OPINION:
The Democratic National Committee has a secret. It is a $4 billion secret, wrapped in a mystery, inside an electoral catastrophe, currently locked in a basement filing cabinet guarded by Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin.
After the party’s spectacular face-plant in the 2024 election, Mr. Martin commissioned a comprehensive political autopsy to figure out exactly how the Democrats managed to spend a GDP-size war chest only to lose the White House, the Senate and their dignity.
However, shortly after taking the reins, Mr. Martin decided the autopsy was far too sensitive for public consumption. He buried the report.
When pressed on a recent podcast about why he refuses to release a report that supposedly contains “no smoking gun,” Mr. Martin offered a master class in political doublespeak: “Because we want to keep the focus on the lessons.”
The reality, glaringly obvious to anyone paying attention, is that the Democratic establishment has something massive to hide. You do not bury an after-action report unless the actions described therein look less like a sophisticated political strategy and more like a clown car careening into a ditch.
Whispers from party insiders suggest the report paints a grim picture of campaign leadership. Ashley Etienne, who was a senior adviser to Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, pointed directly at the financial absurdity of the 2024 run: “There’s speculation that decisions were made by campaign leadership to line their pockets rather than advance a strategy to win the election.”
If lining pockets was the strategy, they executed it flawlessly. If the goal was contacting voters, not so much.
Internal documents leaked prior to this great cover-up revealed that despite making more than 300 million phone calls, the campaign achieved a pathetic 3% voter contact rate. A 3% success rate is not a political operation; it is a robocall scam trying to reach you about your car’s extended warranty.
But there is a secondary, much more transparent motive for keeping the autopsy under lock and key: protecting former Vice President Kamala Harris.
Ms. Harris is reportedly mulling a run for the 2028 Democratic nomination. She is touring the country, talking to donors and asking the Rev. Al Sharpton for career advice. With Ms. Harris eyeing a third shot at the presidency (she dropped out in 2019 when she was polling at less than 3%), party bosses are terrified that releasing a detailed forensic analysis of her failed 2024 run will politically harm her.
They want to scrub the slate clean, pretend the $1.5 billion spent in 107 days was just a minor accounting error and push her forward as the untarnished savior of 2028.
The great irony here? Ms. Harris herself does not want the protection. Privately, she has reportedly told donors she wants the DNC to release the report, NBC News reports. She plays as if she were entirely comfortable airing the campaign’s flaws. Perhaps she feels insulated from the blame, or perhaps she realizes that playing hide-and-seek with a devastating electoral loss only makes the party look weaker.
Other prominent Democrats are tired of the secrecy too. Rahm Emanuel, former chief of staff for Mr. Obama, delivered the most blistering critique of the DNC’s kindergarten logic: “We are all adults. If we can’t handle an after-action report on how we spent $4 billion and lost, then we are all third-grade soccer players and get a medal for effort. God help us.”
Sen. Cory Booker, New Jersey Democrat, echoed the demand for transparency, telling NBC’s “Meet the Press” this week: “Yeah, release the autopsy. This is six months before an election. We need to be mobilizing and organizing in this election. Fine, DNC, release it. They should do that. But the most important thing is for people to get out and vote in record numbers.”
The Democratic Party loves to brand itself as the adult in the room, the party of science, data and transparency. Yet when faced with their own damning data, they shoved it in a shredder to protect a potential 2028 candidate and shield their highly paid consultants from public ridicule.
Voters are not stupid. They know an autopsy is sealed only when the cause of death implicates the deceased. It is time for the DNC to stop treating its base like fragile children. Release the autopsy, face the music and figure out how to run a campaign that actually reaches voters.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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