When Ken Martin was elected chair of the Democratic National Committee in February, he promised a report investigating what went wrong for his party in 2024. “The reality is what we need to do right now is really start to get a handle around what happened last election cycle,” he told reporters. “We know that we lost ground with Latino voters, we know we lost ground with women and younger voters and of course working-class voters. We don’t know the how and why yet.”
Ten months later, Martin has made a remarkable reversal. He will not release the long-awaited autopsy, he announced on Thursday, even though it’s done. Despite months of work — including hundreds of interviews with party operatives in all 50 states — and a pledge to use the report to drive the party forward, Martin appears to have decided that publishing it would be a “distraction.”
That the DNC is mothballing whatever audit it could bring itself to conduct underscores that the party remains petrified of its own reflection.
“In our conversations with stakeholders from across the Democratic ecosystem, we are aligned on what’s important, and that’s learning from the past and winning the future. Here’s our North Star: does this help us win? If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission,” Martin said in a statement explaining his decision.
Strangely, Martin doesn’t seem to perceive the conflict in deeming “learning from the past” important and then torpedoing his party’s attempt to do so.
Shelving the document isn’t exactly a disaster: Leaks to the press as the DNC autopsy was being assembled suggested that the report would be a comically superficial analysis, mostly thanks to the committee’s narrow scope of investigation. But combine the less-than-rigorous postmortem and the about-face on releasing it, and Democrats should be embarrassed.
To understand how allergic the party remains to any serious introspection, consider that in July, The New York Times, citing people briefed on the process of the DNC audit, reported that it was “expected to avoid the questions of whether former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. should have run for re-election in the first place, whether he should have exited the race earlier than he did and whether former Vice President Kamala Harris was the right choice to replace him.” The audit also wasn’t expected to revisit important Harris campaign decisions, the Times reported, including “framing the election as a choice between democracy and fascism, and refraining from hitting back after an ad by Donald J. Trump memorably attacked Ms. Harris on transgender rights.”
Apparently the DNC was terrified from the outset of any serious reckoning with the many things it got wrong last year. (The Times’ July article had this great zinger: “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.”) It could, of course, be divisive to reconsider the biggest decisions defining the election. But that is precisely the kind of thing a party has to endure when it has record-low approval from its own voters and voters have handed the keys to the republic over to a narcissistic and self-enriching demagogue for a second time.
We don’t know what the unpublished report ended up concluding, but the Times reported Thursday that the “prescriptions were more tactical than strategic,” citing DNC officials’ summary of the findings. Among other things, the audit reportedly questioned the efficacy of peer-to-peer text messaging in influencing voters, as well as door-knocking quotas. This is an entirely different universe of self-scrutiny than the reflections suggested by those of us who have long argued that the party had no real policy vision or that Biden’s age was a threat to his candidacy. To be sure, a party autopsy wouldn’t preclude future mistakes. And the reality is that a strong Democratic candidate could disregard its lessons and still win, as President Donald Trump did in 2016. Still, the fact that the DNC is mothballing whatever audit it could bring itself to conduct underscores that the party remains petrified of its own reflection. The document might have been weak sauce, but releasing it would have at least created a record of how the party viewed itself and laid out the parameters of how the establishment was and wasn’t willing to change to meet the challenges of our era. It would have become a potential source of accountability — even if primarily through criticism from progressives in and outside the party about how the self-assessment didn’t go far enough. The Democratic establishment, trying to save face, is sweeping some hard truths under the rug. Doing so all but ensures that it won’t evolve into a party worthy of the country’s trust.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. 
