On Autopsies, Consultants, and the Fundamentals
And weak parties, too.
Given that our readers tend to be news junkies, I expect that many are aware that the Democratic National Committee created a minor kerfuffle over its lack of release of the “autopsy” of the 2024 election. The controversy was generated because DNC Chair Ken Martin promised to release the report publicly if he was elected Chair, and then decided to withhold it once he was in office. This created what was, to me, a tempest in the tiniest of doll-sized teacups (because I don’t really think these kinds of “autopsies” tell us much). Martin claimed he wanted to be forward-looking, not backward-looking, but understandably, when an organization is actively withholding things it promised to share, it makes people wonder what they are hiding.
Let me pause and note that I am a weirdo who consumes way too much political news and has written about it daily in public, for free, for over twenty years. I am a political scientist by training who has been increasingly academically focused (since at least 2010) on the role and behavior of US political parties. I note this because I could not have told you Ken Martin’s name until late April. I note this to suggest that knowing who the DNC Chair is and what they are up to might not be as important as some people think it is (as well as include consultant-drafted autopsies).
Still, if you want to get annoyed, if not even a bit angry, check out Martin’s appearance on Pod Save America from April 28 of this year. Spoilers/a summary: he does a remarkably terrible job defending his choice to withhold the report and does that thing that people in his position do, which is pretend like all wins are because of his leadership. I will add that I am more concerned about his loan strategy and the DNC’s lackluster fundraising than I am about the autopsy issue, but even that does not concern me all that much, given all of the other ways money flows in our politics.
Indeed, I think that the interview underscores the fact that the DNC is not as important or consequential as people think that it is. Our electoral campaigns are candidate-centric, and the party out of power always lacks a central message because there is no actor empowered to be the central messenger (although we often talk like such a central figure/leader/organization exists). To be as blatant as possible: without a presidential nominee, there is no organizing voice for a party (and that voice becomes even clearer when a party elects a president).
I could go on about all of that, but let’s get back to autopsies! Apparently, the pressure on the DNC became great enough that it has been released! Calloo Callay! Let me run off and read it so as to mine its depths! Or, not. But if one so desires, PBS doth provide: Read the DNC’s full post-election autopsy for the 2024 campaign, and The Hill summarizes, if you prefer: DNC’s Ken Martin faces backlash after release of 2024 autopsy: 5 takeaways.
Rather than going too deep down that rabbit hole, I would instead suggest consulting G. Elliot Morris: The real reason Democrats lost in 2024. Long-time readers are likely to be shocked at what he has to say:
When we boot up the data, it’s obvious the main reason Harris lost — and the reason I am going to explore here, at this website, it being a data-driven website — is that 2024 simply had too much inflation-induced anti-incumbent sentiment for the incumbent party to overcome. This is curiously missing from its main diagnosis. The word “inflation” isn’t mentioned in the autopsy a single time (except in the context of inflation-adjusted ad spending).
[…]
The reality of the 2024 election is that it was going to be hard for a Democrat to win, regardless of who they were or how they campaigned. The broader economic and political conditions were so favorable to Republicans that you would have expected Trump to win about 90% of the time, regardless of campaign or candidate effects.
Crazy, right?
He goes on to cite several political scientists on this topic, and even provides a chart! He then notes.
In 2024, Kamala Harris received about 49.3% of the two-party vote. The model — fit on data from 1956 through 2020, with 2024 held out — predicted she’d get about 48%, with an 80% prediction interval of 46.6% to 49.9%. Harris’s vote share lands on the upper end of this range, but still squarely inside of it.
In a sense, then, the surprise of the election is that Harris did as well as she did, considering the prevailing factors against her. Given Biden’s approval rating in June (deeply underwater, in the high 30s) and two straight years of the worst consumer sentiment readings outside of a recession, the Democratic nominee was on track to lose the popular vote by 4 points. She lost by 1.5.
This comports with something I have oft-noted, which is that for all the understandable hand-wringing over “how did the Democrats lose to him?” I think that the reason the race was as close as it was (and why Harris could be seen to have overperformed) was the poor candidate quality of the Republican nominee. I still think a normie Republican would have won the landslide that Trump confabulates about on the regular.
