As the controversy over the Democratic National Committee’s buried autopsy report continues to rage, more Democrats from the party’s establishment wing are offering their two cents. The latest contribution is a column in The Bulwark, written by Rob Flaherty, the former deputy manager of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.

Flaherty’s piece “Here’s What I Told the DNC Autopsy” discusses his conversations with DNC operatives tasked with writing the still-unreleased report. He then continues into his own analysis of what went wrong with Harris’ 2024 campaign for president.

To his credit, Flaherty is willing to do what very few mainstream Democrats have done since Harris' 2024 loss: take a long, and public, look at the campaign’s missteps. But, as with so many other analyses from the establishment wing of the party, he believes that tweaks to the campaign’s messaging strategy and media apparatus could have won the race.

Progressives operating inside the party, meanwhile, have long argued that no amount of messaging acumen could have plastered over the gaping hole in Harris’ campaign: a total dearth of popular policies. (At RootsAction, where I’m the political director, we’ve written our own post-2024 autopsy that focuses exactly on this issue, and where Harris’ campaign fell out of step with popular sentiment.)

If Democrats want to present themselves as a convincing alternative to the post-MAGA Republican Party, they’re going to have to articulate what their political differences are.

Flaherty, by his account, was principally responsible for the digital dimensions of the campaign (social media, content creators, etc.) and so his analysis proceeds through that lens. He devotes a lot of time to worrying over message alignment—alignment between earned and paid media, between the campaign and independent expenditures, and so on. What's missing in that analysis, though, is what that message was.

At the tail end of Joe Biden’s presidency, the nation was embroiled in a number of crises. The recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic had been uneven, with many at the bottom of the labor ladder still struggling to find steady work and keep up with runaway inflation. Americans at all income levels, in fact, were reeling from spiking costs in basic consumer goods. And, while Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Gaza unfolded in full view of anyone with a social media account, Biden and his administration continued their unyielding support for Israel. On top of it all, the unpopular Biden broke his promise to be a “bridge” president, ignored the polls showing that most Democrats wanted a different candidate, and unwisely opted to run for a second term—dropping out only after a disastrous debate and massive pressure from inside the party.

His vice president was then thrust into the unenviable position of having just 107 days (as she often reminds us) to mount a presidential campaign that could defeat Donald Trump.This entailed massive logistical challenges, yes—but it also meant reckoning with Biden’s tenure as president. Would Harris continue to argue, as the Biden administration had, that Bidenomics had been a boon for the working class? Would she continue to support Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he laid waste to the Gaza Strip? These questions demanded answers. Harris and her campaign though, seemed loath to provide them.

Flaherty appears to understand that this was a major problem for Harris. He bemoans the campaign's vacillation on its core message, contrasting that with Trump's comms discipline: "Trump's message was much clearer: The economy feels bad and Harris says it's good. Those vibes were tough to argue with."

He is heavily focused on vibes: "The moment the [BidenHQ] account switched from Biden to Harris, the campaign channeled a vibe shift that showed up in polls. We needed to consolidate the base, make the campaign cooler, and have a campaign voice that could be more flexible and nimble than the candidate’s own."

Putting aside how a “vibe shift” appears in polls, it’s clear from the outset that Flaherty’s level of analysis is all branding, no substance. He gets into the weeds of individual social media accounts and their relative impacts with critical constituencies. Was the KamalaHQ online presence too "girls and gays" coded? Did the account turn off men? For someone who devotes a footnote to scolding the “DC crowd” for believing Biden to be broadly unpopular, Flaherty sure seems to have drunk the Beltway insider Kool-Aid when it comes to assessing the impact of an individual social media account on an election in which more than 152 million Americans cast a vote.

Vibes should not be the basis for a campaign. Yes, a sour mood in the electorate requires a particular approach, but it doesn't mean that Democrats can entirely punt on the difficult work of crafting a resonant political message. Coordination and message discipline between social........

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