It reads like a half-drafted thesis assembled at the last second for a book the Democratic Party never finished reading all the way to the end.
Disclaimer: This document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC. The DNC was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented.
You ever have that recurrent nightmare? You know what I’m talking about, the one where it’s the end of the semester in school, everyone else is sitting around chatting about their vacation plans, and then it hits you: You forgot to write that term paper required for graduation. I don’t know if everyone relates to those sorts of anxiety dreams, but there’s a reason I suspect many of you are nodding your heads right now: The Democratic National Committee finally released its “2024 autopsy” — after more than a year of sitting on the document for reasons undisclosed at the time — and it reads like a half-drafted thesis assembled at the last second for a book the Democratic Party never finished reading all the way to the end.
You can read the “autopsy” (such as it is) in full right here if you wish, but why waste your time? The document is clearly unfinished. I would call it a “first draft,” but it doesn’t even rise to the title; key sections (including the executive summary and conclusion) are missing, and what analysis exists is conclusory and scattershot. There is no unifying thesis to explain why Democratic candidates (or even candidate profiles) fared better than Kamala Harris herself, though the individual pieces are all there, written out, waiting to be assembled by anyone with a brain. In the end, the “autopsy” we have here boils down to raw chunks of undigested state-by-state spew, all amounting in its disorganization to “Why did we lose to Donald Trump? Because we didn’t win!”
Beyond that, it is chockablock full of drafting and data errors, its (unpacked) analysis predicated upon a number of assumptions never really discussed. (Whoever marked up the text in the released copy is in clear sympathy with my editors at National Review, who would have never allowed me to publish a piece this lazy.) And of the bloated 192-page whole, I can only say that if you’ve read all of it, you were professionally required to: This autopsy’s electoral analysis could have been written by a dimwitted amateur using Grok’s AI on Twitter.
That explains the quote I began this piece with. I started there because it works as much for me as it does for the DNC, but you must understand that this line is editorially affixed to the top of every single page of this 2024 Democratic “Autopsy,” which clearly reads like a document half-drafted, submitted, and then simply axed for further political reasons. The closest it comes to a thesis is the following conclusory paragraphs near its beginning:
This divergence means the Party and our candidates have lost the confidence and trust of voters. In the face of misinformation and disinformation, our candidates have proven incapable of projecting strength, unity, and leadership, and voters have drifted away.
Indeed, many of our critical Democratic wins can be attributed to negative partisanship — where Republicans have nominated deeply flawed candidates, and we have been able to convince some Republicans and most Independents to support Democrats in those contests.
I agree! But what of it? How to counter? The autopsy never specifies. And in any event, it won’t matter. There is a process story to write here about how Ken Martin’s forced release of this document signifies his lack of control over a party committee he was barely elected to in the first place, but that is a mere footnote to the real story: Democrats are heading pell-mell into the midterms (and the 2028 presidential election after it) with an enormous head of steam, built on a simple rejection of Trump’s mishandling of the American economy and its foreign policy. A half-written autopsy built around the premise that Democrats need to agree upon actual answers rather than rejecting Trump feels more irrelevant and frankly demoralizing than ever, when the only feeling Americans will be focusing on from now until November is Trump Trump Trump. After that? Who cares? Certainly not Ken Martin, whose tenure as head of the DNC will surely end the next time his number is up.
I will end by repeating a point I wrote a full year ago, about an event that passed into history in November of 2024 and is no longer fully relevant:
Better super PAC messaging wasn’t going to save Democrats in 2024. A Democratic Party that refuses to acknowledge that it lost because of the border, inflation, and its cultural alienation from the great mass of American voters is not a party properly reckoning with its failures. (An honest autopsy would report the cause of death as suicide.)
And yet here’s the funny thing: In politics, very few public suicides are permanent. The Democratic Party, as unpopular as it currently is, cannot actually slit its own throat electorally so long as it remains the only option to oppose a man who has, in his extremity and miscalculation, begun to treat an entire country as his personal patrimony. They will overinterpret the results of November 2026 and 2028 every bit as much as Trump willingly misinterpreted 2024. And we will all be captive to the resultingly seasickening swoon to the left.