Though Joe Biden remains on track to win the presidency, it’s far from guaranteed he will. And if he and the Democratic Party were to once again fail to deliver on the one thing they promise voters anymore, you’ll be able to look back to this year’s Democratic National Convention to find the seeds of their defeat.

The first night of the 2020 DNC was a fitting event for a party that prefers defeat to change. After a humiliating and close to delegitimizing election loss in 2016, Democratic leadership refused to take stock of their own failings, and blamed an assortment of outside forces: Russia, Facebook, Jill Stein, James Comey, to name a few. With Biden at the helm — a candidate with all the same weaknesses as the one who lost four years ago, but even worse — they decided to rerun the exact same campaign as last time, from the all-consuming focus on Trump’s failings right down to the attempt to bring prominent and rank-and-file Republicans into the party fold.

Yet at the same time, the party understands the precarious position it’s in. Between Trump’s outright stated intent to cheat his way to victory, the yawning enthusiasm gap between his and Biden’s supporters, and a raging pandemic that will keep people physically away from the polls, the party elite are well aware low turnout from unenthusiastic sections of the base — voters who are either deeply suspicious or totally indifferent to its candidate — could sink their chances. But any alternative approach that might be more promising would likely involve policies alienating the two constituencies they truly prize: conservative voters and corporate donors.