Politics

Democrats Reportedly Fear Releasing Autopsy Of Party’s Botched 2024 Elections

Ken Martin in 2023 (立法院 / Wikimedia Commons)

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) announced Thursday that it is nixing plans to publicly release an autopsy of the party’s brutal losses in the 2024 election cycle, according to news coverage.

The DNC had commissioned a review of what went wrong for the Democratic Party during the 2024 election cycle, which was based on hundreds of interviews with party operatives in all 50 U.S. states, Politico reported on Thursday. Some Democrats expressed concerns about publicly releasing the findings of the review, Politico reported, citing an anonymous DNC official familiar with the matter.

A DNC spokesperson did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

“We completed a comprehensive review of what happened in 2024 and are already putting our learnings into motion,” DNC Chairman Ken Martin said in a statement provided to The Washington Post on Thursday. “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 continued.

The unreleased DNC report outlined the party’s widely reported drop in support among young voters in 2024, according to Politico. While mentions of former President Joe Biden’s age were absent from the DNC’s review, and also did not come up in other briefings on the report’s early findings, Politico reported.

Biden announced he was ending his presidential reelection bid on July 21, 2024, after his campaign faced calls from other Democrats for him to drop out of the race following a disastrous debate performance weeks earlier. Former Vice President Kamala Harris officially secured the Democratic presidential nomination in early August 2024.

Moreover, many Democrats who were cited in the DNC’s report pointed to the eleventh hour presidential candidate switch from Biden to Harris as a key factor behind the party’s brutal 2024 election losses, Politico reported.

“A handful of wins is not the same as the rehabilitation of the Democratic brand, which is required to build real governing majorities and a national coalition,” Alyssa Cass, a Democratic operative based in New York, told the Washington Post on Thursday. “Achieving that requires real soul-searching and new ideas, and it would be nice for candidates and campaigns to know they had a partner in that hard work, instead of an institutional structure buried in the sand.”

In the November 2024 election, President Donald Trump won 49.8% of the popular vote, compared to Harris’ 48.3%, per CNN.

Just 18% of U.S. voters now approve of Democrats in Congress’ job performance, while 73% disapprove, according to a Quinnipiac University survey released on Wednesday. This marked a new record low job approval rating for the Democratic Party, the Quinnipiac University poll shows.

Despite this, recent reports have indicated that some Democrats are predicting a “blue wave” may occur in the 2026 midterms. However, an Emerson College poll released Thursday morning shows the party is leading Republicans in the generic congressional ballot by just two percentage points.

The DNC has also reportedly been dealing with sluggish donations this year. Martin notably admitted during an interviewwith Politico published in October that there is “not a day that I don’t go home wanting to pull my hair out” in his current gig.

Additionally, Martin suggested in a Feb. 18 memo that U.S. voters now view Democrats as elitist and see the GOP as the working class party.

“When I talk about the state of the Democratic Party, I often speak about the impact of perceptions – what voters see, feel, and sense,” Martin wrote in the memo. “I believe the canary in the coal mine for what happened on November 5 was the recent showing that, for the first time in modern history, Americans now see the Republicans as the party of the working class and Democrats as the party of the elites.”

Still, Martin claimed in a Wednesday post to X that Trump is “going to lose the [2026] midterms.”