Liberal New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg sharply criticized the Democratic National Committee’s long-delayed 2024 election postmortem on Friday, describing the report as “mysterious,” “anticlimactic,” and “ridiculous” following months of internal Democratic infighting surrounding its release.
“The document, it’s now clear, was kept under wraps not because it was impolitic, but because it’s a disaster,” Goldberg wrote.
She also blasted DNC Chairman Ken Martin for changing his tune regarding the report.
“What’s most striking is its utter lack of substance,” she noted further, adding that the words “Israel” and “Gaza” don’t appear anywhere in the 192-page autopsy.
“It offers little insight into why the Democratic Party lost large numbers of Black and Latino men, or its failure to speak to disconnected, irregular voters… I wondered if it was written by A.I., though A.I. probably would’ve done a better job,” she added.
When he was running for DNC chair, Martin said he would release the autopsy report but later changed his mind, declaring it would not be released publicly at all.
That decision made the report “an object of suspicion and fascination,” Goldberg wrote.
“Some thought he was protecting Kamala Harris ahead of 2028. Many progressives were convinced that the D.N.C. quashed the autopsy because it would show Harris was done in by Gaza,” she wrote.
“Rob Flaherty, who’d been deputy director of both the Harris and Joe Biden campaigns, speculated that it didn’t even exist,” she said.
Conservative Washington Post columnist Ramesh Ponnuru also focused on what the report did not include.
“There’s nothing about President Joe Biden’s age and voters’ worries about it. Nothing about the border crisis the Democrats first caused through their policies and then denied in their rhetoric,” he said.
“Nothing about the party’s declining appeal to religiously observant voters,” he continued.
“Nothing about the boutique left-wing views — such as support for taxpayer-funded sex changes for illegal immigrants and prisoners,” he added.
In addition, the report failed to fault Vice President Kamala Harris, who ran an ineffective campaign despite burning through $1.5 billion.
It also did not fault the manner in which she was simply anointed as the party’s candidate after President Joe Biden dropped out.
The report, which was released Thursday and first detailed by CNN, argued that the Democratic National Committee weakened its own political infrastructure through declining voter registration efforts, reduced financial support for state parties, and a broader failure to engage with key voter blocs.
It also said that Democrats have to renew their focus on voters in Middle America and the heavily Republican South.
For his part, Martin distanced himself from the report.
“I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards,” he said, per Fox News.
He added that he could not “in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on it.”
The report, written by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, was released with a disclaimer stating it “reflects the views of the author, not the DNC.”
The committee went even further.
It said it “was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented.”
Martin also said the report was released for the sake of transparency “as I received it – in its entirety, unedited and unabridged – with annotations for claims that couldn’t be verified.”
Rivera, a longtime Democratic consultant, had reportedly not worked on a presidential campaign in more than two decades.
