The DNC has finally released its 2024 election autopsy, and if you were hoping for a moment of genuine Democratic self-reflection, prepare to be disappointed.
The report took forever to see the light of day, and DNC Chairman Ken Martin's explanation for the delay was something else. "When I received the report late last year, it wasn't ready for primetime — not even close — and because no source material was provided, it would have meant starting over. I could not in good faith put the DNC's stamp of approval on the report that was produced," Martin said. So the party that wants to run your healthcare couldn't manage to produce a competent internal review? That’s comforting.
Read more about what I have to say here: https://t.co/9wochQttN5 pic.twitter.com/2REle6FPY3
— Ken Martin (@kenmartin73) May 21, 2026
Of course, most of what the autopsy actually concludes isn't exactly earth-shattering. Democrats didn't just lose because of Donald Trump. They lost because they've spent years drifting away from working-class voters, men, rural America, and irregular voters, while banking everything on anti-Trump messaging and demographic assumptions that turned out to be dead wrong.
Gee, we’ve been saying that for years.
The report traces these organizational, messaging, and cultural failures back more than a decade. That's the Democrats' attempt to spread the blame thin enough that no one person has to own it.
I’m sorry, but that’s still such a cop out. Remember, Democrats have had Hollywood, the public school system, and virtually the entire media apparatus doing their bidding for years. With all that infrastructure, losing this badly isn't a messaging problem. It's a “you” problem, and from what I can tell, the document doesn’t acknowledge this at all.
Still, some of the admissions in the report are interesting.
"A persistent inability or unwillingness to listen to all voters has provided the other major party with opportunities for advancement," the report states. It's not wrong. The party that claims to speak for ordinary Americans stopped listening to them somewhere along the way. The report even concedes it directly. "The party's connections with working Americans and their families were forged through decades of organizing and engagement," but "we have lost these relationships."
That’s a nice way of saying that Democrats have become the party of the coastal elites, not the average American.
There's also an acknowledgment that Democrats became addicted to identity politics and abstract rhetoric at the expense of kitchen-table issues. The report calls on Democrats to "focus less on abstract issues and identity politics, and connect with voters on the issues they say matter most, including the economy, disaster relief, and addressing housing affordability."
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On Kamala Harris specifically, the report is critical, but careful. It concedes her campaign had a serious problem with men, rural voters, and irregular voters. The report dedicates an entire section to the conclusion that "The Male Voter Problem Was Solvable," pointing to North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein as the model. Stein won 51% of men, while Harris won only 40%. "That 11-point gap suggests fundamentally different approaches to male voter engagement," the report notes.
It's weird that picking Tim Walz as her running mate didn’t solve that, right?
The bigger strategic failure was the campaign's near-total reliance on hatred of Trump as a driver of turnout. "The Harris campaign appears to have relied on Trump being unacceptable rather than building an affirmative case for Harris," the report says. It also bluntly admits that "Harris struggled with definition beyond 'not Trump' and 'prosecutor vs. felon.'"
The campaign argues that voters simply didn't know what she stood for, and the campaign never bothered to tell them. Calling that a cop-out is an understatement. From where I sit, this document isn’t a serious assessment at all. It’s sanitized for public consumption.
And the tell is what the document doesn’t include.
There's no mention of Israel, Palestine, or Gaza.
There's no mention of Biden's disastrous inflation record.
There’s no mention of the systematic cover-up of his obvious cognitive decline.
The report does argue that Biden dropped out too late, but again, a cop-out.
Are they seriously going to pretend Biden’s record wasn’t a problem or that Democrats lost trust with voters after spending years claiming Biden was sharp as a tack when he clearly wasn’t?
Most telling of all, the document never once grapples with the possibility that Democrats have simply become too radical. Instead, every problem gets laundered through the word "messaging." The party didn't adopt unpopular positions, you see. It just failed to explain those positions clearly enough. Voters weren't rejecting the product. They just didn't understand the packaging.
Call this document whatever you want, but it’s hot garbage.
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