DNC has released their autopsy report on the 2024 election. It’s apparently a draft, isn’t well sourced or edited and contains some factual inaccuracies.
It doesn’t mention Biden’s decision to run for reelection, Harris’s nomination without a primary or equivalent, any impact of Gaza on the election, or Harris not going on the Joe Rogan Experience.
Some of the things it did say: The Dems failed to project positive qualities like strength, unity, optimism etc about themselves and have also failed to define and effectively attack Trump. Harris took too much for granted (cnn article talks about Harris assuming she could get votes as an antitrump candidate, and that she assumed she would lose rural America and lost more fround there as a result, seems to imply she assumed she would win some segments and failedcto, but is lightbon specifics there. Also said the ad about Harris supportingbtrans healthcare for people detained by ice massively hurt her. Still says she helped Democrats down the ballot more that Biden would have.
It also says that the democrats need to move towards middle class kitchen table issues and away from identity politics to win elections, that the dems ignored issues identified in a 2022 autopsy, that they need to start spending money earlier in the election cycle. And it says that they need to be willing to make fundamental changes to the parties approach but that because elections have been close they haven’t had the ass-kicking needed to force this kind of change.
I can see why they initially didn’t want to release this - the bad construction of the report itself is probably a bigger sign of party issues than the insights in it. Without really diving into the contents, for any of their conclusions I disagree with I can easily say that it was the result of faulty research and half-assed analysis. I doubt it will change minds for anyone in the general public, and we’ll end up rehashing the same intra-party fights in the 2028 primaries, at which point the best hope is that the presidential candidate at least provides some clarity of vision for electoral strategy.
The idea that “moving away from identity politics” will ever be a winning strategy is asinine. That entire framing is a conservative framing, and these issues are the reason why so much of their base supports them despite not being so great in other ways.
FFS, their inability to position themselves as being anti-Palestinian genocide almost certainly lost them the the election. And I say that as someone who defended what Biden actually was doing to try and stop Israel, and who thinks those who refused to vote for Harris over that issue were wrong to do that.
Sure, it would be good if they’d actually defend the working class. But that’s the issue: their inability to defend the oppressed. They never come across like they care to fight for anything, but always just want to play nice and try to restore the status quo.
No one liked the status quo. That’s why a fascist was appealing. You don’t get the rise of fascism without the previous unrest that makes it seem palatable.
Why the fuck would they do this? The fact they released this depresses me more than anything contained in it
Yes the Democrats think they lost for being too radical and we are going to end up with a milquetoast white male centerist candidate in 2028. Everyone just has to be ok with that, and actively support him with every fiber of our being or support fascism (no sarcasm here that’s literally where we find ourselves, support whoever you want during the primaries but when they pick Newsom our whoever we all have to suck it up and support him to the hilt).
But FFS just act like you are taking this seriously you f_ckers.
They lost because incumbents and incumbent parties everywhere lost. They work like hell to support the middle class and kitchen table issues – Biden passed two giant pieces of legislation that helped bring manufacturing back to the US. Look at the construction graph around halfway down this paper: A Tale of Thucydides - Paul Krugman
They push to increase the minimum wage, push to forgive student loan debt, push to increase taxes on the wealthy, close tax loopholes for business, fund the IRS so wealthy tax cheats can’t get away with not paying taxes. They passed legislation to help people use clean energy, they passed the ACA which helped get health insurance for millions of Americans. Which kitchen table issues are they missing?
But, because they want trans people to be about to go to the bathroom at the shopping mall, suddenly all they care about is identity politics.
I cannot believe the DNC is falling for the GOP strawmen about themselves.
I think you are all taking this way too seriously. The take-home message here is that the DNC hired a “consultant” who produced a bunch of gibberish that reads like it was produced by a free LLM and is full of obvious factual errors. Like, errors on the level of “which States did Trump carry?” or “who was President in 2022?”. Many entire sections just don’t exist and are marked as “pending”. It’s nowhere near coherent enough to be described as a product of centrist, or any other, ideology. The CNN article linked in the OP is blatantly sanewashing this crap. Link to a Substack that does a better job describing this dumpster fire.
I had also assumed that the “autopsy” was probably covered up because it was embarrassing to the Party establishment, but clearly it was just “covered up” because it sucks.
Every page of the report literally has this disclaimer printed at the top, in red ink yet:
Disclaimer: This document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC. The DNC was not supplied with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented.
Wow! You might ask “how much did the DNC pay for this crap”? Answer: nothing. They gave the job of analyzing the failure of their billion-dollar campaign to a volunteer. Which should certainly be a big embarrassment to the DNC, but not in any ideologically specific way, just in a “we are very bad at our jobs” kind of way.
Without a truly independent consultant who feels free to analyze and dissect without fear of consequences, such autopsies are largely meaningless. You need an outside entity to do such a study that isn’t afraid to say the harsh truth.
Any internal analysis will be rife with bias and polite avoiding of elephants in the room. And yes, even if it’s not really “internal,” it’s someone who is afraid to offend.
Yes, perhaps the worst thing Harris said in the entire election was, “Keep talking like that and you’ll get Trump elected!” to the pro-Gaza protesters.
