There is no question that the Democratic Party needs to plan a forensic postmortem on why it lost not only the White House but the Senate and House of Representatives, and we can add to this mess a Trump-packed Supreme Court sympathetic if not enthusiastic about extreme right policies.

So talk now of having former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley as the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee, the person to lead reforms of the party, should send alarm bells ringing across not only Maryland but the whole country.

I am a strong Democrat and like many on the Eastern Shore, a victim of the outrageous gerrymander designed by O’Malley and the late Maryland Senate president Mike Miller to pack an overwhelming majority of Republican voters into Maryland’s 1st Congressional District, where hard-right congressman Rep. Andy Harris can never be beaten. O’Malley and Miller succeeded in ousting mainstream conservative Republican, Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, from Western Maryland, in this Tammany Hall-like move to make way for a Democrat.

There are no “moderate” Republicans who could ever win a primary against Harris and there is no one to the right of Harris, unless we were to grant U.S. citizenship to the congressman’s hero, Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban, a “neo-fascist,” as John McCain called him. Harris, now head of the so-called Freedom Caucus, has a job for life and lied about limiting himself to only six terms. “Dr. No” just secured his eighth term.

There is still an old Democratic Party machine in this state, and it is time that lifelong politicians like O’Malley dropped out of politics. O’Malley has never held a non-public job in his life. By adding irritating taxes and fees during his two terms as governor, he prompted a backlash against his would-be successor, former Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, a good man who is now attorney general of our state.

Consequently, Republican Larry Hogan defeated Brown decisively, mainly because of voters’ distaste for O’Malley.

O’Malley was recently appointed by President Joe Biden as commissioner of the Social Security Administration to recommend reforms. That’s well and good, but there were others far more independent of the smoke-filled rooms of the Biden administration who should have been chosen.

O’Malley and his ilk need to make way for new blood and new names. Let me suggest a much better chair of a new reforming national Democratic Party: Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, first woman governor of Rhode Island, venture capital figure, Harvard graduate, Rhodes Scholar with an Oxford Ph.D. thesis on single motherhood, Yale law school alumna, moderate technocrat, progressive Catholic, mother of two children, from a skilled working class/lower-middle class Italian family, with a far broader C.V. than O’Malley. There are other strong candidates too.

That is the kind of person needed to convene like-minded, smart and independent thinkers to prepare for the 2026 midterm elections. Someone who recognizes the need for a strong bench of younger, centrist, pragmatic Democrats in governors’ mansions and Congress to compete for the 2028 nomination and bring democracy back to the Congress, White House and the country at large.

New blood is needed in all the political parties: Please, a moratorium from here on out on the Kennedys, Bushes, Bidens and now Trumps. Enough already! I wish O’Malley a happy retirement.

Michael McDowell is a fellow at New America’s International Security Program. He lives in Chestertown.