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The Democratic National Committee’s decision to block the release of its own autopsy report on the 2024 election is stunning but not surprising. Averse to unpleasant candor, the Democrats’ governing body functions more like a PR firm than a political organization devoted to grassroots capacities for winning elections. The party’s leaders pose as immune from critique, even if they have led the party to disaster.
Unwilling to depart from the party establishment’s culture of conformity, the DNC has remained under the Biden-Harris shadow throughout 2025. Release of an official autopsy might have shown that party leaders actually want to encourage public discourse about the missteps that enabled Donald Trump to become president again. But the DNC is proceeding as if there’s nothing to be learned from the tragic debacle of 2024 that its leaders don’t already know – and they don’t need to share their purported wisdom with anyone else.
In early December, the DNC featured Kamala Harris as the keynote speaker at the semi-annual meeting of its 450 members. Predictably, her formulaic speech received a standing ovation. No matter that in recent months, on the long book tour promoting her campaign memoir, Harris was notably incapable of responding with any coherence to questions about why as vice-president she claimed that Biden was fit to run for president in 2024 or, for that matter, to be president for another four years.
The DNC’s refusal to release its autopsy is in keeping with a pattern of evading hard truths that led virtually every elected Democrat in Washington to go along with President Biden’s insistence on running for re-election until his awful debate performance in late June 2024. Meanwhile, big majorities of Democratic voters were continually telling pollsters that they didn’t want Biden to run again.
An autopsy report with any value would not dodge such matters. Nor would it elide sensible questions about how much money went to insider consultants and advertising contractors as the Harris campaign managed to spend $1.5bn during the hallowed 107 days of her presidential campaign last year. An autopsy might also probe the moral and political consequences of nominee Harris continuing to toe the Biden line for huge arms shipments to Israel while its military continued to slaughter Palestinian civilians in Gaza; during the campaign and afterward, polling showed that she would have gained a substantial boost of votes by calling for an arms embargo.
Months ago, news accounts surfaced that release of the DNC’s autopsy would be postponed until after the November election. The draft autopsy reportedly avoided casting blame on Biden or Harris or other Democratic leaders. But as it turned out, even such a tepid autopsy would be too hot for the DNC leadership to handle.
In mid-December, when DNC chair Ken Martin announced the decision to withhold the autopsy from public view, his rationale reeked of elitism, perfumed as pragmatism: “Here’s our North Star: does this help us win? If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.” The actual message to the party’s base – including millions of loyal volunteers and small donors – was that they couldn’t be trusted to know what party chiefs have learned from a report based on hundreds of interviews with people in all 50 states. At the DNC, the political calculus is that the basis for sharing such information should be need-to-know, and ordinary Democrats don’t need to.
Martin’s explanation for hiding the autopsy – his claim that winning in the future would be hampered by the “distraction” of assessing the past – is backwards. Public candor about why Democrats lost the White House is not a “distraction” – it’s vital for disrupting the party’s repeated compulsion of making the same mistakes all over again.
A former chair of the progressive caucus in the California Democratic party, Amar Shergill, was cogent when mentioned Martin in this acid X post : “Bury the report that will help Democrats understand how and why they lost.”
The DNC is now replicating the kind of tacit disdain for rank-and-file Democrats that fueled the 2024 catastrophe. Despite the lopsided poll numbers against Biden running for re-election, the attitude from the Biden White House and congressional Democrats was: we know much better than Democratic voters what they should want.
Days before the DNC announcement about ditching its autopsy, my colleagues at RootsAction released our own in-depth autopsy, assessing what went wrong in 2024 and how to make crucial changes for the midterms and 2028. Written by journalist Christopher D Cook, the autopsy (“How Democrats Lost the White House”) focuses on these key points:
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Voter disenchantment: Losing 6.8 million voters who supported Joe Biden in 2020 proved pivotal in the close 2024 election. Harris’s inability to mobilize those pro-Biden voters was a massive failure.
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Biden’s betrayal: Biden’s stubborn decision to seek re-election, and his refusal to step aside until very late in the process, robbed Democratic voters of open primaries and undermined Democrats’ chances.
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Abandoning the working-class base: With millions of Americans feeling desperate because of rising costs, the Harris campaign lost this Democratic base by bowing to corporate donors’ interests and failing to challenge the impact of corporate greed in escalating inflation.
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The Gaza effect: Harris lost many voters – especially young people, Arab-Americans and Muslim Americans, with sizable consequences in Michigan and other swing states – due to her refusal to indicate any openness to shifting her policy position on Israel and Palestine.
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Losing young voters: Extensive evidence shows a huge drop-off in Democratic support among young voters aged 18-29.
Some of the bleakest findings in the RootsAction autopsy about the 2024 election involve similarities with the findings in the RootsAction autopsy about the 2016 election, “The Democratic Party in Crisis”. On matters such as the party standard-bearer’s support for corporate power and militarism, as well as failure to connect with young people and the working class while pandering to mythical troves of moderate Republican voters, the names Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris could often be swapped with complete accuracy.
As public scrutiny of the Democratic party’s recent history continues to be off the table at the DNC, one factor is its chair’s view that vigorous intraparty debate is unseemly. Before becoming DNC chair, Martin had told me on two occasions (once in 2019 and more politely early this year when he was making calls before the chair election) that he doesn’t think Democrats should be criticizing each other in public.
The future of the Democratic party is crucial because – given the structural realities of the American political system – this party is the only electoral vehicle for ending Republican control of the federal government. Anger and disgust with the Democratic leadership is fully valid. Yet strong progressives like representatives Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Summer Lee and Ro Khanna would not be in Congress if they hadn’t run as “Democrats”.
While ousting the Republicans from power is essential, progressives need to be fighting the Democratic party’s power structure that keeps impeding progress on that momentous task. Blockage of the official autopsy is symptomatic of the DNC’s deference to party leaders who engineered the disastrous 2024 presidential campaign.
Martin won the DNC chair job almost a year ago without the support of Democratic heavyweights like Senator Chuck Schumer and representatives Hakeem Jeffries and Nancy Pelosi, who all backed Martin’s main opponent. Martin is not a favorite of many old-guard officials in the upper reaches of the party, and an autopsy with even a modicum of criticism in their direction might have sparked some kind of revolt. Martin opted to avoid any such problem by deep-sixing the autopsy.
“It’s about protecting people who fucked up,” a DNC member told me. “Ken is trying to hold the DNC together. The decision about the autopsy is about trying to keep peace within the party.”
But a party unable to publicly examine its own failings is unlikely to climb out of the rut that proved so helpful to Donald Trump in 2024.
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Norman Solomon is the director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book is The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy
