That the DNC kept the autopsy under wraps so far suggests they will probably be able to withstand pressure to release it between now and the midterm elections.
You can contend, as many do, that the reasons for the Democrats’ defeats in 2024 are obvious. But the Democratic National Committee’s job is to get Democrats elected to office, and the DNC wanted to get the most comprehensive, insightful, and useful analysis of the defeat that they could.
After all, the Biden and Harris campaigns combined raised and spent more than $2 billion, and failed to win any of the seven critical swing states. There are also lingering questions about whether the Harris campaign had an accurate sense of how well they were performing. After the election, Harris wrote that her campaign’s internal analytics showed she was ahead in all the battleground states the Friday before the election; on a post-election appearance on Pod Save America, David Plouffe revealed, “Even post-debate, we had ourselves down in the battleground states… I think it surprised people, because there was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw.”
The DNC conducted extensive data analysis and conducted hundreds of interviews in all 50 states and put together a 200-page report. And then, in December, they declared that no one could ever see it and that it must be locked away, like that crate containing the Ark of the Covenant. Even more mysteriously, DNC chairman Ken Martin had previously promised, “of course, it will be released.” Now Martin says that releasing the report would constitute “navel-gazing and looking backwards and, uh, trying to relitigate 2024.”
This has led to considerable speculation that something in that report is scandalous or particularly embarrassing for someone important in Democratic Party politics.
Martin appeared on the Pod Save America podcast this week and insisted that was not the case.
We’ve been sharing those lessons out with donors. We’ve been talking about this with party leaders and activists and others and organizations and campaigns. It’s no surprise to — and I get it. I get why people are obsessed with it because there’s various groups and organizations and people who think there’s some sort of smoking gun in there. Guess what, John? In the third closest presidential election in the last 100 years, everything mattered. There’s nothing that didn’t impact that election.
Pod Save America host Jon Favreau pushed back, contending that if the report has nothing surprising in it, there doesn’t seem to be any good reason to withhold it.
Meanwhile, NBC News reports that Kamala Harris thinks that the DNC should release the autopsy.
As former Vice President Kamala Harris considers another run for president, she is also signaling that she has no problem with a public airing of what went wrong last time — telling donors she believes the Democratic National Committee should release its buried autopsy of her failed 2024 campaign, according to a person who has heard the conversations.
Harris may have no idea what is in the autopsy. Or she may have some sense that the full autopsy, with all the details, would spread around the blame for her defeat. (The fact that Harris wants to blame others for her defeat doesn’t mean that there aren’t other forces within the party that contributed to that defeat in a significant way.)
The fact that the DNC kept the autopsy under wraps so far suggests they will probably be able to withstand pressure to release it between now and the midterm elections, and if Democrats have the good midterm year that everyone expects, many will conclude the DNC and the Democrats as a whole learned their lessons from 2024. That may not be the case at all, but that is what a whole lot of Democrats will want to believe in that scenario.