The DNC Autopsy: a 192-page document that doesn't believe in itself, man
Filed under: this will not stand | Three Caucasians were consumed in the writing of this piece. Possibly four.
So the Democratic National Committee — eighteen months after the body cooled, eighteen months after the toe tag was tied, eighteen months after the rest of us stood around the grave in the rain asking what the hell happened — has finally, mercifully, released its official autopsy on the 2024 election1.
They called it “Build to Win. Build to Last.”
I had to set down my Caucasian when I read that title. I had to actually set it down on the lane, man, and just stare at the pins for a while.
Because here is what “Build to Win. Build to Last.” contains in its Executive Summary section:
DNC autopsy — Executive Summary
“This section was not provided by author.”
The Conclusion?
DNC autopsy — Conclusion
“This section was not provided by author.”
The Appendices? Same. Blank. Gone. Not provided by author. A 192-page document about catastrophic failure, and the author could not be reached for the summary, the conclusion, or the appendices. This is the Epstein Files of political party self-reflection. The DNC has produced the literary equivalent of a bowling ball with no finger holes. Decorative. Non-functional. Somehow still expensive.
But wait — it gets richer. Because the DNC, in a move so exquisitely self-loathing it almost circles back around to brave, slapped its own disclaimer on the front page. Page one, man. Before you even get to the table of contents that leads to the blank Executive Summary. The disclaimer says, and I want to be precise here, that the DNC cannot independently verify the claims presented in its own commissioned report.
The Democratic Party has produced an autopsy that disavows itself on fucking page one. That rug didn’t just get peed on. The rug filed a disclaimer about the pee.
This is what passes for accountability in a party that lost to a convicted felon running on grievance, gold sneakers, and the cognitive architecture of a novelty sponge.
Now. Let’s talk about what the report actually admits, because buried under the bureaucratic styrofoam packing material, there are some genuine confessions. Confessions that would have been useful, oh, I don’t know, before the election.
The autopsy’s own pollsters — on the record, in writing — admit that the Trump campaign’s “Kamala is for they/them” ad was, and I am quoting the document here, “very effective.” They admit the campaign was “boxed in.” And then they deliver what might be the single most expensive shrug in American political history:
DNC autopsy — Research & Strategy section, pg. 72
“If the Vice President would not change her position — and she did not — then there was nothing which would have worked as a response.”
Nothing. Would. Have. Worked.
Pour another Caucasian, and read that again. These are the people who charged somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars to run the Future Forward operation — a boondoggle so prodigious in its uselessness it deserves its own wing at the Museum of Political Malpractice — and their official, documented, on-the-record conclusion about the most effective attack ad of the cycle is: we had no answer, there is no answer, please stop asking.
Meanwhile, the Lincoln Project — a group of former Republicans running on spite and tactical fury — went from concept to finished counter-ad in thirty-six hours. Thirty-six hours. No Zoom calls with allies seeking permission. No focus groups in Bucks County. No blowback-score calculations run by consultants billing $40,000 a month out of converted DC townhouses. They pointed out, accurately and with receipts, that the gender-affirming care policy Trump’s ad attacked was Trump’s own federal policy. They flipped the script in a day and a half while Harris HQ was still work-shopping whether they were permitted by a fraction of a fraction of their own base to respond at all.
The patient described the murder weapon in detail. Then politely declined to take it away from the killer. Then billed the estate for the consultation.
And here is the part of the autopsy that is so obvious it physically hurts to read — the part where the document, in chapter after chapter, accidentally writes the obituary it couldn’t bring itself to write in the conclusion section it left blank.
Josh Stein won the North Carolina governorship. The autopsy notes, plainly, that his path to victory involved focusing “less on abstract issues and identity politics” and connecting with voters on “the economy, disaster relief, and housing affordability.” Jacky Rosen won in Nevada running on healthcare costs and wages. Ruben Gallego won in Arizona by being a working-class guy who didn’t speak to working-class people like they were a diversity seminar he was running slightly behind schedule. Elissa Slotkin outperformed Harris in sixty-eight of Michigan’s eighty-three counties by talking about manufacturing jobs like she actually gave a damn about Macomb County.
The pattern is so blazingly, insultingly clear that you could read it from the International Space Station with your eyes half-closed. When Democrats talk about the price of eggs, the cost of rent, the wages people take home, and the dignity of their work — they win, or they at least lose like contenders. When they campaign on the boutique concerns of the activist-class ecosystem — the issues that peaked politically sometime around 2021 and have been radioactive with working-class voters of every background ever since — they get vaporized.
The autopsy knows this. The autopsy says this. In plain English. Multiple times. And then the consultant class that produced it will go back to their converted DC townhouses and charge somebody $40,000 a month to not implement it, because telling the loud edges of the base that their priorities are electoral poison is the one thing that absolutely cannot be done. Blowback, you know. The focus group might wince.
They published 192 pages explaining precisely why they keep losing, with the conclusion left blank, and called it “Build to Win.” The Dude has seen nihilists with more institutional self-awareness. At least the nihilists knew they believed in nothing. They were upfront about it.
The most damning number in the whole document isn’t in the messaging sections or the organizing sections. It’s in the spending analysis. Outside spending on federal campaigns in 2024 reached $4.5 billion. Four and a half billion dollars. And the official conclusion of the people who spent it is that nothing would have worked.
Nothing would have worked. Four and a half billion dollars. Nothing would have worked.
Man, I am going to need another Caucasian.
Look — the document does, in soft flashes, demonstrate something resembling a pulse. It acknowledges Democrats have lost ground at every level since the 2008 Obama landslide. It calls for a ten-year strategic plan. It talks about organizing everywhere to “Win Anywhere.” These are the right words in the right order, and if someone with actual authority and actual accountability and actual willingness to have an uncomfortable conversation with the activist base ever acted on them, something might change.
But knowing isn’t doing. And the Democratic Party, by its own forensic confession, has spent sixteen years knowing and not doing. Studying the last defeat while staging the conditions for the next one. Commissioning the autopsy while protecting the lifestyle of everyone who performed the surgery that killed the patient.
The Republicans spent decades doing the unglamorous, untweetable work — the Federalist Society, ALEC, the evangelical ground game, the state legislative pipeline, the patient construction of a judicial infrastructure that now owns the Supreme Court for a generation. Nobody went viral. Nobody got a podcast. They just kept bowling, frame after frame, building a consistent game.
The Democrats got the biggest electoral mandate in modern history in 2008 and spent the next sixteen years failing to lock in a single structural advantage, disinvesting in state parties, vacating working-class communities, and then expressing genuine surprise, cycle after cycle, when the results came back.
And now they’ve written it all down in a 192-page document with a blank conclusion.
The Dude is not abiding today, man. The Dude is, for once in his life, genuinely, specifically, non-philosophically furious. There are people in windowless rooms in Alexandria right now storyboarding the next “they/them” ad, the next culture-war carpet-bombing, the next cycle of attacks specifically designed to exploit the Democratic Party’s inability to respond without first convening a permission structure. And the official response of the opposition party, certified and documented, is that there is nothing which would have worked.
Somebody had better find something that works. And fast. Because the next election isn’t waiting for the Executive Summary to be provided by the author.
It should be noted that under the ‘inspired’ leadership of Ken Martin, that it took a fuckton of brow beating to get them to drop this turd in the punch bowl…