The pundits have decided: The Democratic Party is dead. No one likes them. No one knows what they stand for. Young people snicker at them. Traditional Democratic demographic groups are losing the faith. The Democrats have lost the presidency — twice now — to a personality who in normal times would have been considered toxic and unelectable.

So it's all over, right? Baloney. Look back in history, and you'll see that Democrats have come back from much worse.

In 1928, Democrat Al Smith lost a presidential election by an historic margin, taking only 41 percent of the vote. It was the Democrats' third consecutive loss of the White House, and Smith carried only eight states out of 48, for a 444 to 87 electoral vote tally. The party’s Southern base had panicked at the prospect of putting an urban Catholic in the White House. Traditional rural Democrats hated being in the same room as sweaty city folk, many of whom were immigrants and the children of immigrants.

The Democrats were pronounced dead.

Then, four years later, New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt (D) flipped the script. He sailed into the White House with an electoral vote victory of 472 to 59, reversing the thumping that the Democrats had absorbed four years earlier. The Republican victor in 1928, incumbent President Herbert Hoover, carried only six states.

What had changed by 1932?........

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