The Democrats are determined not to learn from their failure |
By Branko Marcetic Usually, a report might become major news because of some kind of damning or inconvenient revelation that’s contained inside it. But the Democratic Party is currently in such disarray, it’s managed to turn even the act of simply releasing a report to the public into an embarrassing debacle. The Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) autopsy report on what went wrong in 2024 was finally released last week, and it has quickly, and somewhat hilariously, plunged the party into an internal crisis, with DNC chair Ken Martin now facing calls to resign. I say “hilariously” because the reason for this has very little to do with what’s actually in the report and is entirely due to Martin’s extremely public bungling of the messaging around it. To be clear, there’s plenty embarrassing about the report’s content too. But it’s revealing and emblematic of a Democratic Party that has been utterly in shambles the past year that the production and release of the report has become somehow a bigger controversy than what’s in it. Then there’s the Gaza issue. Interest in the report soared the past few months thanks to leaks that suggested the party’s role in assisting Israel’s yearslong genocide, and how that contributed to its 2024 defeat, was part of the final copy. Instead neither Gaza nor anything to do with Israel or foreign policy in general appears. Even more puzzling, the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project insists they were told “clearly and unambiguously” that the autopsy found that Gaza was a “net-negative” for the party in 2024. And only a week before the report’s release, the Harris campaign’s digital director, who had spoken to the report’s authors, had described exactly how this had been the case. | 
