The Democratic Party is examining how it lost the 2024 election, but it apparently does not intend to spend much time looking at their actual presidential campaigns. The party is planning to avoid reviewing decisions like whether President Joe Biden should have run for reelection, whether he should have dropped out of the race sooner, or whether Vice President Kamala Harris was the right candidate, The New York Times reported Saturday.
Following a dramatic loss across the board to Republicans and Donald Trump, who is leading an increasingly authoritarian presidency, Democrats are choosing not to reckon with uncomfortable questions about their failures.
The Democratic National Committee’s “after-action review,” which began in March, is also not expected to look at strategic or messaging decisions by the Harris campaign, such as not responding to a team Trump attack ad that said Harris was for “they/them” and Trump was “for you,” or the campaign’s decision to paint the election as a choice between democracy and fascism.
“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,” Reid Epstein and Shane Goldmacher write for the Times.
The autopsy will evidently focus more on outside spending from organizations and super PACs that supported the Democrats’ presidential bid. Six people with inside knowledge described the postmortem to the Times.
“We are not interested in second-guessing campaign tactics or decisions of campaign operatives,” Jane Kleeb, Nebraska Democratic chairwoman, told the Times. “We are interested in what voters turned out for Republicans and Democrats, and how we can fix this moving forward.”
Ken Martin, the new DNC chairman, has been promising an election postmortem since he began the role in February. So far, his time has been marked by petty infighting and chaos — most notably over whether David Hogg, the mass shooting survivor and gun control activist, should be allowed to serve as a DNC vice chair while leading a Super PAC pledging to primary ineffective Democrats. (Hogg left the DNC last month.)
Democratic strategist Paul Rivera has been leading the review, which is not done yet. However, Rivera has started telling people their findings thus far.
“We’re glad to see there’s so much interest in an after-action report on how Democrats can win again,” Rivera told the Times. “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.”
Kleeb said she thinks the report will shift the party’s focus 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.”
The report will likely argue that the Democrats’ main super PAC, Future Forward, did not spend enough time attacking Trump and spent too much time speaking positively about Harris. The group spent $560 million supporting the Biden-Harris campaign. A Future Forward aide, though, told the Times that 13 percent of its ads were about Harris, and the rest were attacking Trump.
But as the Times previously reported, the data-driven team at Future Forward argued throughout the 2024 campaign that negative ads weren’t useful against Trump, based on their internal message testing. Their team instead asserted that ads contrasting Trump and Harris were more valuable.
As Rolling Stone reported earlier this year, Future Forward’s ads did not place a premium on using clips of Trump speaking — and the group argued, based on its testing, that ads featuring clips of Trump speaking were less effective than ads relying on narration.
The ads tended to include laundry lists of information, and were often hard to follow.
It’s probably a smart idea for Democrats to review those spending decisions. But skipping over the main reasons they lost — namely, Biden’s decision to run for president in 2024, which put them in a major bind when he was forced to drop out — seems like just another huge mistake that the party isn’t ready to acknowledge.
