‘Granular detail doesn’t help us’: DNC defends 2024 autopsy report secrecy
Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin isn’t budging on his decision to keep the party’s internal report dissecting 2024 election losses under wraps — despite previously committing to releasing it.
He first announced in December he wouldn’t be publicizing the party’s findings and doubled down on the decision in an interview with the Miami Herald this week. He gave one of the most extensive on-the-record explanations of his takeaways from a document few eyes have seen.
“Getting into the granular detail doesn’t help us. What helps us is actually the lesson itself so that we can win the next election and not have to relitigate the last one,” Martin said while in Miami Sunday. He called the report “quite voluminous.”
Democratic electeds and consultants have criticized Martin’s decision to withhold the specifics.
“Why does the party only trust people with the truth who are part of their insular club?” former Barack Obama speechwriter and Pod Save America co-host Jon Favreau said on social media last month.
“If there’s good analysis we should see it,” Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz wrote on social media after the announcement. “That’s what they said they were going to do.”
Martin defended his decision as an effort to keep the party forward-looking.
“The most important piece is actually keeping people’s focus on learning what we need to learn to win the upcoming election, right? And not relitigating the last election. None of us have a time machine. We can’t go back and change the past,” Martin said.
The party was plagued by infighting in the wake of Donald Trump’s decisive win, including last summer when gun control activist, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School alumnus and former DNC Vice Chairman David Hogg vowed to help fund challengers against safe Democratic incumbents.
But they’ve since been riding a recent wave of momentum and have been eager to move on from 2024’s losses. The party took out a $15 million loan last fall, according to finance reports, to boost Democrats who were successful in their elections in New Jersey and Virginia.
The party has also been celebrating smaller wins like Mayor Eileen Higgins’ victory in the Miami mayoral race in December and a big swing toward Democrats in a special election in Texas Saturday — which even Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called a warning sign to Republicans.
When asked what he learned from the report, as one of the few people who has actually read it, Martin pointed to the party’s failure to reach young voters.
“We took them for granted. There was an assumption for many years that young voters support Democrats, that they are more traditionally aligned with progressive causes and values and as a result would support Democratic candidates,” he said. “The reality is much more stark in that they are definitely a swing voting block.”
This was also a point the party also emphasized internally to its members after the report was completed, as CBS reported.
“We can’t treat young voters as a guarantee. We have to actually treat them as swing voters meaning we have to persuade them,” he said. “We have to be having conversations early with them and we can’t take their vote for granted.”
Another major takeaway, Martin said, was the party’s failure to compete effectively online. “It’s not just where we spent money or how we spent money — it is the fact that we weren’t in the spaces where voters were at. That was one of the most alarming things, for sure.”
The report gave him new insight “about the new media landscape and just how sophisticated the operation was on the other side,” Martin said. “How they actually had a micro and nano influencer strategy that really was unrivaled.”
Critics within the party, however, say the decision not to let the public see the granular details from the months-long analysis is preventing the kind of open dialogue the party needs to reckon with its failures in 2024.
Democratic political consultant Dan Pfeiffer said in December, “This is a very bad decision that reeks of the caution and complacency that brought us to this moment.”
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