After the 2012 loss in the presidential election, the Republican National Committee commissioned an "autopsy" that outlined all sorts of failures and problems in the campaign. That project led to real changes in the RNC's approach to organizing and messaging. Some of those lessons got eclipsed by the sui generis nature of the Donald Trump phenomenon in 2015, but others – especially the funding of precinct-level organizing – stuck.
The RNC deliberately made the autopsy public from the start; it served as the catalyst for my book Going Red. It also forced the Republican Party to make the changes necessary to compete in presidential elections, with accountability as leverage. Without a public accounting of what went wrong, there would have been no pressure to make corrections that addressed the real issues of that failed campaign.
That brings us to the Democratic National Committee's response to their catastrophic 2024 presidential campaign. Having lost against an opponent that not only beat them but triumphed over their hysterical attempts to disqualify him, the DNC commissioned an autopsy of their own. And then ... they buried it along with the body.
Two months later, Democrats want answers, Axios reports:
Democratic officials and strategists blasted the Democratic National Committee on Thursday for withholding its autopsy of the party's loss in the 2024 presidential election, despite repeatedly pledging to release it.
Why it matters: Several Democrats — including many advising possible 2028 presidential candidates — said burying the report unfairly helps former Vice President Harris if she runs again, and shields top party consultants by hiding potentially damaging information about their efforts.
- "Kamala Harris certainly benefits from not having an open discussion" about the 2024 campaign, said Jeff Weaver, Sen. Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign manager in 2016 and top adviser in 2020 who's a frequent critic of the DNC.
- Mike Casca, chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, a potential 2028 presidential contender, asked whether everyone who worked on the DNC report committed to not working on a 2028 campaign. "Seems like a problem to me," he added.
Yeah, well, maybe. The problem with this theory is the idea that withholding the autopsy would do Harris any good. Harris hasn't won a truly competitive election in her life, and the 2024 general election demonstrated why. Harris is a politician whose electoral success has always "depended on the kindness of strangers," to quote Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. As Harris herself stupidly detailed in her own memoir 107 Days, she utterly failed even when anointed as the nominee and spotted $1.5 billion in campaign funds.
John identified the next issue with this theory two months ago:
The short answer to the question in my headline [about the report's release] is maybe. The slightly longer answer is that no one really cares and the report has been written in such a way that it won't matter anyway. ...
There won't be any acknowledgement of the fact that Democrats had a mainstream media eager to proclaim Joe Biden the winner of every debate. Unfortunately, Biden was so old that he embarrassed himself in front of the entire country. Who can forget?
If choosing a candidate who can complete a sentence isn't part of the autopsy report, it's useless.
Its uselessness is almost certain, because any useful report would have to center on the fraud committed by Democrats over the four years of the Biden Regency. They lost the election in large part – but not entirely – because they conspired to keep a senile old man in the Oval Office while others exercised his authority in violation of the Constitution. The entire party then conspired to rig the 2024 primaries to prevent any real challenge to the Biden Regency, only to see it blow up in the June 27, 2024 debate on prime-time TV. Rather than conduct an open convention to choose an effective nominee, the same conspirators picked one of their own – Harris – to keep the lid on one of the worst political violations in US presidential history.
Does anyone believe that the DNC would allow an autopsy that even hinted at the truth to be made public?
The other reason Democrats lost is that they got too high on their own progressive supply and lost ground in the middle. That at least would be solvable if Democrats were willing to fix it. They aren't, however; they just want to win elections without appealing to the icky and problematic voters who live outside their progressive epistemic bubble. Even if their autopsy only looked at this issue, the progressive-elite-run DNC would never let that conclusion see the light of day, either.
It doesn't matter much, anyway. Everyone already knows the reasons Democrats lost in 2024. We don't need to read an internal autopsy to figure that out. However, their determination to bury any criticism of the hard-Left nutcases that run the party reveals their refusal to learn, and especially to change.
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