Consultants don’t like this kind of analysis (nor does the broader “messaging” pundit class) because it means that consultants have less to consult about, and pundits less to fume about (“if only Harris had done this!”).
As Elliot notes:
Another reason consultants don’t focus on structural factors more often is that they can’t sell you any services to solve that problem, because there’s nothing you can do about them.
This is a reminder to me that we frequently get what might be called the Causation of Political Genius Theory backwards (I need to workshop that). To wit: the best way to be proclaimed a Political Genius, and thereby claim a sinecure in the newspaper, on cable TV, or on a podcast, is to have managed a winning presidential campaign. The operative theory is that if your candidate wins, it must be because the campaign was managed so well. You know, kind of like coaches in the NBA. But unlike Phil Jackson, James Carville only has the one ring with the one team. In other words, rather than Political Genius —> Winning, the causation direction is actually Winning–> (people think you are a) Political Genius.
I mean, if Caville hadn’t sussed out that “It’s the economy, stupid,” Clinton would have lost, right?
Back to Elliot and the autopsy:
The autopsy’s diagnoses — Democrats didn’t define Trump, didn’t go negative enough, didn’t engage male voters, didn’t show up in rural areas, didn’t invest enough in digital ads, didn’t have a “permanent campaign” strategy — could all be simultaneously true and roughly irrelevant to the 2024 outcome. They might matter at the margins in a future election where the fundamentals are neutral. But they probably didn’t matter much in 2024 because the fundamentals weren’t neutral.
[…]
The deeper problem with the autopsy is that it imagines a voter who doesn’t exist. The kind of voter the report’s recommendations would persuade — someone weighing Harris’s issue positions against Trump’s, watching campaign ads carefully, updating their beliefs in response to messaging frames — is essentially a Washington consultant, not your grandma who can’t afford to pay her bills because gas is up 50% and electricity subsidies just ended. One of the problems with autopsies is that voter psychology takes a lot of work to understand well, but the people who have that skillset largely aren’t the type of person the DNC is hiring to audit their choices.
It is easier, to be sure, to come up with a list of action-oriented bullet-points (A permanent campaign! Motivate the males! Define the candidate!) than to do social science.
But as Elliot reminds us:
then there is the low-information voter, who decided 2024 more than any other group. The voters who broke hardest for Trump in 2024 were the ones who paid the least attention to politics. These are voters who, in our surveys, cannot name the party in control of Congress, don’t follow the news regularly if at all, and make decisions mostly based on vibes and what their social groups are saying. The DNC autopsy spends pages on messaging strategy aimed at engaged voters and almost no time on the people who actually moved.
These simply aren’t people who are going to be moved by the right messaging. If you don’t have enough political information to know which party controls Congress, what possible campaign strategy is going to penetrate?
This is what strategists miss when they treat campaign choices as the dominant drivers of vote choice. But you can’t ad-target your way out of an inflation problem. You can’t define your opponent if your opponent’s main appeal is that he is not the person currently in charge while gas is $5 a gallon. And you certainly can’t run a 107-day campaign aimed at low-information voters and expect them to suddenly start paying attention to your six-point plan on housing. Whether you “defined your opponent early” has no bearing on the dominant force in politics.
Side note: this is yet another reminder that American campaigns are way too long. We may rationalize that they provide a year’s worth (or more) of information for the public, but the reality is that most of us already likely know how we are going to vote in 2028 (and 2032, etc), and those who truly don’t are more likely to be the types influenced by the structural forces Elliot notes in his piece.
Elliot notes that one of the things the autopsy does not do is examine the nomination process in 2024 (and the lack of contested primaries). I agree that it is kind of striking that that topic is not in the report, and ultimately, although I think Elliot and I agree on its ultimate effects. But first, let me harp on this paragraph because it hits on my “weak party” point from above, and also tickles a part of my brain about how Americans, even smart ones, continue to talk about our parties.
