In the premiere episode of The Franchise, HBO’s warts-and-all satire of the movie business, an assistant director named Dag has a brief existential crisis about the wisdom of spending her life (and someone else’s fortune) on hacky comic-book adaptations. “What if this isn’t a dream factory?” Dag wonders aloud to a colleague. “What if it’s an abattoir?”

It’s a question that many Democrats are suddenly asking about a different brand of slaughterhouse billed as a dream factory: the Kamala Harris campaign. A week after Team Kamala’s electoral flop, the postmortems are rolling in, and they’re brutal. As one anonymous Biden staffer told Axios, “How did you spend $1 billion and not win? What the f***?”

WTF indeed. Despite outspending Donald Trump by hundreds of millions of dollars, Harris-Walz got crushed by the former president, and staffers are in angry finger-pointing mode, some blaming Joe Biden for the result. Other party operatives are loudly resigning or complaining to the media about the campaign’s failures. That list of discontents includes Lindy Li, a member of the Democratic National Committee finance committee, who says Biden’s unceremonious campaign dropout was a “f*** you” to Democrats and the Harris campaign was a “$1 billion disaster.” “We lost all the swing states,” Li said. “This is just astounding. This is not some like blip. This is an avalanche.”