Take me by the hand, pretty mama, come and dance with the tabbies all night long ...
I could watch this on loop! @RealCandaceO looks rekt! About time someone punches back on her while on her show!! pic.twitter.com/cBiUG4VDiI
— Tiffany Savage 🇺🇸 (@patriot_savvy) May 20, 2026
Ed: Oopsie!
===
Politico: Democrats’ long-awaited autopsy of the 2024 election backfired almost immediately after it was released on Thursday.
The Democratic National Committee’s biting and gloomy portrait of the party immediately kicked off a fresh round of infighting, with strategists and party officials lambasting chair Ken Martin for releasing a haphazard, typo-ridden report that failed to fully capture why, exactly, the party was crushed by President Donald Trump.
Martin explained his reasoning to DNC members on a private call Thursday afternoon, according to three people on the call granted anonymity to share details. One person said Martin’s post as chair is “absolutely at risk,” though they were not sure “if DNC members have enough votes to actually pass a vote of no confidence.” ...
David Hogg — the former DNC vice chair who was ousted over a procedural issue and has embarked on a primary spree against fellow members of his party — unsurprisingly called for Martin’s resignation.
Asked why in an interview with POLITICO Thursday, Hogg responded: “I mean, have you read the report?”
Ed: I mean, I have read the report, and ... Hogg ain't wrong about this. Just the fact that Martin had 18 months to get this finished and ended up with this unfinished snow job, which he didn't even bother to proofread after spending millions of dollars on it. It's an atrocious failure of leadership and competence, but there is some poetic justice in that, because it reflects the reasons for the cover-up of Biden's senility as well.
===
Ed: The most absurd idea in the report, and one that NBC News takes seriously in a fit of amnesia, is that the Biden and Harris campaign did not go negative against Trump soon enough. They had been going negative on Trump for nine years at that point, and officially so from the moment that Biden suggested he might run for a second term. That decision and the entire campaign was framed around the need to prevent Trump from returning to the White House and to "save democracy." Neither Biden nor Harris ever made a case for their election other than their persistent and nearly sole argument that Trump was "disqualified" to serve.
===
The DNC Autopsy report runs 192 pages.
— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) May 21, 2026
There is not ONE mention of Joe Biden's advanced age or the strategic decision to shield him from a public that thought he was too old to continue as president.
Unreal.
I was a BIG advocate for the DNC releasing the 2024 autopsy.
— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) May 21, 2026
Having now read it, I can see now why there was so much resistance within some corners of the party to releasing it.
It is an utter disaster. And a failure on virtually every front.
Ed: That's true of the report, the effort behind the report, and of the Biden and Harris campaigns.
===
The Associated Press: The report is far from comprehensive, and it avoids some of the most critical factors in the 2024 race.
For example, it doesn’t address President Joe Biden’s decision to run for a second term at 81, despite widespread concerns about his age. Biden dropped out after a faltering debate performance, and Harris was quickly anointed to replace him at the top of the ticket.
After serving as Biden’s vice president, Harris was viewed in some corners as the natural choice for a new nominee. But the report does not address lingering concerns that the process was rushed or should have been handled in a more deliberative manner.
Perhaps most notably, the words “Gaza” and “Israel” do not appear anywhere in the text. Democrats suffered from internal disagreements over the conflict, which sapped enthusiasm for Harris among voters who were upset by the Biden administration’s support for Israel.
Ed: There's a lot more missing than that, as I noted in my post earlier, and as Amber Duke points out next. However, it's very interesting that the mainstream media is recognizing that this is an utter snow job. Also, Biden's debate performance was a lot worse than "faltering," but perhaps "senile" isn't in the AP Style Guide.
===
The leaked DNC autopsy doesn't mention:
— Amber Duke (@ambermarieduke) May 21, 2026
- Inflation or Bidenflation
- Podcasts
- Women's sports, bathrooms
- Pronouns
- Catholics, Christians, or evangelicals
- 'Religion' or 'Religious'
- White men
- Anything related to MAHA
- Gas prices
And:
- Only one mention of trans…
And:
- Only one mention of trans in the context of the they/them ad
- One 'border' mention in the context of Dems being mad that Kamala was labeled the 'border czar'
- Brief mention of climate policies causing 'anxiety'
- One mention of '80-20' issues but no definition of what those are
It also alleges that the media ecosystem is too right-wing for Democrats to be able to compete.
