The DNC Refuses to Learn from 2024

By Noah Rothman

Friday, December 19, 2025

 

It’s not as though the post-mortem analysis Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin commissioned earlier this year was going to produce some shocking revelation about how Joe Biden and Kamala Harris lost the White House in 2024. The story’s major plot points are hardly a state secret.

 

Decrepit and too proud to admit as much, Joe Biden clung to the presidency well beyond his sell-by date. He bowed out of the race only after a fractious panic among his fellow Democrats forced him out, but too late to hold a legitimate nominating contest. The nod went by default to Harris, an uncommonly unimpressive politician her own administration had spent the previous three years sabotaging. The party ran on a platform of continuity after Biden presided over disasters abroad and historic inflation at home, asking voters to ratify their own misfortune. They declined.

 

The story’s details are surely of interest. There is no shortage of journalistic products that have already explored and exposed them. But in the end, Martin could not allow his committee to acknowledge what everyone already knew.

 

This week, the DNC chairman announced his intention to bury the autopsy he had commissioned. After three months and over 300 interviews with party officials in all 50 states, the report is destined for the trash bin. Why? Because an account of how the Democratic Party stumbled from one catastrophe into another, culminating in a humiliating national loss, might make the party look bad. And, really, who could have foreseen that?

 

“Here’s our North Star: Does this help us win?” Martin said in a statement that recast his own cowardice as a rare sort of pluck. “If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.”

 

But helping the party course-correct is precisely why the report was commissioned in the first place. Indeed, Martin advocated an aggressive “post-election review” that drilled down on the party’s tactical and strategic missteps in his run for his current role. Democratic officials were briefed on the DNC report’s preliminary contents as early as October. Indeed, the DNC moved more slowly than some Democratic consultants who published their own after-action reviews and recommendations (the Democratic Committee’s report was expected to go particularly hard on the Democratic “consultant class” and the activists who populate it). Beyond the intra-party intrigue and status games, the DNC report might have had some practical application if it provided party members with a step-by-step guide to avoid repeating Harris’s mistakes.

 

But that’s all ancient history now. According to the party insiders who spoke with the New York Times, “Looking back so publicly and painfully at the past would prove counterproductive for the party as it tries next year to take back power in Congress.” In 2025, Democratic candidates overperformed in off-year, municipal, and special elections. Democratic voters are enthusiastic, and a critical look back would only invite recrimination. And, honestly, critical introspection is no fun at all. “Haven’t we rehashed 2024 enough?” one Democratic communications consultant told Times reporters. “We just won a bunch of elections this year,” he said. “There is also a lot of good to be learned from there.”

 

Outside the Democratic Party’s status-conscious establishmentarians, Martin’s retreat has been met with incandescent outrage. Some embittered Democrats accused the party of putting its thumb on the scale for Harris in 2028. Others claim the party is merely shielding its members from scrutiny — a sign that the “caution and complacency that brought us to this moment,” as onetime Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer put it, persists.

 

Pfeiffer has a point. Perhaps Democratic candidates enjoyed outsize success at the polls this year because they are all stellar campaigners, and America has taken a hard left turn over the last eleven months. Or maybe the party is benefiting by default, relying on the president’s deteriorating political brand to do the work of persuasion for them. That is what Democrats did in 2024. That did contribute to a level of self-satisfaction among party elites that verged on delusion.

 

Rank-and-file Democrats should be nervous. Their national committee chairman seems to have been persuaded that the only thing worse than losing the White House would be assigning blame for that failure to specific individuals and institutions and the choices they made along the way. But it’s Martin who should be scared. A party with an approval rating of just 18 percent that is so short on cash it had to take out a $15 million loan two months ago is not a healthy enterprise.

 

Acknowledging the Democratic Party’s present precarity and recent missteps would give all the wrong people the satisfaction of knowing that Democrats recognize our shared reality. It is far better for party officials to scrounge around for their lost car keys where there is streetlight. After all, Donald Trump is busy doing all the party’s heavy lifting for them. Sure, Democratic candidates and the party’s messaging have their flaws, but why shift the focus from Trump? He’s the best weapon in the Democratic Party’s arsenal. All Democrats need to do is mollify their uncompromising and unrepresentative base voters. The president and his movement will do the rest. Not like 2024 at all.