OPINION:
If you want to understand how the Democratic Party managed to set $2.3 billion on fire during the 2024 election, look no further than its newly released, highly contested and deeply embarrassing campaign “autopsy.”
After months of treating the document like a cursed artifact, Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin finally released the 192-page report. But before you even get to the table of contents, the DNC slaps you with a disclaimer so massive it practically requires its own ZIP code: “[This document] reflects the views of the author, not the DNC. 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.”
Translation: We paid for this, but we have absolutely no idea if any of it is true.
It is easy to see why Mr. Martin hid the autopsy for months. In his own panicked preamble, he confesses, “I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards.”
He admitted that he initially buried the report because it “wasn’t ready for primetime. Not even close.”
Why wasn’t it ready? For starters, the author, veteran strategist Paul Rivera, seemingly forgot to talk to the people who actually ran for office. The analyst, who Mr. Martin said worked for free, wound up not even interviewing former President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz or many of their top aides.
Writing an election autopsy without talking to the candidates is like reviewing a restaurant by just staring at the menu through the window.
But while the methodology is a joke, the details that did leak out paint a hilarious, if tragic, picture of a White House with completely deranged priorities. Consider the curious case of first lady Jill Biden. The report reveals that the Biden White House commissioned extensive polling on “how Dr. [Jill] Biden could support her husband as president.”
They wanted to know her best photographic angles, her best issues and the optimal settings for her appearances.
But what about the vice president? The autopsy notes: “No similar research was conducted to support the vice president — to identify the issues she should talk about, the ways in which she should talk about them, the audiences with which she could perhaps resonate and support the President’s agenda.”
That’s right. The White House heavily strategized the first lady’s messaging but left Ms. Harris entirely to her own devices. When Mr. Biden finally dropped out, pollsters had to frantically scramble because there was zero self-research on their own nominee.
However, the Bidens were not the sole cause for Ms. Harris’s crushing defeat. She lost the race because of her own profound political baggage and inability to run a competent campaign.
First, there was the immigration disaster. The autopsy points out that Ms. Harris was completely anchored by the “border czar” label. The report says: “It [‘Border czar’] was not the official title, but it was the one that the media propagated, and the White House failed to contradict or correct.”
Ms. Harris never figured out how to explain her porous border portfolio to the American public, mostly because it was utterly indefensible.
Then came the cultural blunders. The Trump campaign’s most devastating ad simply played a video of Ms. Harris supporting taxpayer-funded gender transitions for inmates, ending with the devastating tagline: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
How did the Harris campaign counter this wildly effective messaging? It didn’t.
The report notes that pollsters “all recognized the attack as very effective, and felt the campaign was boxed — the ad was a video of her saying what she said, and it was framed as an attack on her economic priorities.”
Furthermore, the autopsy brutally concludes: “If the vice president would not change her position — and she did not — then there was nothing which would have worked as a response.”
Ultimately, Ms. Harris lost because she had nothing affirmative to offer. The party banked entirely on “negative partisanship,” hoping it could simply point at President Trump and scream. The autopsy warned that relying on demonizing Republicans resulted in fielding candidates “incapable of projecting strength, unity, and leadership.”
Ms. Harris spent $2.3 billion to prove she was incapable of projecting strength. Now, the DNC is millions of dollars in debt, its chairman is apologizing for a botched autopsy and the Democratic Party is left holding a report that nobody wants to claim.
It turns out that when you combine a neglected vice president, a first lady with better polling data than the candidate and a campaign completely detached from reality, you don’t get a victory. You get a spectacular, multi-billion-dollar comedy of errors.
• 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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