The Democratic Party's 2024 "Autopsy" Reveals Nothing Not Already Known
The Autopsy Report Shows Democrats Still In Deep Denial Over 2024
Last week the Democratic National Committee finally released its “autopsy” report1 on why the party failed so spectacularly in the 2024 Presidential election.
As DNC Chair Ken Martin belatedly admitted when releasing the report, the document was an even bigger dumpster fire than the Democrats’ efforts in 2024.
Martin issued the following statement to CNN:
“When I was elected DNC chair, I commissioned an after action review of the 2024 election that I wanted to be honest and transparent, and with actionable and specific takeaways for the future of the Democratic Party. When I received the report late last year, it wasn’t ready for primetime — not even close — and because no source material was provided, it would have meant starting over. 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. For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged. It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”
I’ve read the report. Martin is being kind. The polite way to describe the report is that it is pure garbage.
The report is incomplete. Whole sections, such as the Executive Summary, are missing entirely. Sourcing and attribution are nonexistent. Some of the asserted facts are of questionable accuracy or simply wrong. I would call the report “amateurish” but that would be an insult to amateurs everywhere.
The structural defects of the report itself negate any informational value it might have. Its presentment of factual assertions and the conclusions it draws from those factual assertions are fatally tainted by the gaps in the reports assemblage.
As an analysis of the Democrats 2024 campaign efforts, the report is worthless.
Why mention the report, if it is as bad as all that? The report is as bad as all that, but it warrants mentioning because of the utter absurdity that it was even necessary. Everything about the Democrats 2024 implosion was reported and documented in 2024. All the leg work for a real introspection into 2024 has already been done.
It was known long before Kamala Harris acceded to the nomination that she was a flawed candidate with ample baggage of her own.
It was known long before the disastrous June 27th debate that Joe Biden’s cognitive decline would be a factor in the election.
It was known almost from the outset that Kamala Harris’ campaign had a problem with messaging.
It was known as the election cycle drew to a close that Kamala Harris’ campaign was not capable of making smart, sensible, strategic decisions.
It was clear from the polls leading up to the election that Democrats were bleeding support among core constituencies.
The autopsy report itself ultimately is irrelevant because everything it purports to discuss was already known. Nothing was revealed in the report because there was nothing left to reveal.
February 2024: Biden’s Cognitive Impairment Confirmed
The warning signs that a Kamala Harris campaign would be a problematic effort at best emerged very early in 2024, after Special Counsel Robert Hur declined to prosecute Joe Biden for mishandling classified documents due to his age and apparent failing memory.
Specifically, Hur described Biden in his Special Counsel report as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
Despite the obvious challenge to Biden’s fitness to serve a second term, there was no serious effort to promote Kamala Harris to the top spot at the time.
It is worthwhile to point out that, as the Robert Hur report was gaining traction in corporate media, Kamala Harris was faring worse in the polls than Joe Biden. Even among Democrats, a senile Joe Biden was provably viewed as preferable to Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket.
This was in February, 2024. The Democrats were faced with a clear problem about Joe Biden’s fitness to run for a second term and still concluded that Biden was a better choice than Kamala Harris.
You do not need an “autopsy” report to understand this. You only need to read the media reporting at that time.
June 27, 2024: The Wheels Come Off The Biden Campaign
The end of June and the beginning of July, 2024, were days when months happened for the Democrats. There was, of course, Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the June 27 debate against Donald Trump, where the extent of his cognitive decline was broadcast in prime time for the nation to see.
As Bari Weiss (then of The Free Press, before taking the helm at CBS) reported the day after, not only did the debate reveal the extent of Biden’s mental deterioration, it revealed the mendacity and complicity of corporate media in concealing it from the public. Corporate media was exposed as being little more than the propaganda department of the Democratic Party.
When Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson released their “tell-all” Original Sin in 2025, in meandering, evasive, and largely self-serving terms, they essentially admitted that Bari Weiss was right.