By letting the party nominate Biden without a primary or convention, party bosses closed themselves off to those paths to November that ended in victory. The party had years, not weeks, to coordinate a graceful handoff to a successor who could have built a real campaign around economic reform, distanced her/himself from the Biden era, and had a fair shot at competing against an incredibly flawed opponent.
I am struck here by the way in which “the party” is discussed (and the evocation of “party bosses”). “The party” did not stop a contested primary from taking place. There was no contested primary because there were no serious contestants (with apologies to Dean Phillips, whom I had to look up).
It is possible that Elliot meant to say “Harris” instead of “Biden” in that sentence, but even so, at the time, there did not appear to be a serious anti-Harris faction of the party that would have created a contest. More importantly, there is no authority (“boss” or “bosses”) to have been able to dictate the process. The closest thing to a central leader that the Democratic Party had in 2024 was Joe Biden. That’s how our parties work. There is no “the party” that is in charge of all of this. Note, as a reminder, while yes, some party elites, most notably Nancy Pelosi, made appeals to Biden to step down, it was Biden’s choice.
Elliot continues:
The autopsy mentions the truncated timeline for Harris’s campaign in passing, but does not engage with the actual decision-making chain that produced the truncated timeline at all. That omission tells us a lot about the Democratic Party as an institution — about who has power, who exercises it, and who is ultimately (not) being held accountable for 2024.
Agreed.
You can argue that even a hypothetical Democratic nominee who entered the race in 2023 would have lost given the fundamentals. I think that’s probably true!
Agreed!!
(I might argue that the soul searching about 2024 — the notion of an “autopsy” in general — to explain a 1.5-point defeat is all a bit dramatic anyway, but your mileage may vary.)
Agreed!!!
There is more at the link, including Elliot’s arguments that the Democrats need to swing big policy-wise to change the current cycle. I have thoughts on that that may come up in the future. He also notes that the fundamentals aren’t going away and that Democrats need to understand that as soon as you win, you start getting blamed for things not going the way people want.
Democrats are about to be handed a win in 2026–28 by voters who are angry at the party currently in power. If they mistake that for vindication of a new strategy that fiddles around the margins — instead of the same structural anti-incumbency that buried Harris — they will spend the 2030s out of power and wishing they had thought bigger when time was still on their side.
Indeed.
As you’ve been writing all along, low information voters aren’t going to be moved by party messaging. But, low information voters aren’t to be trusted to own their government – as Thomas Jefferson predicted and 2024 proved. Some effort must be made to minimally engage the unengaged.
Perhaps instead of restrictive ID requirements in order to vote, a brief civics exam could be a prerequisite to voter registration.
Steven, this is one of your better posts. It raises important questions worth pressing on.
I think we’d agree that both parties are peculiarly weak right now, each for different reasons. Republicans appear organizationally captured by a single figure, while Democrats seem adrift ideologically after successive electoral setbacks. “Duverger’s Law” suggests we’re stuck with these two parties regardless, so the more urgent question becomes: how do we make the best of what we have?
That leads me to your central concept, which I think deserves more unpacking: what actually constitutes a “strong” or “weak” party? Strength is doing a lot of work in your analysis, and it could mean several distinct things:
Electoral strength — the ability to win and hold power
Policy efficacy — the ability to translate electoral victories into preferred policies
Ideological coherence — how robust and consistent the party’s core commitments are
Breadth of coalition — whether it functions as a “catch-all” party (broad tent, ideologically loose) or a programmatic party (narrower but more doctrinally disciplined)
These don’t necessarily move together — and here’s where I think there’s a deeper tension worth examining: I’m not sure a “strong” party is even compatible with persistent incumbency. My intuition is that incumbency tends to weaken parties over time. Once in power, parties get captured by incumbent officeholders whose first priority is their own reelection, not the party’s programmatic coherence. Patronage, compromise, and the demands of governing erode ideological discipline. The party machinery becomes an instrument of individual political survival rather than collective purpose.
If that’s right, then “party strength” and “electoral dominance” may actually be in tension — which raises a harder question than the one you’re posing.
So: which dimension of strength matters most for your argument? And do you think the two parties are weak in the same way, or in fundamentally different ways?