The Democratic National Committee's effort to analyze what went wrong in the 2024 election was always kind of a joke from the start. Soon after the effort was announced, it was revealed that it would not be looking into two crucial questions from 2024, namely Joe Biden's decision to run for re-election when he obviously was not up to the task, and what happened after he (finally) decided to end his campaign and Kamala Harris was anointed the official party candidate (without any primaries or any sort of selection process at all). Those are some pretty big things to decide to ignore, you've got to admit.

Even so, perhaps it would have contained some valuable information for the Democratic Party heading forwards. But D.N.C. Chair Ken Martin just announced that he was reversing his earlier promise to make the post-mortem report public, and that it would remain secret instead. This does not exactly signal confidence, to state the obvious.

But the biggest problem with the report, from all accounts, is even bigger than flat-out ignoring, you know, what actually went wrong in 2024. Because apparently the report also didn't even bother to examine what was wrong with the Democratic Party brand either. The information in the report was limited to small-ball analyses of the process of the election -- what advertising and get-out-the-vote money was spent, how it was spent, and how effective it was. This completely sidesteps the question of what policies the party stands for -- or should stand for, going forward.

At first, the report was being held back so it wouldn't be a "distraction" to the off-off-year 2025 election cycle. However, it has been a month and a half since Democrats scored a blockbuster victory in this year's elections, and still no report was forthcoming. Now -- one week before Christmas -- Martin just threw in the towel and said the party would not be publicly releasing the report at all.

This is beyond idiotic. It is, in fact, laughably inadequate. But it is precisely the type of thing you'd expect from the Democratic Party establishment, who are terrified of losing their deep-pocket donors and/or annoying any of the party's various factions with any sort of policy reset. It is, to be blunt, everything that is wrong with the Democratic Party wrapped up into one.

What went wrong with the 2024 election was multifaceted. Joe Biden's mental decline, his agonizing post-debate delay until he finally bowed to the inevitable and stepped back, and the choice of Kamala Harris as a standard-bearer were all enormous factors in the outcome of the election. Martin claims that examining any of that was not necessary, since it was such a unique circumstance that it's not likely to happen again. But even conceding that this is a good point doesn't mean all of it should just be ignored.

The only policy conclusions the post-mortem actually draws are that Democrats didn't respond well to Republican attacks on public safety and immigration. As one reporter put it: "That amplified the Democrats' credibility problem on the election's central issue: the economy." But without seeing this analysis it is impossible to know how deep it goes. A real examination of the problem would have to include not just mistakes in messaging but mistakes in the policies the messaging was describing. From all reports, the autopsy doesn't do this at all.

The whole thing is about process, apparently, with no regard to policy at all. "The party took young voters for granted," therefore the answer is to get better at reaching young voters through non-traditional media. But what will Democrats actually say to young voters through influencers and other new media channels? What will they stand for that will cause young voters to get excited about voting for them? The report apparently doesn't say.

This is all about as useful as a medical autopsy on a female gunshot victim that concentrates on what makeup she was wearing, while refusing to actually examine the gaping wound at all. It is like criticizing the sinking of the Titanic by only critiquing what food was served in the dining room the night of the accident. It is beyond just "woefully inadequate," it is (as stated previously) nothing more than a bad joke.

The Democratic Party needs to get its collective head out of the sand. It needs to face a few realities. First and foremost should be the hard lesson that no matter how much money a candidate spends (Harris burned through over a billion dollars in her short run), it won't matter one bit if the voters don't like the message being communicated. And that's not just a problem of constructing a better messaging scheme for the ads, it also involves the policies the candidate is running on.

For instance, if the party were truly interested in getting young voters excited and getting people enthusiastic about voting for them again, they should look to the lesson Zohran Mamdani just taught them all. Because it's not just the message, it's what is being promised.

Kamala Harris promised to "fight every day" for people who would vote for her. What did she promise them? An "opportunity economy." What does that actually mean? Who knows! It is the type of phrase a political consultant would come up with to be everything to everybody -- it means what you think it means. Hey presto!

Compare that to Mamdani making actual promises on things like free child care, free bus services, and a rent freeze. Those are things voters can get excited about, not just "I will fight for you every day" without any specifics.

Democrats have been handed a gift, heading into 2026. They have a perfect issue and a perfect way to frame it for the voters -- the "affordability crisis." Donald Trump has failed to make good on his promises to make everything affordable starting "on Day One," and the electorate is tired of waiting and angry at nothing being done.

But Democrats could blow it. They could blow it by relying once again on overpriced political consultants who focus-group a "message" to death, and by doing so render it meaningless fluff. "We will fight every day to solve the affordability crisis" isn't the same thing as (just to give the most obvious example) "We will force Trump to end his disastrous tariffs that just raise the price on everything with his 'Trump tax'!"

Democrats need to get specific. They need to get bold. They need to make big promises and offer big solutions. It doesn't matter how adept they get at deploying their ads and breaking through in new media if all of those ads don't really have anything to say.

That is what a real autopsy of the 2024 election -- bolstered by what worked in the 2025 election cycle -- would have said. And if it had, the D.N.C. could have proudly released it to the public, as a shot across the bow of the Republican Party, heading into the midterms.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant