Democrats finally release 2024 election autopsy after criticism
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/21/democrats-2024-autopsy-released
Democrats finally release 2024 election autopsy after criticism
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/21/democrats-2024-autopsy-released
32 Comments
The document is basically saying, “Keep doing what we’re already doing, *but louder*”.
A quick look through the paper, and it doesnt seem to seriously address any of the issues people have been pointing out about plaguing the Democratic party:
* Talent Pipeline Failure
* Leadership Disconnect from Reality
* “My Turn” Over Merit
* Donor Capture / Elite Influence
* “Republican Lite” Governance
* Marginalization of Progressives
I can see why they were hiding this – it’s an embarrassing waste of time and money to just pat themselves on the back with no real feedback.
192 pages and not a *single* mention of the party’s uncritical support for Israel becoming radioactive?
Sure, Jan.
The glut of factual errors and lack of critical analysis and creative thought is staggering. It reads like a low-effort, first semester freshman paper. Everyone connected to the production of this document should resign or be fired. This is serious stuff, our democracy and lives are on the line, and we don’t have the luxury of abiding such buffoonery.
“Old man lied to America about being a transition candidate.”
Edit for the confused: *“Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,”* Biden said at a 2020 rally in Detroit.
It’s literally how he got the Dem nomination in the first place.
IDK, maybe refusing to actually listen to what their voters want was a big problem. The people have shown that they want less Schumer and Jeffries and more Mamdani, AOC, Crockett. But since the DNC only does the will of their corporate masters we are here.
Imagine how bad your party is when you lose to the worst candidate in history. The democratic party in its current form is a dogshit party, it is baffling how they continue to reject leftist ideas that will help the average american.
Don’t run a geriatric running on fumes
Don’t skip a primary when you realize the incumbent is not viable
Don’t pass over popular candidates for leadership positions just because someone else has been there longer. This isn’t the playground, it’s is never anyone’s “turn”.
How does this whole report only mention Biden 4 times?! The DNC still wants to pretend there was nothing wrong with Biden, when the fact that a president stepping down from re-election months before the vote is nigh unheard of.
This is so shit that i can see why they were hiding it. We’re fucked
Didn’t Ken Martin just get one of his pals to do this for free? I always thought it was more likely that they buried the autopsy because it was a shoddy piece of work than because it held controversial findings about Gaza or Israel.
What’s the saying? You don’t need to attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
Interesting read. I’m glad to see that they have decided to release it in full so we can see what they saw, even though it contains some factual errors. Also not sure I buy the story that they didn’t want to release it because of the errors and the idea that “some people may not take this report seriously because it gets some percentages wrong and has some misspellings.” Methinks I detect the smell of bullshit.
Nothing in the report I’ve seen so far is a surprise. Biggest and most important things I noticed:
– Biden campaign did not set Kamala up for success and missed some big opportunities to help – plus, the timing of the switch was bad and did not really give adequate time to build a coordinated strategy (this kind of seems like a “duh” to me as I think we all know that the best thing that could have happened would have been if Joe announced in 2022 that he wasn’t running again and would pass the torch – this would have allowed for a real primary and to build a cohesive strategy against Trump)
– Kamala put too much into winning urban areas hoping that it would offset rural areas, but rural areas turned up consistently for Trump
– The “She’s for they/them, he is for you” ad really landed with Americans and Harris never had a good response, nor did she have an ad that hit equally well
– Republicans continue to be, unfortunately, better at “politics” than Democrats in the sense that they are not afraid to fight dirty and sadly it works. This is not news for anyone paying attention to politics in the last 40 years. The Democratic party is at least a decade behind the GOP when it comes to how well they weaponize media to attack their opponents and galvanize support for their own candidates. The sad reality is that half the country is chronically misinformed or underinformed and I fear this is only going to get worse with AI that is not only great at micro-targeting but will literally be able to *create the perfect content on the fly,* tailor made for a specific recipient. This is like the nuclear weapons of communicating ideas to the masses.
That interview on pod save America with the DNC chair a couple weeks ago was one of the most frustrating interviews I have ever listened to.
The guy is such a smug prick.
Spines are things that humans have. Grow one, Dems. You’re not on Israel’s leash. Criticism of Israel is valid. We’re just asking you to be brave enough to ask for the world to stop burning.
God we are so fucking embarrassing.
🙈
Republicans can put out full guides on how to destroy democracy, but we can’t even pull together a report analyzing an election.
I think what went wrong is glaringly obvious: we didn’t get a proper primary to choose the best candidate.
Im more interested in if they asked any of us for our input? I have some ideas.
So incredibly embarrassing to even skim through. It’s been two and a half years and they haven’t managed to even finish introductory paragraphs in half the sections? Like someone else said, this is half-assed undergrad level work product. What a dereliction.
FFS, I voted Dem, I’m a reformed RINO fiscally conservative voter who walked away in the early 2000s when I finally smelled the coffee of the marriage equality campaigns.
Since then though, with the exception of President Obama it has been a hold my nose and vote.
The democratic party lost in 2024 because the GOP with Trump are going low and motivating the disgruntled bigotry and racism in the country. They are scapegoating the bigotry as the reason why the disgruntled are justified in their being disgruntled. In telling them that the reason they are down is the programs that make it harder for them and benefit others.
The democratic party is absolutely tone deaf on that issue and their activist fringe elements are openly hostile to messages that maybe some white people need help too.
Then the party topped it off by having a non-demagogue President who has visible age impacts and didn’t stand up to it.
And the the killshot came when Biden debated and stood there like a deer in the headlights at the end of June with barely more 90 days to go.
With no plan or even viable primary election happened, they proceeded to anoint, while a capable politician, one that is unlikely to won the primaries out right and played to the strengths of the bigotry of the otherside while not motivating anybody to come off the bench to vote for the Democrats.
I hope we look young and to new solution and approaches. Mamdami, AOC, I don’t agree with everything they say, but they and people like them, are our best bets to bring new voters to overturn the right. The same old same old Kelly, Newsom, Beshear, Shapiro, just going to get us four more years of Billionaire puppet.
All that money spent on the campaign and $99 on this piece of shit
This just adds more proof to the hypothesis that the Dems are just controlled opposition acting like they care more. They’re just the pause/recover button when things get too hot but never go against fascism in reality.
GOP party leadership.. and get agent down to local elections must be laughing their assess off at this. The level of incompetence on display is genuinely staggering and representative of why the DNC keeps falling.
But, this needed to be released. It was the only way to have an honest discussion about the direction of the party.
You notice Democrats constantly worry about electability and deliberately put forward nominees their own base doesn’t even like, just to appease the opposition’s base.
Lunacy.
This is what I actually believe, and it’s not really the fault of the Democratic Party in particular:
– Social media has pretty much every potential voter pinned down.
– Potential Trump voters were fed a constant barrage of content that would maximize their turnout.
– Potential Harris voters were fed demotivating content (cost of living, etc) to minimize turnout.
X and Meta are the main culprits.
The Leadership Message section at the beginning being blank is so fucking on point for the current DNC leadership
I hate it because it’s worse than I thought, it isn’t hiding some smoking gun, the smoking gun is they never gave a shit about it in the first place.
I wish they hadn’t gotten rid of David Hogg. We really need that youth and that feistiness at the DNC.
They blew it with Kamala.
First female VP in history, first minority VP in history, first president who seriously may die in office in a very long time. They had 4 years to keep Kamala front and center. Let the American people get to know her. Give her some big wins. Play to her strengths and make her look like a viable successor to Biden. Then, if they had to anoint her, we’d all be cool with it.
Instead – what did she accomplish? What was she *tasked* with accomplishing? She was at the occasional photo op and I know very little about her actual positions or priorities.
I’m left to conclude that her boss didn’t have confidence in her to handle the big stuff, so why should I?
They had 4 years, and completely squandered it.
It was over when the Biden administration decided not to expand the supreme court and letting Garland take his time going after Trump. Even if there wasn’t the votes to expand the court, the goal is to put pressure and he wasn’t very good at that.
The best part is page two titled “leadership message” and then it’s just blank. Like, we know.
Any post mortem on 2024 that doesn’t heavily mention the global anti-incumbency wave that year isn’t real analysis, it’s political jockeying.
The DNC is a controlled opposition run by spineless corrupt cowards.
To know how many brilliant data analysts exist in the country and this is what they come up with for such an incredibly important question is lazy and borderline negligent
I’m a martech/adtech technologist and marketing strategist who also happens to be super into political science who also is married to a data scientist.
I’m writing my own solutions guide and going to try and blast it out to the world. This document is so consultant coded, it fucking kills me.
Without going into super details, the report gets a lot of the symptoms right, but it still treats the problem like it’s mostly messaging and organizing when the real issue is the entire political/media environment has changed.
It still thinks politics works like a persuasion game when a huge amount of modern voting behavior is identity, culture, tribe, outrage loops and algorithm-fed emotional reinforcement.
The document keeps circling around the “Democrats feel culturally disconnected from normal people” issue without ever fully saying it out loud or confronting what voters actually associate the party with now.
“Reconnect with the working class” sounds good, but the working class is no longer one thing. A union worker in Michigan, a Latino tradesman in Arizona and a young gig worker in Atlanta do not see the world the same way politically or culturally.
This report is mostly about improving Democratic operations inside the current system instead of asking whether the system itself has fundamentally changed in ways that make old coalition and persuasion models far less effective now. That’s the consultant class working to justify its existence and frame it as solutions.
It’s light on actual data science, embarrassingly naive on strategies and the worst part for me is how the DNC redlined things but even the redlines are flawed.
No, AI didn’t write this. I’m just fed up with the DNC and want to show a data driven way forward that actually can move the needle. Like hardcore “we have to invest and win in these specific areas” type of output. Winning rural voters is my passion, I know we can break through, but we have to get the donation / money class to see it.