The Democratic National Committee has decided to unburden itself of what has been.
DNC chairman Ken Martin announced Thursday that he will not release his long-awaited autopsy of why Democrats lost in 2024, despite promising to do so when he took power. Most recently, officials said they were waiting to share the document until after the off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey. Now they say they don’t want to step on their momentum coming out of those wins. Martin says he wants to avoid a “distraction.”
Yet the Democratic brand is still in rough shape. Only 18 percent of voters approve of how congressional Democrats are doing their jobs, the lowest number since Quinnipiac started asking this question in 2009.
The party’s establishment is terrified of the socialists who seem to be ascendent in their coalition, epitomized by New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. They’re also scared of alienating some of the left-wing interest groups that planted the seeds of their 2024 defeat by pushing candidates into taking toxically unpopular positions on issues like transgender rights.
People who have been briefed on the autopsy that will remain under lock and key say it “describes a feeble response to concerns about public safety and immigration in particular,” The Post’s Dan Merica reports. “That amplified the Democrats’ credibility problem on the election’s central issue: the economy. Another key takeaway, officials said, was that the party took young voters for granted.”
Word went out over the summer that the postmortem would not examine Joe Biden’s selfish decision to seek reelection when he was not mentally or physically up for a second term, the efforts to quash potential primary challenges and the coronation of Kamala Harris as his replacement without an open process that might have elevated an electable alternative. Martin has said it was unnecessary to scrutinize these dynamics because they were so unique and unlikely to happen again.
Another factor: The core of the DNC’s mission is raising money, and the autopsy most certainly would have been a reminder to donors how poorly Democratic groups spent theirs. Harris was good at fundraising, bringing in $1 billion in less than three months, but the campaign blew through $1.5 billion in just 15 weeks, with scores of frivolous expenses.
Major donors have been reluctant to invest in organizations that clearly misallocated resources last year. With only $3 million left in its coffers, the DNC had to take out a $15 million loan this fall. (Its Republican counterpart has no debt and $91 million cash on hand.)
If the report remains under seal, it’s hard to see how lessons gleaned from more than 300 interviews across all 50 states will be learned by down-ballot campaigns in 2026. Democrats believe, probably correctly, that Trump’s unpopularity creates a favorable enough political environment for them to win big in next year’s midterms, just as it did in 2018. But being anti-Trump was not enough for them in 2024, and it may not be enough to take back the White House in three years.
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