The Billion-Dollar Blindfold: The DNC’s 2024 Autopsy is an Insult to Voters

Brent Molnar: Voice of Reason

May 21, 2026

When a political party spends billions of dollars to fight a must-win election that places the country on the doorstep of fascism (and loses decisively) the absolute bare minimum owed to its voters is a brutally honest reckoning. Instead, the Democratic National Committee has delivered a lesson in institutional cowardice.

After months of intense internal pressure and public stalling, the DNC has finally released its long-awaited 2024 election autopsy. The resulting 192-page document is not an honest analysis of what went wrong. It is an exercise in breathtaking incompetence that actively ignores the most explosive issues of the campaign.

It is beyond indefensible. It is beyond reprehensible. And astoundingly, the leadership of the party agrees. In an unprecedented move that perfectly encapsulates the dysfunction of the current Democratic apparatus, DNC Chair Ken Martin released the report while simultaneously throwing it under the bus.

Martin publicly stated, “I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards.” He admitted to shelving it back in December because it was riddled with errors, lacked sourcing, and was “not ready for prime-time.” Every single page of the document now carries a glaring disclaimer stating that it reflects only the views of its author (who is no longer with the committee) and that the DNC cannot even verify its own underlying data.

To spend billions of donor dollars on an existential campaign, suffer a massive, consequential defeat, and then fail to produce a functional, fact-checked post-mortem is institutional malpractice. But the true scandal isn’t the typos. It is what the report intentionally leaves out.

An autopsy is supposed to determine the cause of death. But the DNC’s report completely ignores the massive, bleeding wounds that fractured the Democratic coalition in 2024. By refusing to grapple with reality, the party establishment has revealed its outright refusal to learn from its mistakes:

The Ghost of Gaza: Despite months of nationwide protests, the uncommitted voter movement, and widespread polling showing that the administration’s unconditional support for Israel’s war in Gaza severely depressed turnout among young voters, Arab-Americans, and progressives, the report does not mention Gaza or Palestine a single time.

The Biden Delusion: The report attempts to critique the campaign’s mechanics while entirely ignoring the elephant in the room: President Joe Biden’s stubborn refusal to drop out of the race until the eleventh hour. The party apparatus spent over a year gaslighting the public about his viability, only to have the dam break late in the summer, yet this historical failure of leadership is entirely sidestepped.

The Primary Bypass: The document conveniently glosses over the catastrophic decision to coronate Kamala Harris as the nominee without a single primary vote being cast. By avoiding the chaotic, undemocratic process that installed her at the top of the ticket, the DNC sidesteps any accountability for actively shutting down voter choice.

Instead of taking responsibility for a disastrous top-down strategy, the report takes the easy way out. It blames the Biden political operation for failing to prop up Harris, criticizes Harris for “writing off rural America,” and chides the party for focusing on “abstract issues and identity politics.”

While those factors certainly contributed to the loss, they are merely symptoms of a much deeper rot.

The Democratic Party establishment failed to do the most basic analysis of its own complicity. They asked voters to save democracy, but when they failed to deliver, they refused to transparently investigate their own catastrophic blunders. If the DNC cannot even manage to accurately diagnose how they lost 2024, they have absolutely no blueprint for how to win in the future.