In a move that should unleash harsh criticism and recriminations, the Democratic National Committee has decided against publicly releasing its long-awaited report on the 2024 election, which could end up protecting key actors inside the party from accountability over the blown but winnable contest.
The DNC has completed the report after extensive data analysis and hundreds of interviews in all 50 states. But according to a DNC official, the committee determined that releasing it would spark a media frenzy and retrospective finger-pointing that could divide the party and distract from its winning streak in recent elections.
“Here’s our North Star: does this help us win?” DNC Chair Ken Martin said in a statement given to The New Republic and a handful of other media outlets in advance of its wider release. “If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.”
In the statement, Martin called the completed report a “comprehensive review of what happened in 2024” and said the party is “already putting our learnings into motion.” The decision that releasing the report would work against the party, Martin suggested, emerged from “conversations with stakeholders from across the Democratic ecosystem.”
But if the report is “comprehensive” in its look at 2024, keeping it secret raises more questions about who specifically inside that “Democratic ecosystem” will benefit from its remaining under wraps.
Take, for instance, the Future Forward super PAC, which had a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars for the 2024 contest. Well before Election Day, the PAC came under harsh criticism from some Democrats who argued that it hadn’t spent sufficient money earlier in the campaign on ads attacking Trump, which may have allowed Trump to rehabilitate himself after his 2020 loss and the January 6 insurrection.
Other Democrats charged that Future Forward’s ad-testing model and addiction to traditional TV ads led to anodyne communications and that its flawed theory of politics caused it to refrain from sufficiently targeting Trump, letting him avoid blame for his first-term disasters on Covid-19 and the economy. Still others said the PAC didn’t innovate in digital communications, failing to reach and motivate young and nonwhite voters who helped tip the election to the president.
There are grounds for thinking the DNC report digs into these problems. According to a DNC official, the analysis found, among other things, that the party didn’t invest sufficiently in innovative digital tools; that its digital ads didn’t reach young voters who no longer engage with broadcast and cable TV; and that Trump—with the help of an ecosystem of right-wing podcasters and influencers—outworked the Democrats in the information wars. Democrats must play catchup in this department, the report found.
It’s good to hear the report concludes this. But it would be nice to know what specifically the party found on this front and precisely how it’s resolving to do better. Any such analysis of advertising and communications failures would seemingly have to look at Future Forward’s role; in fact, over the summer word leaked that Future Forward would come under heavy criticism in the analysis. If so, that will now remain undisclosed.
Meanwhile, The New York Times reported Wednesday that Future Forward USA Action, the dark-money group connected to the super PAC, took in over $600 million from donors in 2024 alone. How was that money spent? Where did it go?
These are not just backward-looking questions. Many Democrats are wondering what Future Forward’s role will be in this cycle and the next: Will party leaders once again steer massive donor resources in its direction? Will it adopt a different approach to our rapidly evolving information environment? How heavily will the party rely on a single super PAC? Will it spread around more money to smaller grassroots groups? The lack of a public report seems to leave such questions unanswered.
Or take the big question about Joe Biden’s age and fitness for a reelection campaign. It’s unclear what the DNC analysis concludes about key decisions made by the Biden campaign’s high command—people like reelection chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and senior adviser Anita Dunn, who is now an adviser to Future Forward—including the decision to stay in the race too long. That hamstrung Kamala Harris’s ability to get her campaign up and running in time. The lack of a public report may mean accountability falls by the wayside.
Asked directly whether the DNC had decided not to release the report out of concern for how it might impact the reputations of key party players—or whether the DNC faced pressure from key actors to keep its conclusions secret—the DNC official denied this and said the only consideration was what benefits the party. And the official declined to comment on whether Future Forward’s performance and the fate of all the money channeled into it was scrutinized in the report.
Then there are the big intraparty debates over how to talk about issues like immigration and public safety. The DNC official says, somewhat cryptically, that the report concludes that the party was not sufficiently responsive to voters’ concerns about these issues and that the party must address them head-on.
But without seeing the report, it’s hard to know what this means. Does it mean Democrats should build their strategy around public concerns about these issues in a way that does or does not assume that arguments over them with Republicans are winnable if engaged correctly?
Does it mean Democrats should forcefully make the case that Republicans are wrong about how to handle crime and Democrats are right about it, or does it mean Democrats should refrain from making that case out of fear of alienating voters concerned about it? Should Democrats forthrightly defend immigration as a positive good for the country and immigration flows as something that absolutely can be managed in the national interest, or should ministering to voters’ concerns mean they cede the argument?
Failure to release the report seems to evade public debate over such hard questions. Indeed, the decision seems like it could create additional problems: It could lead reporters to ferret out the report’s findings in dribs and drabs that might even distort its real conclusions or make them prone to manipulation by factional party actors. At the same time, it could make the party appear more insular and less willing to seriously engage with what brought us a second Donald Trump presidency.
Of course, winning speaks louder than anything. If the party can weather the bad press over this decision, get past whatever dustups result from the torrent of leaks that will likely follow, and go on to win the midterms resoundingly, it might look in retrospect like a good strategic decision. But those who are interested in transparency and a genuine public reckoning probably aren’t going to get it.
