early in the process.

"There's been talk about that for 50 years, but none of it makes any sense at all, because whatever it is, if you do a regional primary, then only the mega-wealthy, mega-star candidates have the ability to seek the nomination," Raymond Buckley, chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, which oversees the Democrats' first-in-the-nation primary.

The deliberations underscore how quickly talk would turn to 2024 and whether President Joe Biden would run again.

"Yes, Biden has obviously made it clear that he is running again, but nobody really knows that for sure," one state party chair told Insider. This person added: "I just think the DNC is going to prepare for all scenarios."