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The action by the DNC to withhold the publication of its internal post-election analysis on the 2024 election seems shocking however to be expected. Resistant to frank assessments, the Democrats' governing body behaves more like a communications shop rather than an electoral entity devoted to cultivating grassroots capacities capable of prevailing at the polls.

A Culture Resistant to Internal Critique

Reluctant to break with the party establishment's culture demanding unity, the committee has continued under the Biden-Harris shadow all through 2025. Publishing such a report might have shown whether party leaders actually want to encourage public discourse regarding the errors that enabled the former president to return to the White House. Yet, the DNC is proceeding under the pretense that there's nothing to glean from the tragic debacle of 2024.

Our guiding principle: is this good for winning elections? Should the answer be negative, it becomes a sideline issue from the core mission," a rationale that has been offered for withholding the analysis.

Key Issues an Autopsy Would Have Addressed

Any valuable post-mortem with any value would not dodge a series of difficult topics. Among them are:

• Electoral Disenchantment: The loss among millions of voters who supported the party's candidate in 2020 was decisive during the tight recent race.
• The Insistence to Run: The unwavering insistence by the incumbent to stay in the race, and an extremely delayed exit, has been criticized as denying the party's base the chance for open primaries.
• Abandoning Core Democratic Voters: Amid economic anxiety, the campaign is criticized for ceding to powerful financial backers and not managing to address the impact of profit-seeking.
• The Gaza Effect: An unwillingness to shift a policy position on the situation in Gaza reportedly led to losing key demographic groups, especially among youth voters, Arab American communities, and Muslim Americans.
• A Decline in Young Voter Allegiance: Research shows a significant drop-off in votes for the candidate from young voters.

A Record Avoiding Accountability

The decision to withhold aligns with a longstanding habit to avoid difficult realities. It echoes a dynamic where nearly all Democratic officeholder in Congress supported an incumbent's insistence on running for re-election right up until a poor campaign event led to a change.

Concurrently, large majorities of Democratic voters had been repeatedly informing pollsters that they did not want that candidate to be the nominee.

Campaign Spending Questions

An honest report might also investigate matters about campaign spending, such as the amounts flowed to party strategists and advertising contractors over the course of an electoral effort which expended a staggering war chest in a short period.

The Underlying Implication

Ultimately, the suppression surrounding this report highlights a deference to the existing power structure responsible for a losing national race. The implication to rank-and-file members – which includes countless loyal volunteers – is that they cannot be trusted to know the lessons the leadership claim to have learned based on hundreds of interviews drawing from feedback from all states.

A political entity unwilling to publicly examine where it went wrong will struggle to break free from the pattern that proved so advantageous to the winning candidate.