[[link removed]]

DEM LEADERS DECIDE TO BURY DAMNING REPORT ON WHY TRUMP WON IN 2024  
[[link removed]]


 

Greg Sargent
December 18, 2025
The New Republic
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The Democratic National Committee has completed its long-awaited
analysis on what went wrong in the 2024 campaign. But in a move that
will attract intense criticism, it’s keeping the findings secret. _

DNC chair candidate Ken Martin speaks at the Democratic National
Committee Winter Meeting in National Harbor, Md., Feb. 1, 2025.,
Credit: Rod Lamkey Jr./AP file

 

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 election.

“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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
that Future Forward would come under heavy criticism in the analysis.
If so, that will now remain undisclosed.

Meanwhile, _The New York Times_ reported
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]—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.

 

_Greg Sargent is a staff writer at The New Republic and the host of
the podcast __The Daily Blast_
[[link removed]]_. A
seasoned political commentator with over two decades of experience, he
was a prominent columnist and blogger at The Washington Post from 2010
to 2023 and has worked at Talking Points Memo, New York magazine, and
the New York Observer. Greg is also the __author of the critically
acclaimed book_
[[link removed]]_
An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Disinformation
and Thunderdome Politics.  _

 

_The New Republic was founded in 1914 as a call to arms for
public-minded intellectuals advocating liberal reform in a new
industrial age. Now, two decades into a new century, TNR remains, if
anything, more committed than ever to its first principles—and, most
of all, to the need to rethink outworn assumptions and political
superstitions as radically changing conditions demand._

* Democratic National Committee
[[link removed]]
* Ken Martin
[[link removed]]
* 2024 Elections
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Bluesky [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]