Pure slop. Stunningly bad.
Ed: This report was concocted with a clear strategy of distraction in mind. That's probably why the project failed to get finished, because the task was impossible to complete. Martin and the people he assigned to this task wanted to distract from the fact that Democrat progressive policies are untenable and unpopular, its incumbent was senile and everyone knew before cooking the 2024 primaries, and its anointed replacement was one of the most incompetent politicians in its senior ranks.
===
HuffPost: A handful of prominent Democrats called for Martin’s resignation after the report’s release, including Dan Pfeiffer, a top aide to former President Barack Obama; Run For Something co-founder Amanda Litman; and former DNC vice chair David Hogg. Elected officials, however, were notably silent. ...
The document draws several broad conclusions: President Joe Biden’s White House failed to adequately promote Vice President Kamala Harris politically; Democrats are too closely associated with “identity politics” in a way that is damaging to the party’s brand; and Democrats should spend money earlier in election cycles, a highly contested idea.
But it does not dwell on other key policy and political decisions, including not bothering to second-guess Biden’s decision to run for reelection; not extensively evaluating how his support for Israel’s war in Gaza may have hurt the party’s brand with Muslim and progressive voters; and not examining Harris’ decision to select Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate.
Ed: Even HuffPost noticed these omissions. The most surprising mention is Biden's decision to run for a second term, followed by the choice of Walz. Even progressives are questioning these, which makes the DNC's reluctance to discuss these issues even more puzzling. The CYA must run deep at the DNC.
===
Democrat Rep. Jared Moskowitz: “An autopsy is a medical procedure you do over a corpse, and now it sounds like we need a malpractice attorney because we couldn’t even do the autopsy correctly.”
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 21, 2026
Yikes. https://t.co/mLCO48PYsJ pic.twitter.com/FaPO3qkmuC
REP. JARED MOSKOWITZ (D-FL): Well, I haven't seen it since it just came out. But obviously, like an autopsy is a medical procedure you do over a corpse. And now it sounds like we need a malpractice attorney because we couldn't even do the autopsy correctly. So, look, we know how we got here, right? Obviously, you know, it was the Joe Biden issue at the debate. It was the switch over to Kamala without a process.
And at the end of the day, Democrats weren't talking enough about affordability in the economy. And that's what we need to be doing. And we've been doing that ever since the election. And so, look, we lost the last election. It wasn't close. But the fact that we can't even tell people why, we're too afraid to tell them the truth. They know the truth. They saw the debate. They saw what happened, right? And they saw that we got killed in the election. We lost every swing state. So they can write whatever document they want, but Democrats know why we lost.
Ed: Moskowitz may have the most honest reaction from Democrats today. Other than his paean to Biden, of course, which comes toward the end. The question is why the DNC won't discuss the real reasons they lost, and the answer is likely that the Biden cover-up implicated Harris, the DNC, and a lot of other senior Democrats.
===
The New Republic: The report doesn’t examine many of the major criticisms of the Democratic Party’s 2024 campaign, from President Biden’s initial decision to run for reelection to the impact of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, which the Biden administration failed to stop. Another glaring omission was the impact of Vice President Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic nominee for president late in 2024 without anything close to a primary or electoral process.
It also includes multiple errors—it cites Washington Governor Bob Ferguson as a candidate who supposedly did things right, only to point out later that he underperformed Harris at the polls. In other discrepancies, it had conflicting vote percentages written for North Carolina’s gubernatorial race, and misspells the names of multiple Democratic politicians.
The solutions the report offers are minimal. One paragraph states, “Building to win requires new thinking, and building to last requires thinking about more than the next election. It requires finding the best way to connect with the right voters in the right places, and if 2024 has proven anything, there is enough money to do it all the right way.” But what that means doesn’t get much elaboration.
