🔗 Share this article

This decision by the DNC to suppress the release regarding its own post-election analysis on the 2024 election is remarkable yet not surprising. Opposed to hard truths, the party's leadership apparatus often functions more like a publicity machine rather than a political organization devoted to building local power for winning elections.

A Culture That Avoids Dissent

Reluctant to depart from the party establishment's culture demanding unity, the committee has continued within the influence of the previous administration all through this past year. Making public such a report might have shown that the leadership actually want to encourage honest conversation regarding the strategic failures that paved the way for Donald Trump to win re-election. Instead, the leadership is moving forward under the pretense that there's nothing to glean from the stunning loss of 2024.

Our guiding principle: does this help us win? If the answer is no, it becomes a sideline issue from what truly matters," a justification that has been offered for withholding the document.

Key Issues a Report Might Have Explored

Any valuable post-mortem of substance would tackle head-on certain uncomfortable matters. These include:

• Electoral Disenchantment: Failing to retain among millions of voters who supported the Democratic ticket in 2020 proved pivotal in the narrowly decided 2024 election.
• A Choice to Seek Re-election: The unwavering choice of the incumbent to run again, coupled with an extremely delayed step-aside, is viewed as robbing Democratic voters the chance for open primaries.
• Failing the Working-Class Base: While facing inflation, the campaign allegedly accommodating powerful financial backers and not managing to address the role of big business.
• The Foreign Policy Impact: The failure to shift an approach regarding a major international conflict reportedly led to alienating key demographic groups, especially with youth voters, Arab American communities, Muslim voters.
• Losing Young Voter Backing: Polling data demonstrates a major decrease in Democratic support among the youth electorate.

A Pattern Avoiding Accountability

Choosing secrecy is consistent with a longstanding habit to avoid difficult realities. It recalls an episode where nearly all Democratic officeholder in Congress supported an incumbent's insistence on running for re-election right up until a disastrous televised debate compelled a change.

Meanwhile, large majorities of Democratic voters were consistently telling researchers that they did not want the incumbent to run again.

Campaign Spending Concerns

An honest report could probe issues regarding financial allocations, such as how much money flowed to party strategists as well as advertising contractors over the course of a campaign that managed to spend an enormous war chest during the general election.

A Larger Problem

Fundamentally, the secrecy surrounding this report highlights an allegiance toward party leaders who engineered an unsuccessful presidential campaign. The message for ordinary supporters – including millions of small donors – appears to be that they do not be trusted to see the lessons the leadership claim to have learned based on hundreds of interviews based on conversations with insiders.

A political entity unwilling to critically review its own failings is unlikely to escape the cycle that ended up being so helpful to the rival party.