The short answer to the question in my headline 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.
The party has been working on this report for months. When the current head of the DNC was elected back in February, he promised it was one of his top priorities.
During that session with reporters, Martin said that his first priorities as chair will be looking "at the state of the party, the finances," looking at the party's "contracts" and starting a "post-election review process."
"We don't call it a post-mortem or an autopsy, because our party's not dead. It's still kicking right?" Martin said.
"The reality is," he added, "what we need to do right now is really start to get a handle around what happened last election cycle. We know that we lost ground with Latino voters, we know we lost ground with women and younger voters and of course working-class voters. We don't know the how and why yet."
Months later, in July, the NY Times reported that the autopsy was steering clear of the decisions that probably actually mattered most in the last election.
The audit, which the committee is calling an “after-action review,” is expected to avoid the questions of whether former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. should have run for re-election in the first place, whether he should have exited the race earlier than he did and whether former Vice President Kamala Harris was the right choice to replace him, according to the people briefed on the process so far.
Nor is the review expected to revisit key decisions by the Harris campaign — like framing the election as a choice between democracy and fascism, and refraining from hitting back after an ad by Donald J. Trump memorably attacked Ms. Harris on transgender rights by suggesting that she was for “they/them” while Mr. Trump was “for you” — that have roiled Democrats in the months since Mr. Trump took back the White House.
Party officials described the draft document as focusing on the 2024 election as a whole, but not on the presidential campaign — which is something like eating at a steakhouse and then reviewing the salad...
Top Democrats said they did not intend for the report to address strategic decisions made by leaders of the Biden and Harris campaigns. Indeed, in a sign of the report’s narrow scope, more than half a dozen people who were senior officials on the campaigns say they have not yet been interviewed.
Having decided to ignore the party leaders making the actual decisions, what is left to criticize? Apparently the answer is that the autopsy report will fault the PAC which spent a boatload of money to little effect. In essence, the report is going to argue that Dems had a messaging problem.
In particular, the people briefed on it said, the after-action review is expected to place blame with Future Forward, the party’s main super PAC, which spent $560 million to support Mr. Biden and then Ms. Harris. They said the report would argue that Future Forward spent far too much propping up Ms. Harris and not nearly enough attacking Mr. Trump.
That was three months ago. Yesterday the Washington Post reported the final report was being delayed again until after the elections in New Jersey and Virginia.
The Democratic National Committee will wait to release its autopsy of the party’s 2024 presidential campaign until after elections in November, pushing the official attempt to reckon with the failure that has dominated internal debates past the first anniversary, said three top Democrats who have been given a verbal preview of the review...
By waiting until after the November elections, Democrats hope to avoid media coverage of their 2024 failings while voters head to the polls in elections in New Jersey and Virginia, both of which have received investment from the Democratic committee. Former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Rep. Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey are ahead in polls of their respective gubernatorial contests, and Democrats hope that wins in both states could bode well for the party ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Just like the previous story about the autopsy, this new one suggests the gist will be about messaging.
Initial briefings have focused on the party’s communications and structural failures, as well as the way Republicans reached voters on key economic issues in a way that Democrats did not, according to the three people briefed...
“Are we actually going to build the things we need to do to be persuasive to voters and be in their face in the right ways at earlier points in the cycle,” said another Democrat who received a briefing, adding that the report will get into how Democrats engage with voters and acknowledge that Republicans, led by Trump, have done a better job of defining the terms of national debates.
So we're now 11 months after the last election and the belated autopsy is going right back to 'Democrats need their own Joe Rogan.' That really seems to be the thrust of all this.
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?
Biden: "Making sure we make every single solitary person eligible for what I've been able to do with covid, excuse me, with umm dealing with everything we had to deal with. Look, we finally beat medicare."
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) June 28, 2024
Trump: "Well he's right. He did beat medicaid. Beat it to death." pic.twitter.com/FL152ERLiR
If choosing a candidate who can complete a sentence isn't part of the autopsy report, it's useless.
