Liberal New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg sharply criticized the Democratic National Committee’s long-delayed 2024 election postmortem on Friday, describing the report as “mysterious,” “anticlimactic,” and “ridiculous” following months of internal Democratic infighting surrounding its release.
Advertisement She also blasted DNC Chairman Ken Martin for changing his tune regarding the report. “What’s most striking is its utter lack of substance,” she noted further, adding that the words “Israel” and “Gaza” don’t appear anywhere in the 192-page autopsy.
Advertisement When he was running for DNC chair, Martin said he would release the autopsy report but later changed his mind, declaring it would not be released publicly at all. That decision made the report “an object of suspicion and fascination,” Goldberg wrote.
Democratic Speculation on Report Contents
“Some thought he was protecting Kamala Harris ahead of 2028. Many progressives were convinced that the D. N. C. quashed the autopsy because it would show Harris was done in by Gaza,” she wrote. “Rob Flaherty, who’d been deputy director of both the Harris and Joe Biden campaigns, speculated that it didn’t even exist,” she said.
Conservative Washington Post columnist Ramesh Ponnuru also focused on what the report did not include. Nothing about the border crisis the Democrats first caused through their policies and then denied in their rhetoric,” he said. “Nothing about the party’s declining appeal to religiously observant voters,” he continued.
“Nothing about the boutique left-wing views – such as support for taxpayer-funded sex changes for illegal immigrants and prisoners,” he added. It also did not fault the manner in which she was simply anointed as the party’s candidate after President Joe Biden dropped out.
Report’s Key Findings and Release
The report, which was released Thursday and first detailed by CNN, argued that the Democratic National Committee weakened its own political infrastructure through declining voter registration efforts, reduced financial support for state parties, and a broader failure to engage with key voter blocs.
For his part, Martin distanced himself from the report. “I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards,” he said, per Fox News.
The report, written by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, was released with a disclaimer stating it “reflects the views of the author, not the DNC. ” Martin also said the report was released for the sake of transparency “as I received it – in its entirety, unedited and unabridged – with annotations for claims that couldn’t be verified. ” Rivera, a longtime Democratic consultant, had reportedly not worked on a presidential campaign in more than two decades.
The Democratic National Committee has released its analysis of the 2024 presidential campaign, in which then-Vice President Kamala Harris was decisively defeated by Donald Trump, despite spending over $1 billion in campaign funds.
Before I even review the findings, the story has actually become more about how badly the roll-out of the 2024 autopsy has been thus far:
Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin on Thursday released the party’s autopsy report on the 2024 election after facing intense pressure to do so.
Martin had been pummeled in public for months after he promised to release the report and then reversed course in December, saying he would not do so. It’s one in a series of negative storylines that Martin has faced during his short tenure at the DNC, even as Democrats have made political gains in elections in the past year.
The situation for the Democrats is worsening because it seems the party did not honestly assess its performance: They anointed a candidate whose policies did not resonate with everyday Americans. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, provided a blunt critique of the weak excuses offered for the unsuccessful campaign:
CNN just spent an entire segment proving the DNC autopsy is every bit as bad and evasive as we expected.
“There are a lot of things in that version that are incomplete, uh, and also it does not touch a couple topics that a lot of people were very interested in and thought were the reasons for this report not being out.”
“There is nothing about Joe Biden and what happened in the debate. There is nothing about Kamala Harris getting the nomination without any kind of primary process.”
Martin, who has done the party no favors as its leader, rolled out the excuses:
“I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on the report that was produced. After last November’s massive Democratic wins, I didn’t want to create a distraction, but by not putting the report out, I ended up creating an even bigger distraction. For that, I sincerely apologize.”
Understand, these are the losers who want to run the country. But they can’t even roll out a report without making it a disaster:
BREAKING: Democrat Rep. Jared Moskowitz is calling the 2024 DNC Autopsy report “malpractice.”
“It sounds like we need a malpractice attorney because we couldn’t even do the autopsy correctly.”
“We got SHELLACKED in the last election. I mean, we lost every single solitary swing state.”
The report hasn’t even been out that long and Democrats are already turning on one another.
So, what was the diagnosis for getting smoked in 2024? What does the report say? A bunch of stuff that appears to miss the point:
Much of the 200-page draft autopsy report doesn’t focus directly on the 2024 election — it includes a lengthy recap of modern American political history dating back to the 2008 presidential election, historic fundraising and spending data from past elections and more.
But the report also includes significant discussion of what the author believes went wrong for Democrats in 2024.
The diagnosis includes underfunded state parties and Democratic declines in voter registration. The report also stated that a “persistent inability or unwillingness to listen to all voters has provided the other major party with opportunities for advancement at the expense of Democratic growth, evolution, and ability to find common ground with seemingly disparate groups of voters from coast to coast, and the heartland Democrats tend to ignore.”
“Underfunded?” The party blew through a billion dollars. Also, here’s a much shorter version of what this autopsy should have said:
- “Our anointed candidate sucked. She couldn’t connect with anyone outside of the lunatics in our party.
- “Our policy ideas, when our anointed candidate even bothered to mention them, were inferior to Trump’s.”
- “Running on ‘but I’m not Trump!’ isn’t a political winner.”
