First Draft: Has the Democratic Party Learned Nothing From 2024?
The Democratic National Committee’s embarrassing 2024 'autopsy,' finally published, didn’t even mention Gaza. Plus: is a Republican rebellion really brewing over Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund?
On this day in 1856, pro-slavery South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks used his cane to savagely beat abolitionist Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner at his desk on Capitol Hill – a key point on the road to civil war.
Good morning! Andrew here. Democrats have lost to Donald Trump twice, and we all continue to pay for it – the vulnerable more than others. You might hope, at some point, the Democratic Party would carry out a fact-finding mission to tell us all why that happened. Well, then I have some good news, as well as some bad news.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we look under the hood of the Democrats’ failed 2024 autopsy report, Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund threatens his $1 billion ballroom, and the Trump administration drops charges against six ICE protesters in Chicago after a judge alleged prosecutorial misconduct.
Losers Don’t Know Why They Lost
The Democratic National Committee on Thursday finally released its long-awaited autopsy, supposed to explain why the party lost to Donald Trump a second time.
The primary reasons why Democrats lost in 2024 are well-documented and widely understood: There was broad dissatisfaction with the economy and brutal post-pandemic inflation; Joe Biden chose to run again even though his physical decline was obvious, to the point that he was forced to quit the race with just months to go; and Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, adamantly refused to break with her boss over his support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
As I previously reported with Swin in our own version of a 2024 autopsy, Democrats also ran a bad campaign from a technical perspective. They failed to adapt to a rapidly changing media environment, didn’t present a cohesive message, and relied obsessively on data to drive decision-making in ways that didn’t make much sense.
Swin and I had to complete our story on “How the Democrats Blew It” by January 2025. The DNC never finished its actual autopsy report.
The document released on Tuesday, titled “BUILD TO WIN. BUILD TO LAST,” remains shockingly incomplete a year and a half after Trump won, even though these reports are a perfunctory campaign tradition: The losing side conducts countless interviews and extensive research, disclosing it for the sake of transparency, with the point of doing better next time.
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