As disastrous as the debate performance was, however, it was arguably not the worst thing to happen to the Democrats at that point. A few days after that debate, the Supreme Court effectively demolished Special Counsel Jack Smith’s “J6” case against Donald Trump, acknowledging that Presidents cannot be indicted for performing their official duties.
Not only did Smith’s lawfare campaign against Trump get eviscerated, that ruling also put on pause the sentencing phase of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s “hush money” case.
The collapse of the lawfare cases against Donald Trump meant that there would be no avoiding further debates between Biden and Trump, and no way to shield Biden from further scrutiny over his increasingly questionable cognitive abilities.
Despite the rapid implosion of Biden’s re-election bid, Democrats even in early July still did not coalesce behind Kamala Harris.
Instead, there was aborted talk of having a “blitz primary” so Democrat voters could choose a suitable replacement for Joe Biden.
Their idea goes something like this, according to a memo shared with Semafor that has been circulated to Democratic donors and bundlers as well as officials within the Biden campaign and administration:
Biden would step down as the Democratic nominee in mid-July, and announce the new system, with backing from Vice President Kamala Harris.
Potential candidates would have a few days to throw their respective hats in the ring. The Democratic Party then would begin a primary sprint in which the six candidates who receive the most votes from delegates pledge to run positive-only campaigns in the month leading up to the convention.
The “blitz primary” would involve weekly forums with each candidate moderated by cultural icons (Michelle Obama, Oprah, and Taylor Swift are among the names floated in the memo) in order to engage voters.
The nominee would ultimately be chosen by the delegates using ranked choice voting before the start of the Chicago convention on Aug. 19.
It would be announced with plenty of fanfare on the third day of the gathering. The memo imagines the nominee unveiled on stage with Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
Even as it was glaringly apparent that Joe Biden was not going to be the Democratic nominee come the fall campaign, Democrat strategists and party leaders were not leaning towards Kamala Harris at all.
Let that sink in: Joe Biden’s campaign was imploding and all but over, and Democrats wanted anyone other than Kamala Harris to step in as the nominee.
Do we really need an autopsy report to conclude that Kamala Harris had a lethal amount of political baggage, when her own party did not want her to be the nominee?
Nor should we overlook how she came to be the nominee. Roughly thirty minutes after Biden posted to social media his letter withdrawing from the race, he made another social media post explicitly endorsing Kamala Harris as his heir apparent.
If one believes the (very credible) narratives that Biden was forced out, his last-minute endorsement of Harris might actually be the biggest “F*** You” in modern political history. At the very least, Biden short-circuited the previously discussed plans and machinations of the Democratic Party to pick someone other than Kamala Harris.
Do we really need an autopsy report to conclude that the Democratic Party had a major breakdown in party communications and strategy to be blindsided in this fashion? Bear in mind that up to that moment, the Democrats had their eye on anyone except Kamala Harris.
The party did not want Kamala Harris as their candidate—and this had been publicly reported throughout the first half of 2024. Yet, because of how Biden’s withdrawal was handled, the part found itself with Kamala Harris as their candidate.
Human Trafficking
With Harris having moved into the nominee slot by the back door, her political baggage quickly became one of many albatrosses around her neck.
In particular, the debacle that had been Kamala Harris’ tenure as one of Biden’s “border czars” very quickly became an early target for Trump surrogates and alternative media outlets.
That part of her political resume was particularly damaging, as it brought back into the spotlight the very disturbing revelations I had discussed earlier in 2024, that roughly 85,000 children had been trafficked across the southern border, with at least the facilitation if not the outright complicity of the Biden Administration.
Nor should we overlook Tulsi Gabbard, among others, being targeted with Stasi-like surveillance under a reinvigorated “Quiet Skies” program run by the TSA.
Stories such as this gained traction particularly within alternative media outlets, even as they served to discredit corporate media outlets, which were again shown in the process to be fully complicit in the Biden White House campaign of censorship and repression.
