By Rich Lowry
Friday, May 22, 2026
The Democrats couldn’t complete their term paper, but
handed it in anyway because too many people were wondering what had become of
it.
Under pressure, the DNC finally released its autopsy of
the 2024 election, after rampant speculation about what it contained and why it
hadn’t yet been made public. Did it include references to Gaza or didn’t it?
Why or why not? What explosive revelations were being kept from us?
It turns out that the autopsy is a thoroughly
unimpressive, unfinished document that, in the sheer incompetence of its
drafting and handling, says more about the low state of the current Democratic
Party than any of its analysis does.
The DNC chairman, Ken Martin, maintains that he delayed
so long because he didn’t want to create a distraction by releasing a poorly
done report, which sounds like a typical Washington excuse for hiding
something.
Except it wasn’t. Once everyone saw the report, they
realized Martin was right about the embarrassingly poor handiwork of his own
outfit.
At the start, the autopsy contains a disclaimer that “the
DNC was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting
data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot
independently verify the claims presented.”
Then, throughout the document, there are hostile
annotations casting doubt on its claims.
And the report doesn’t have a conclusion.
The Democrats would have been better off going with
ChatGPT.
That said, the report acknowledges that Democrats are out
of touch and too dependent on the Republicans’ making poor candidate choices
(something the GOP may be about to do again in its Texas Senate primary with
the Trump-endorsed, scandal-plagued attorney general, Ken Paxton).
It notes how Trump’s they/them ad hitting Kamala Harris
on trans issues was devastating and unanswerable.
It recognizes that Harris didn’t do enough to separate
from Biden and make an affirmative case for herself rather than relying on
voters’ supposedly considering Trump unacceptable.
On the other hand, it fails to grapple with the issues of
inflation and immigration (except to complain about Harris being given a role
with some responsibility over the border). These were the two biggest
substantive issues in the election, while the autopsy also whiffs on Biden’s
age and his catastrophic poor judgment in trying to run for reelection.
(It also doesn’t mention Gaza, bitterly disappointing the
anti-Israel left.)
Yet, our expectations for such documents shouldn’t be
very high. What was the report going to say? That Democrats disgraced
themselves by pretending that Biden was fit for a second term, and only shifted
course when he got exposed in the first debate, and they then had no
alternative but to turn to a charmless nonentity as a last-minute substitute?
The history of party retrospectives like this isn’t good.
Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 by taking the recommendations of the
GOP autopsy after its 2012 election defeat and often doing the opposite in
substance and tone.
Democrats may be rudderless and increasingly extreme, but
that doesn’t mean they won’t have a good Election Night this coming November.
Usually, a party that has just lost the White House rises or falls in the
midterms based on the incumbent president’s job-approval rating, rather than
its own political creativity or inherent appeal.
As for retaking the White House, that typically depends
on nominating someone who is charismatic and fresh, who has an unexpected
approach to politics, and who develops a new coalition — think Barack Obama in
2008 or Donald Trump in 2016.
None of this comes about by having a political strategist
talk to a bunch of people about the immediate past election and write a long
report about it. Needless to say, Democrats should be grateful that the stakes
of their autopsy are so low — otherwise, they would have had to endeavor to
actually finish it, and grapple with truths about the 2024 election
conveniently passed over in the just-released document.
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