Ed: When you can't honestly talk about what went wrong, you can't offer any real solutions. The progressive media are starting to recognize that now.
===
I could write the autopsy for you really quick: Joe Biden was the worst President America has had in decades, surpassed in incompetence only by their next nominee, Kamala Harris. https://t.co/AqGIv0o8yV
— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) May 21, 2026
Ed: Allow me to complete the inquest ... "who then refused to give any coherent answer to what she would do differently from an unpopular Biden, and whose most important campaign decision was to choose Governor JazzHands McSnitchLine as a running mate. And he turned out to be the worst running mate in decades."
===
Jeffrey Blehar at NRO: You can read the “autopsy” (such as it is) in full right here if you wish, but why waste your time? The document is clearly unfinished. I would call it a “first draft,” but it doesn’t even rise to the title; key sections (including the executive summary and conclusion) are missing, and what analysis exists is conclusory and scattershot. There is no unifying thesis to explain why Democratic candidates (or even candidate profiles) fared better than Kamala Harris herself, though the individual pieces are all there, written out, waiting to be assembled by anyone with a brain. In the end, the “autopsy” we have here boils down to raw chunks of undigested state-by-state spew, all amounting in its disorganization to “Why did we lose to Donald Trump? Because we didn’t win!”
Beyond that, it is chockablock full of drafting and data errors, its (unpacked) analysis predicated upon a number of assumptions never really discussed. (Whoever marked up the text in the released copy is in clear sympathy with my editors at National Review, who would have never allowed me to publish a piece this lazy.) And of the bloated 192-page whole, I can only say that if you’ve read all of it, you were professionally required to: This autopsy’s electoral analysis could have been written by a dimwitted amateur using Grok’s AI on Twitter.
Ed: I disagree. Grok would have done a far more credible job. Also, let's not forget that Martin had EIGHTEEN MONTHS to complete this project, almost twice as long as the RNC used to actually finish and publish its 2012 autopsy, which also had a game plan for reorganization that it actually implemented. This is an entirely embarrassing effort from the DNC, and Martin can't just wash his hands of the failure. This autopsy may require an autopsy of its own.
===
my favorite part of the DNC autopsy pic.twitter.com/bofM5egFOT
— Andrew Kaczynski (@KFILE) May 21, 2026
Ed: That offers a conclusion of its own ... about competence in the DNC.
===
Salena Zito at WashEx: Downballot primary results for seats in the Pennsylvania legislature and Congress had both parties heading into very different directions for November’s midterm election cycle. The Democrats are marching far left, and Republicans are beating back challengers from their far-right flanks. ...
The Democrats, on the other hand, went leftward in many of their primary races, beginning with the race for Congress. Proud Democratic Socialists of America member Chris Rabb defeated a crowd of more establishment-type primary challengers, winning his election as the Democratic nominee for Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District.
“We will be with Congressman Rabb every step of the way in the fight to abolish ICE, free Palestine and win Medicare for All,” the DSA posted on X on Rabb’s win.
Rabb, a leftist state representative who called for his rivals to join him in calling the war in Gaza a “genocide,” received heavy lifting — and not just from DSA activists in Philadelphia. He also won the backing of several members of the left-wing “Squad,” the Working Families Party, and held a rally with left-wing political streamer Hasan Piker.
Ed: Democrats are convinced that the reason they lost in 2024 was that they were too easy on Israel and didn't support Hamas enough. The lack of any mention of Gaza in the autopsy is being cited as a major omission designed to distract from the value that position has with the electorate, but the drift toward outright anti-Semitism had started long before the 2024 election, and both Biden and Harris pandered hard to the Dearbornistan faction. We'll see what happens when Democrats go the Full Totenkopf this cycle.
===
.@kasie: "Why did they put out a report that didn't grapple at all with what every American could plainly see, and said was the problem with the Democratic nominee for president in 2024: their sitting president and his declining health?"
— The Arena on CNN (@TheArenaCNN) May 21, 2026
WATCH @rahmemanuel's reaction to what… pic.twitter.com/NxeE6rEduQ
Ed: Kudos to Kasie Hunt. Seriously. Maybe they should ask her to write an actual autopsy.
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