The DNC has finally released its 2024 election autopsy, and if you were hoping for a moment of genuine Democratic self-reflection, prepare to be disappointed.
The report took forever to see the light of day, and DNC Chairman Ken Martin’s explanation for the delay was something else. “When I received the report late last year, it wasn’t ready for primetime — not even close — and because no source material was provided, it would have meant starting over. I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on the report that was produced,” Martin said. So the party that wants to run your healthcare couldn’t manage to produce a competent internal review? That’s comforting.
Of course, most of what the autopsy actually concludes isn’t exactly earth-shattering. Democrats didn’t just lose because of Donald Trump. They lost because they’ve spent years drifting away from working-class voters, men, rural America, and irregular voters, while banking everything on anti-Trump messaging and demographic assumptions that turned out to be dead wrong.
Gee, we’ve been saying that for years.
The report traces these organizational, messaging, and cultural failures back more than a decade. That’s the Democrats’ attempt to spread the blame thin enough that no one person has to own it.
I’m sorry, but that’s still such a cop out. Remember, Democrats have had Hollywood, the public school system, and virtually the entire media apparatus doing their bidding for years. With all that infrastructure, losing this badly isn’t a messaging problem. It’s a “you” problem, and from what I can tell, the document doesn’t acknowledge this at all.
Still, some of the admissions in the report are interesting.
“A persistent inability or unwillingness to listen to all voters has provided the other major party with opportunities for advancement,” the report states. It’s not wrong. The party that claims to speak for ordinary Americans stopped listening to them somewhere along the way. The report even concedes it directly. “The party’s connections with working Americans and their families were forged through decades of organizing and engagement,” but “we have lost these relationships.”
That’s a nice way of saying that Democrats have become the party of the coastal elites, not the average American.
There’s also an acknowledgment that Democrats became addicted to identity politics and abstract rhetoric at the expense of kitchen-table issues. The report calls on Democrats to “focus less on abstract issues and identity politics, and connect with voters on the issues they say matter most, including the economy, disaster relief, and addressing housing affordability.”
Hellbound and Down 