The Democrats Are Determined Not to Learn From Their Failure

by UB Center for Urban Studies · 05/28/2026

The Democrats’ botched 2024 autopsy doesn’t just leave out Gaza. It also simply pretends the left-populist upsurge embodied by Zohran Mamdani isn’t happening, while coveting its achievements.

Kamala Harris speaking into a microphone with a stadium full of people and a sign that says "Freedom" behind her. — Kamala Harris speaks into a microphone on stage at a large campaign rally, wearing a purple blazer, with a large American flag and a crowd of supporters visible in the background. A sign reading “Freedom” is partially visible behind her. Photo: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images

Usually, a report might become major news because of some kind of damning or inconvenient revelation that’s contained inside it. But the Democratic Party is currently in such disarray, it’s managed to turn even the act of simply releasing a report to the public into an embarrassing debacle.

The Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) autopsy report on what went wrong in 2024 was finally released last week, and it has quickly, and somewhat hilariously, plunged the party into an internal crisis, with DNC chair Ken Martin now facing calls to resign. I say “hilariously” because the reason for this has very little to do with what’s actually in the report and is entirely due to Martin’s extremely public bungling of the messaging around it.

To be clear, there’s plenty embarrassing about the report’s content too. But it’s revealing and emblematic of a Democratic Party that has been utterly in shambles the past year that the production and release of the report has become somehow a bigger controversy than what’s in it.

While it’s unclear who exactly is responsible for it, Martin’s first misstep was arguably appointing his consultant friend Paul Rivera to head the task, for which he reportedly took months to get in touch with top names from the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris operations or simply never reached out to them at all. This appointment might have been overlooked, but Martin then serially delayed the report’s release, suddenly threatened to bury it, then reversed himself again and vowed to put it out, all while claiming that the nearly two-hundred-page report — which claims to have been based on interviews with more than 12,000 Democratic officials and surveys of 5,000 more people — had been written for free.

Naturally, given both this spectacle and the unfinished, error-ridden product that found Martin folding an apology into a press release announcing the report’s public reveal, the choice of Rivera, with his less-than-illustrious career, is now receiving extra scrutiny, further fueling questions about Martin’s leadership.

Then there’s the Gaza issue. Interest in the report soared the past few months thanks to leaks that suggested the party’s role in assisting Israel’s yearslong genocide, and how that contributed to its 2024 defeat, was part of the final copy. Instead neither Gaza nor anything to do with Israel or foreign policy in general appears.

To read the full article, go to Jacobin

By Branko Marcetic on May 27, 2026