Today, DNC Chair Ken Martin finally caved to months of pressure and released the long awaited 2024 election autopsy report, which you can read in full here. CNN was given a first look at the report. You can read their takeaways here.
“I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards. I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it. I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on it,” Martin said in an online post. “But transparency is paramount. So, today I am releasing the report as I received it — in its entirety, unedited and unabridged — with annotations for claims that couldn’t be verified.”
As reported by CNN, the report is filled with inaccuracies — polling numbers that don’t match up and misspellings of the names of politicians. The full report is heavily annotated where source information is missing, removing a means of third party confirmation.
But for me, the stand out is what’s not in the report. Per CNN;
The report is silent on some of the biggest and potentially juiciest aspects of the 2024 campaign.
That includes any judgment about Biden’s decision to run again, the impact of the war in Gaza (which split Democrats) and the fact that Harris was allowed to take over the ticket without anything amounting to an electoral process for choosing a replacement.
It also doesn’t weigh in on Harris’ failure to do an interview with podcast host Joe Rogan, which many analysts have regarded as a major mistake.
Now, I’m sick of the Rogan line. Yes, I think she should have gone on — but its hardly what sunk her campaign.
While the report disparages Biden for not adequately setting Kamala up to run (with either internal polling or messaging throughout his term), it does not cast judgement on him attempting to run a second term.
Arguably, Biden’s refusal to let go of power until the last possible moment was the ultimate failure of his presidency. A full field primary would not only have given voters a chance to choose a nominee — it would have given the party a chance to adapt in real time to what issues voters were responding to. Even if in the end the candidate was still Kamala Harris, she would have entered the race with a far more prepared campaign. Yet this crucial decision is not scrutinized in the report.
Further, the report fails to elaborate on the effects of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the Biden administration’s failures to condemn it. In Michigan, a swing state with one of the highest Muslim populations in the country, 100,000 Americans cast “uncommitted” ballots in the primary — 13..3% of the vote. Thousands across the country did the same, making a point to show up in a primary election that was already assured for Joe Biden just to express their unhappiness with the party.
It’s true that Ken Martin, chair of the DNC, has expressed dissatisfaction with this report from the offset, leading to months of dodging its release. But given the attention and questions following the 2024 election, how is it that the DNC has so utterly failed to truly address the question of “what went wrong?”
We are in a pivotal moment. As the Trump administration erodes our fundamental rights and democracy, we deserve an opposition party who is capable of meeting the moment. If they can’t even properly run a fucking report on their losses, how can we expect them to truly adapt and win elections?
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