Democrats' 2024 autopsy is described as avoiding the likeliest cause of death

Boston Globe

3 hours ago

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Party officials described the draft document as focusing on the 2024 election as a whole, but not on the presidential campaign — which is something like eating at a steakhouse and then reviewing the salad.
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Producing a tough-minded public review of a national electoral defeat would be a politically delicate exercise under any circumstance, given the need to find fault with the work and judgment of important party leaders and strategists. It is particularly fraught for the new DNC chair, Ken Martin, who promised a post-election review from his first day on the job but whose first few months in the role have been plagued by infighting and financial strains.
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'We are not interested in second-guessing campaign tactics or decisions of campaign operatives,' said Jane Kleeb, the Nebraska Democratic chair, who heads the association of Democratic state chairs and is a close ally of Martin. 'We are interested in what voters turned out for Republicans and Democrats, and how we can fix this moving forward.'
Locked out of power at the federal level, Democrats are struggling to show that they have taken to heart the message that voters sent in November and are well suited to regain power in future elections.
The review, which was begun in March and is being led by Paul Rivera, a veteran Democratic operative, is not yet complete and the report is not fully drafted. Rivera nonetheless has begun briefing people on what the report has found so far, and those briefings suggest that the Democratic autopsy will avoid addressing some of the likeliest or leading causes of death.
Among those is whether Biden should have run for reelection. Some of Harris' top aides have faulted him for dropping out so late that she had just 107 days to campaign as the presidential nominee. But Biden's son Hunter said on a podcast this past week that Democrats lost 'because we did not remain loyal' to his father.
Top Democrats said they did not intend for the report to address strategic decisions made by leaders of the Biden and Harris campaigns. Indeed, in a sign of the report's narrow scope, more than half a dozen people who were senior officials on the campaigns say they have not yet been interviewed.
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DNC officials cautioned that interviews were still taking place and the report's conclusions might change before it is released this fall. 'We're glad to see there's so much interest in an after-action report on how Democrats can win again,' Rivera said. 'But folks might be better off holding their applause, or their criticism, until we have had a chance to complete our work and people can actually read it.'
People briefed on the report's progress said they had been told it would focus more on outside groups and super political action committees that spent hundreds of millions of dollars aiding the Biden and Harris campaigns through advertising, voter registration drives and turnout efforts.
Kleeb said she expected the report to accelerate the party's diversion of resources from advertising to organizing.
'The days of us spending millions and millions of dollars on traditional TV ads are over,' she said. 'And I do think that this report will put an exclamation point on that.'
In particular, the people briefed on it said, the after-action review is expected to place blame with Future Forward, the party's main super PAC, which spent $560 million to support Biden and then Harris. They said the report would argue that Future Forward spent far too much propping up Harris and not nearly enough attacking Trump.
It is expected to argue that Future Forward's advertising approach was too focused on television programs to be effective. And it will review the lack of coordination between the super PAC's advertising and the Harris campaign's, which were often not in sync.
A Future Forward document that was distributed to donors and reviewed by The New York Times said about half of the super PAC's advertising was delivered on digital platforms, which includes television-like streaming services. The group said it spent more than $51 million just on YouTube ads.
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A Future Forward aide, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the group's operations, said just 13% of its advertising was positive about Harris, with the rest attacking Trump.
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The critiques of Future Forward will not be new to Democrats who read real-time coverage of the campaign last year, along with more recent book-length and magazine accounts of the Biden and Harris campaigns.
A DNC official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that Future Forward had been reflective and candid in its conversations with the review's authors, denied that Future Forward would be blamed for the loss and insisted that any criticisms of the group would also apply to the broader Democratic world.
Rivera has conducted more than 200 interviews with officials from all 50 states, an aide said.
'The DNC's post-election review is not a finger-pointing exercise; it's about bringing together Democrats across the ecosystem to adopt an actionable playbook to win, not just for 2026 and 2028, but to dominate for cycles to come,' said Rosemary Boeglin, a spokesperson for the committee. 'Democrats are clear-eyed about the challenges facing the party — many of which are rooted well before the 2024 cycle — and it requires all of us to make structural changes in how we run campaigns.'
Rivera's team has included aides to Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Rep. Raul Ruiz of California. Walz, the party's 2024 nominee for vice president, has spent time since November on an atonement tour publicly explaining what he thought went wrong in the campaign, including what he saw as his own missteps.
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The DNC's election review, which will extend to contests for Congress and state offices, is not the only one underway. Jen O'Malley Dillon, who oversaw the Biden and Harris campaigns, is involved in a separate monthslong project being led by Melissa Williams, a former top official at Emily's List who oversaw the group's independent political spending.
That project is seeking to piece together as comprehensively as possible the technical and tactical decisions made both by the campaign and leading outside groups, and to document the results from those spending decisions, according to three people with knowledge of the research. The results are not expected to be made public but rather to be circulated privately among Democratic strategists to provide a fuller record and greater understanding of what happened, the people said.
A third look back is being led by the Strategic Victory Fund, a network of liberal donors and organizations.
Scott Anderson, the group's president, said it had so far interviewed more than 100 people, including top officials from the Biden and Harris campaign and the DNC. Anderson said he did not intend to make its report public but would instead use it to inform Democratic donors and decision makers.
'So many people in my world, after 2016, jumped into a resistance mode that there wasn't a real thoughtful moment to talk for a minute with all the key people about what we're doing right and wrong about every aspect of politics and culture,' Anderson said. 'We really need to take a step back in a way that I don't feel was done after 2016, and have hard conversations.'
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The DNC's report is expected to be far different from the so-called autopsy that Republicans produced after the 2012 election of Barack Obama. In March 2013, the Republican National Committee released a 100-page 'Growth and Opportunity Project' report that declared the GOP was in an 'ideological cul-de-sac' and called for moderation on immigration along with a number of other changes.
While Republican leaders did adopt many of its recommendations in time for the 2016 election, Trump's campaign ran counter to many of the changes the RNC had proposed, and he has since remade the Republican Party in his image.
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