The Democratic National Committee announced last week that it won’t publish its long-promised “after-action report” examining the party’s 2024 defeat. Chairman Ken Martin ordered the report shortly after he was elected in February. It included 300 interviews with top Democrats in all 50 states.
Mr. Martin now feels its release would be a “distraction.” After all, Democrats easily won the New Jersey and Virginia governors’ races last month. They’ve overperformed in special elections all year. Why dwell on 2024 when 2025 has gone so well for the party?
The report would have been incomplete anyway. Mr. Martin had already announced that it would skip examining both Joe Biden’s choice to seek re-election at age 81 and key decisions in Kamala Harris’s 107-day presidential campaign. How could any substantive analysis of the Democratic loss ignore these topics? The notion that Mr. Biden would hit his stride in a second term was obviously absurd long before his disastrous June 2024 debate. Even a shallow dip into Ms. Harris’s campaign would have revealed unwise spending and critical errors.
To diminish criticism about the buried report, anonymous DNC officials fed reporters snippets of the party’s findings. Democratic door-knocks were badly targeted, the review discovered. Peer-to-peer text-messaging programs were ineffective. Officials perhaps hoped these tidbits would suggest that Democrats are grappling with their loss and correcting past mistakes. But these were hardly the party’s most consequential missteps.
As the Washington Post’s Dan Merica discovered, the report criticized Democrats’ “feeble response” to voters’ concerns about crime and immigration. In the minds of many swing voters and even plenty of Democrats, the party has drifted too far left. It is enamored with issues far less important to voters than inflation, the economy, border security and public safety.
To position themselves for future elections, Democrats need to realize two things. First, bashing Donald Trump isn’t sufficient to guarantee victory. Second, a democratic-socialist message simply won’t sell in vast swaths of America.
A call for a shift in strategy would have boosted Democrats’ credibility with ordinary Americans. Many voters were conflicted in 2024. But their distaste for a Biden-Harris rerun outweighed their strong doubts about re-electing Donald Trump. Democrats openly making substantial changes could attract swing voters in both 2026 and 2028. It would also re-energize dispirited contributors.
Democrats must generate a broad agreement among party officials, activists, donors and candidates about the path forward. A frank, open discussion would have produced a stronger consensus about needed changes than what’s likely to occur now.
Burying the report cedes the DNC’s leadership role to those willing to engage in the tough work of self-evaluation. But without the DNC chairman presiding over that process, it will be more expensive and divisive than it would have been otherwise.
By contrast, Republican Chairman Reince Priebus released the GOP’s autopsy report on its 2012 loss in the March after the election. The analysis found the party needed to do more to reach nonwhite and working-class voters, strengthen its messaging on key issues, bolster data and digital efforts, and recruit “more candidates who come from minority communities.”
