Nothin’ To See Here

After the 2024 debacle, the Democratic National Committee commissioned a post-mortem study. DNC Chair Ken Martin has just announced that we should all just forget about it. Everything’s fine. Let’s move on.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, he’s got a point. Democrats have been winning elections or coming close in places where they shouldn’t throughout 2025 and there’s every reason my party should do very well in 2026. Why dredge up old wounds and distract from that?

Also, there’s what Martin didn’t say, which is that any report written by Beltway insiders will get it wrong. Coastal elites do this from time to time. They send Ivy League grads into deepest, darkest Midwest to divine how these people think, what language they use, how they survive by producing only food and useful, physical objects. Then they get together at a Washington hotel and decide what we need over lunch.

Finally, the report was likely to miss the point entirely if it just focussed on specific mistakes made by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. All that is obvious. Biden should have never run for a second term. He should never have selected Harris to be his running mate in 2020. Harris should have never said that prisoners should get sex change operations at taxpayer expense. And blowing $100 million a week, which is what they spent, on the campaign couldn’t make up for all of that. What else do you need to know?

But now here’s the argument for releasing it.

First off, do you really think it won’t get leaked? Of course it will and then not only will the dirty laundry get aired, but the Republicans will have a field day coming up with all kinds of conspiracy theories (who is better at coming up with conspiracy theories?) about why Martin tried to sweep it under the rug.

And second, the Democrats really do need to do some soul searching. They’re not winning elections now because anybody is voting for them. They’re winning because Democrats are showing up en masse to vote against Trump and swing voters have swung back to them because prices are too high. There is no consistent, understandable, positive Democratic Party agenda that anybody is choosing. They’re winning because they’re not Trump.

And be careful what you wish for. Once Trump is gone, then what do they have? Voters will focus back on everything they hate about Democrats. The party’s lowest approval rating in history hasn’t improved. Once voters remember what it is about the Democrats that they rejected in 2024 and once Trump is off the scene they may well return to the other guys.

There is a deep problem within my party and it’s not about the superficial stuff — voter targeting, use of social media platforms or even specific strategic choices made by candidates. The fundamental problem is that we are defined by our hard-left activists and their eccentric causes, both of which are deeply unpopular.

This will be the last cycle in which Donald Trump will define American politics. For the last decade you had to be for or against him and that mattered more than anything else. Moreover, outside of the elections when he was actually on the ballot himself, Trump functioned as the best get-out-the-vote strategy the Democrats have ever had.

With Trump no longer around to be against, what are the Democrats for? That’s the question that any study needs to answer.