Democratic Party

Democrats Tried To Bury 2024 Election Autopsy

Why is the party so dead set against learning from its own mistakes?

Joe Lancaster | 5.22.2026 10:45 AM

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(Illustration: Bill Clark/Newscom/Midjourney)

Political parties that lose major elections will often create an "autopsy report." Hoping not to make the same mistakes twice, an autopsy lets the party take stock of its failures, learn why its candidate failed to connect with voters, and get a sense of how to do better next time.

But 18 months after Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election to then-former President Donald Trump, the Democratic Party only got around to releasing an autopsy this week. Even then, the party only did so as a result of public pressure, having previously sworn off the prospect of ever publicly releasing the report. Why is the party so dead set against learning from its own mistakes?

The 2024 election "was a punch to the gut, and people were pissed off," Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Ken Martin wrote Thursday in a statement accompanying the report's release. "How, we all asked, could Democrats have lost to Donald Trump again? How did we blow through billions of dollars? And where do we go from here?"

The resulting report paints a bleak picture for Democrats. "We must admit and accept some hard truths about our Party," it cautions. "Since the high point of the 2008 Obama landslide…the Democratic Party has vacillated between stagnation and retrogression. In doing so, we have lost the confidence we once received from everyday Americans—and election results show it. In the sixteen tumultuous years since that historic election, Democrats have lost ground at every level of........

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