This past week the DNC released its autopsy of the 2024 election. DNC chair Ken Martin sat on it for months, assured us there was no smoking gun, promised he’d already been sharing the lessons, and then finally dropped the 48,000 words on a Thursday with a note on the front saying the findings don’t reflect the views of the DNC. He released the autopsy and disowned it simultaneously.
I get why he’d disown it. It’s a big turd. But the whole time he buried it, Martin kept saying the lessons from this report were already being put to work. Lessons. We’re keeping the focus on the lessons, he’d say. We’ve been releasing the lessons. I read it, most of it. It’s not that there are no recommendations. There are plenty. Go heavier on digital and connected TV, lighter on broadcast. Organize earlier. Rebuild the state parties. Those are the lessons. If they’ve taken any of them, they’ve taken the wrong ones, and there’s a reason for that.
Every question in the report is a variation on the same question. How do we campaign better with what we’ve got? How do we market this thing more effectively to the people we’re trying to sell it to? Never once do they stop and ask whether the thing they’re selling is bullshit. Whether the product is any good. Whether a single promise in it would fix a single person’s life.
Every problem this autopsy was built to diagnose is still here in 2026, we’ve yet to solve a damn one of them.
It was never about governing. It was about winning for the sake of winning, with no theory of what to do with the power once they have it. The DNC still isn’t looking for a mission of its own. It tells the campaigns to build their own contrast and definition and leaves the meaning to everyone else. The party is a machine with no idea what it’s for.
To the contrary, it’s pretty pleased with itself. The report never once treats the Biden record as a failure. Its gripe about Bidenomics isn’t that it failed people, it’s that the message leaned on big macro statistics instead of the daily reality people were actually living. When the party lost down the ballot, the report decided strong local candidates just needed to define themselves better. They’re certain Democrats are doing a great job, and that it’s just their inability to explain how awesome they are that keeps them out of power.
What I see in this report is the Biden administration in miniature. Biden was sold to us, by the press and by his own people, as proof of what Democrats could do if they got back to their FDR roots. We got the CHIPS Act. We got the IRA. We got the bipartisan infrastructure law. We were told it was the most historic spending in generations. But the rubber never hits the road. Lives weren’t transformed. Why? Because these people refuse to admit that the systems they are funding are no longer productive.
They refuse to look at the difference between an input and an output. Effort and results. You can pour trillions into a financialized housing market and a six-trillion-dollar healthcare industry, but if you never touch the monopolies and the middlemen and the rot underneath, nothing useful comes out the other side. It’s worse than that. Pour more money into an out-of-control healthcare industry and all you’ve built is a stronger monopoly, a more powerful opponent.
Hellbound and Down 