The human trafficking angle would also get worse as the summer progressed, as media outlets reported that the number of children (“unaccompanied minors” in the anodyne argot of DHS) that were either trafficked or simply “lost” (and therefore almost certainly trafficked) was not 85,000 but at least 320,000.
The resulting narrative was not at all kind to Kamala Harris. The extant public record was showing the Administration—which is to say, Kamala Harris—effectively involved in child trafficking.
The Biden-Harris Administration is not properly vetting sponsors, and has not been properly vetting them. Whistleblowers report that this lack of vetting has gone on almost since the beginning of the Biden-Harris Administration.
Because the Biden-Harris Administration is not doing proper vetting, children are being released not into the custody of family or friends—people who would provide proper care. Because the Biden-Harris Administration is not doing proper vetting, children are being released into the custody of likely human traffickers.
To put it bluntly, the Biden-Harris Administration has been releasing hundreds of thousands of children into slavery.
To put it bluntly, Kamala Harris has been releasing hundreds of thousands of children into slavery.
Do we really need an autopsy report to recognize that a candidate who has to explain away such charges faces an uphill battle to secure a majority of voters in any state?
Again, the broad outlines of all of this were publicly reported and well known long before Biden stepped aside and thrust Harris into the spotlight. That the media attention only made the numbers worse serves to underscore just how deeply flawed Kamala Harris was the Democratic nominee. There were good reasons the Democrats did not want her to step into Biden’s shoes.
Polling Revealed A Shambolic And Losing Campaign
By mid October, the public polling by Atlas Intel and others made it clear that Harris’ candidacy was in serious trouble.
The Atlas Intel polls in particular showed two very disturbing trends for Kamala Harris: 1) third party candidates like Cornell West and Jill Stein pulled more support away from her than from Donald Trump, making Harris vulnerable on both the right and the left. 2) A growing portion of the voter coalition Joe Biden assembled in 2020 was defecting to climb aboard the Trump Train.
Nor was there any great mystery why voters were turning away from the Harris campaign—the campaign itself sucked.
First there was her stance on “price gouging”, which carried uncomfortable parallels to Richard Nixon’s infamous 1971 attempt at price controls.
Nor did she just stop there. When she did discuss her economic plans, they included a heavy dose of Nixonomics, including rent control, while doing nothing to address the harsh reality that the 2022 hyperinflation cycle had resulted in a major loss of real income across all job sectors and income brackets.
Full disclosure: I was opposed to Harris’ economic proposals then and I still think that rent controls, price controls, and ignorance about declining real wages are a very bad policy mix.
However, the polling data made it clear that I was not alone in rejecting Harris’ economic vision in favor of Trump’s. Voters in 2024 had a bad feeling about the state of the US economy and that bad feeling was leading an increasing number of voters to support Donald Trump.
That is what the national poll data showed at the time.
The Pennsylvania poll data also showed that Donald Trump had surprising traction among groups that one would expect to be firmly in the Democratic camp, such as blacks, women, and “non-binary” voters.
The poll data also showed that Trump was doing better among the lower income brackets, while Harris fared well only among those earning $100,000 per year or more.
The Wisconsin poll data from that same period showed that Trump’s numbers were no fluke.
The poll data was clear and unequivocal: On the issues of greatest significance to voters, Kamala Harris’ messaging was either rejected or ignored. People either did not like or did not trust her economic proposals, and they gravitated to Donald Trump’s proposals, with Trump making significant inroads into traditionally Democrat demographics as a result.
Harris’ disastrous poll numbers in swing states also served to highlight the chaotic and profligate nature of her campaign itself, such as when her staffers hyped an appearance by Beyoncé at a Houston rally late in the campaign cycle, leading supporters to expect a mini-concert by the musical superstar, only to have her talk briefly and depart without singing a note.
