There’s a somewhat puzzling and ongoing contretemps roiling leftist politics these days: Why is the Democratic National Committee still refusing to release its post-2024 election “autopsy” report?
Let’s acknowledge, right out of the gate, that the usefulness of such assessments is, at best, disputable. After the Republicans issued an in-depth analysis following their 2012 election loss, conservative voters proceeded to ignore its central pillar takeaways at the very next opportunity, nominating Donald Trump for president in 2016. He defied expectations and won.
Setting aside whether such things do any good, Democrats want to see what their own party produced after its decisive defeat at the polls nearly two years ago, in which Trump swept the battleground states and became the first Republican to win the national popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004.
The fact that the DNC has bizarrely insisted on keeping this report shrouded in mystery has only focused more attention on its existence. Numerous elected officials and prominent figures have demanded its publication, echoing a widespread sentiment on the Left. Theories about what is being hidden abound. Among the most popular is the notion that the DNC is worried about being exposed on the issue of Gaza, as well as the idea that the autopsy could be too embarrassing to Kamala Harris, who may run again in 2028.
The idea that Democrats being insufficiently hostile to Israel as an electoral game-changer strikes me as highly dubious, even if it’s a base obsession. And plenty of Democrats would actually love to embarrass Harris into receding from the scene. Beyond that, she’s already put her spin on the race in an after-action memoir, and (as a notoriously lagging indicator) has endorsed releasing the report.
So what’s really going on here? I offered my best viable theory on Fox Business Network earlier this week:
As noted in the clip, I increasingly suspect this holding pattern isn’t about protecting or sparing others from humiliation or backlash. It’s about self-preservation within the DNC.
GOP SLUMPING INTO BLUE WAVE TERRITORY
After a dispiriting national loss largely driven by the public’s aversion to Democrats’ extremism and various costly policy failures, there’s a very real possibility the autopsy included admonitions for the party to moderate on certain issues, and perhaps to reject a Full Resistance posture against the (then newly re-elected) president. Those would be sensible pieces of advice, actually. But the Democrats’ base has been in no mood for any of that, to put it mildly. Their voters want nothing less than high-decibel, full-throated, reflexive resistance, with any other course of action being considered tantamount to “enabling authoritarianism” and “Nazi collaboration.”
If these voters were to discover their own political party urging a tack to the center, or even advising some degree of cooperation with The Devil, they’d revolt. They would insist upon a comprehensive, house-cleaning purge inside the DNC. The authors and sponsors of this report might therefore be worried that the next autopsy they might need to perform would be on their own careers in Democratic politics. We’ll see if the pressure continues to mount to make the document public, which would prove or disprove this theory of the case.