Translation: We won’t apologize, we won’t change, we’ll let Israel keep doing what it’s doing, and we feel entitled to your vote anyway.
I mean, it’s embarrassing and makes them look like fools. But at least it means that they won’t be taking the “consultant’s” advice to move to the center seriously, so I do think it’s less bad than the alternative.
That’s a big assumption. The problem is people are fundamentally idiots. Not you or me, obviously - but everybody else . People forget or simply ignore little things like context constantly, especially after some time passes. Come 2027 if not tomorrow I am 100% convinced there will be people seriously citing this report as a reason to tack hard to the center. It’s inevitable.
The question is just how many and influential those people will be. But it will be a non-zero number and it will have some influence. Marginal or not we’ll have to see.
There will certainly be people making that argument, but I doubt they will be citing this report to make it, since the DNC (most of which probably support the argument) has gone pretty much scorched earth on it.
Anyway, here is a link to another CNN story that contains the full text of the report (plus margin notes from the DNC pointing out errors), if you want to see it in all its dubious glory.
Yes, it’s crazy but this is actually true. We were facing worldwide inflation, and if you were up for reelection in your country, people were mad and were going to blame you. It didn’t matter that no individual national leader was responsible, people needed a target and took aim at what was available. It was a noted phenomenon that 2024 was a slaughter for incumbents globally, and Democrats happened to be in power, and were doomed from the beginning. If Republicans had been in power at that time, we would instead be talking about how the current Democratic president’s party was going to fare in their midterm.
And let’s not forget, Republicans say that and then make their campaigns all about identity politics. Does anyone remember this?
Yup. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, in Canada, the incumbents were set up to get so blown out that they may not have even qualified as a national party. Trump saved them with his talk of annexing the Nordentenland.
I read all 192 pages of the thing. As an analysis of 2024, As a political science major’s term paper on American politics, it’s poorly written, poorly detailed, poorly sourced (keeping all the sources anonymous and not including direct quotes from any of them - except Hillary Clinton, and I think that was taken from an article), and lacking in a final conclusion.
The only specific conclusions I could draw from that big mess of words were
The Biden administration failed to give Harris a high visibility role that would allow her to build her own public identity
Both the Biden campaign and the Harris campaign failed to handle the handover smoothly
Assuming that voters had moral objections to voting for Trump, and not clearly articulating the Democratic objections and alternatives to his policies
The Democrats don’t use social media - or digital media in general - well
The Democratic Party has let its ground game and voter outreach efforts sag.
The national party needs to coordinate better with state organizations and learn from their sucesses.
In other words, nothing that we here on the Dope weren’t discussing during the 2024 campaign.
The report is also lacking in recommendations other than to do better.
While I agree that they can’t really get away from identity politics because the GOP is basically choosing that battlefield, they also do a poor job of actually defining what their own identity is, and seem to be letting the GOP paint them as something they’re not, or at least an amplified and caricatured version of what they actually are. And they’re not challenging it, because I suppose injecting nuance or limits on stuff like that could offend their own people. We see this in another thread where there’s a lot of debate about whether the Democrats should be hitching their wagon to trans rights. They didn’t, but the GOP makes it sound like their advocacy for LGBTQ+ rights makes them choosing trans sports as a hill to die on, which AFAIK isn’t the case either. But they can’t say that no, we’re not choosing that particular hill either.
It’s not a great position to be in, and the Democratic party needs to somehow seize the information/messaging initiative and quit having to fight on the Republican battlefields, and make them fight on the Democratic ones. No idea how they go about that though.
I’ve been saying that for years; Republicans are the party of people who care about their whiteness, or fear their particular brand of Christianity is under attack. They are the party of “real Americans”, the common clay, salt of the earth types. They are the party of “protecting the American way of life” from others, be they foreigners or some form of weirdo freak.
It’s entirely identity politics. “Republicans are for us”.
It’s the Democrats that are proposing legislation to address housing, education, the environment, healthcare. Fucking issues.
That’s nonsense. The campaign was all about “bringing joy back.” The republicans weaponized it by saying that Harris had a cackling laugh.
And again more nonsense. Supporting civil rights is only identity politics because the republicans have effectively framed it as such.
The democrats don’t want to talk about the right to use the bathroom. They want to talk about topics such as healthcare, education, housing, transportation and infrastructure.
It’s not a substantive problem.
I’m tempted to say it’s just that America is real fucking sexist. The last 2 democratic candidates who lost were women. And despite benefiting from a woman in charge, I don’t think America has the collective maturity to make that decision.
The Democrats have been addressing Civil Rights and Unions. Those are both solid issues with more work to be done. But, they come from the last century. They need to get the focus on more immediate concerns. Historically, they were champions for the young. We need to look for real workable solutions to climate change and housing. A kid starting out with a college degree these days who wants to buy a house is going to have a much harder time than I did.
The Democrats need to get out of the last century.
No, they are important issues under siege right now. We are in the process of a general rollback of civil rights and are headed not for the last century, but for the one before that.
Civil rights are an immediate concern. That “kid starting out with a college degree these days” have to worry about being deported, shot or thrown in a camp, not just if they can get a house.
. People forget or simply ignore little things like context constantly, especially after some time passes. Come 2027 if not tomorrow I am 100% convinced there 