That Harris was even bothering to campaign in Texas in late October, when it was clear she had zero chance of carrying the state, rather than the much more vital “swing” states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, was itself a bizarre choice by the campaign. Capping that questionable logic with an apparent “bait-and-switch” with a major celebrity gave the campaign a shambolic yet cynical appearance. Such decisions certainly gave alternative media outlets yet another chance to portray Kamala Harris has cynical, contemptuous of voters, and utterly clueless about the struggles ordinary American are facing.
The consequences of such disastrous decision-making was revealed in the poll data well before Election Day. Every shift in core Democrat constituencies away from Harris and towards Trump was another confirmation that Harris’ campaign was an absolute hot mess of chaos and corruption.
Does it really take an autopsy report to discuss what was already public knowledge?
The Autopsy Was A Mess. It Was Also Unnecessary
There was simply never any need for an autopsy report. Everyone watched the Democratic Party collapse in the Presidential contest in 2024. People already know why the Democrats lost. If the Democrats have any grasp on reality left, they know why they lost.
The brutal reality for Democrats is that the 2024 Presidential election contest saw the Democrats implode on every front.
The brutal reality for Democrats is that, in the 2024 Presidential election contest, America saw the Democrats implode on every front.
The brutal reality for Democrats is that, in the 2024 Presidential election contest, even corporate media reported that the Democrats were imploding on every front.
It was plain in early 2024 that the party had guessed wrong in letting Biden press forward with a re-election bid.
It was plain in early 2024 that Kamala Harris was the absolute last choice the Democrats had for an alternative to Joe Biden. Right up until Joe Biden made the it untenable, the Democrats made the judgement call that they would do better with a senile Joe Biden than with Kamala Harris.
It was plain that corporate media was completely in the tank for Joe Biden, and then for Kamala Harris, effectively telling voters not to believe their own eyes—and corporate media luminaries such as Jake Tapper admitted as much after the fact.
It was plain as Joe Biden’s campaign went off the rails after that disastrous debate that Kamala Harris’ baggage would not be easily offloaded. Her failures as border czar, the humanitarian nightmares created at the southern border by the policies of the Biden-Harris Administration, policies she effectively inherited having been Vice-President during their implementation, and the authoritarian abuses of the Biden White House against political opponents all were political deadweight weighing her campaign down.
It was plain as the election cycle wore on that Kamala Harris had either the wrong message or was ineffective at delivering the message (or both). She did not connect with voters on any of the issues that were of importance to the voters. She did not make a compelling case for the Democrats’ ideas on the economy, on immigration, on inflation, or on protecting “democracy” and civil liberties.
It was plain from the Beyoncé fiasco that Harris’ campaign was making horrible strategic and tactical decisions about where to campaign and where to direct campaign dollars.
The lunacy of the Democratic Party’s 2024 autopsy report is not that it is an inept, amateurish, incomplete pile of excrement (although it is). The lunacy is that the Democratic Party thought it needed to commission such a study to understand why the 2024 election turned out the way that it did, when the entire country had already witnessed the party’s election machinery completely disintegrate over the course of the election cycle.
There is no mystery as to why the Democrats came up short in 2024. The reasons why were amply documented and discussed during the election cycle itself. The only mystery now is how much longer can the Democrats remain in denial about 2024.
If the autopsy report is any indication, they will remain in denial for quite some time yet.
For those who are interested, the complete DNC draft report, with annotations.
You're probably close to the mark there.
The reality is the Democrats ran the most incompetent campaign in modern times and none of the decision makers in the party want to face up to that. Everyone "supporting" Harris was more interested in charging the campaign huge fees for every little thing while doing next to nothing.
The cynicism and greed on display from everybody swirling around the Harris campaign was blatant and disgusting, and the party will not say anything about that.
Yet who is the leading candidate for 2028? Kamala Harris. Even though her biggest news is her separation from her husband Doug Emhoff.