What the Democrats' autopsy should have focused on
The seeds of defeat weren't sown in 2024, but rather in 2021, when Biden and his party grossly overread their mandate.
We are living in an era in which decisions typically described as “unprecedented,” indefensible, or “inexplicable” have become so commonplace that we need new verbiage. “Wince-worthy,” perhaps?
As much as Democrats would assume that these terms are most applicable to President Trump and his administration, in this case they’re intended for Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin. It was reported this past week that Martin had decided to bury the “autopsy” report the party had commissioned in March to examine why it lost the 2024 presidential election.
Before Martin decided to give the Epstein-file treatment to the autopsy report, those briefed on the study had described it as the product of over 300 interviews with Democrats in all 50 states. Martin’s lame explanation was to say, “Here’s our North Star: Does this help us win? If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.” A more convincing explanation was that he intended to protect the egos and reputations of those who had made decisions that contributed to the party’s loss last year. Deep-sixing the report will hardly ingratiate the party’s donors, many of whom were already skeptical of Martin and opposed his election to chair the party from the beginning.
The ironic thing is that if The New York Times’ reporting from July was correct, the autopsy report was unlikely to ruin reputations, even those that perhaps should have been. The Times’ Reid J. Epstein and Shane Goldmacher wrote five months ago that the DNC’s “examination of what went wrong in the 2024 election is expected mostly to steer clear of the decisions made by the Biden-turned-Harris campaign and will focus more heavily instead on actions taken by allied groups, according to interviews with six people briefed on the report’s progress.” Most relevant, the audit looked to avoid the question of whether President Biden should have run for reelection in the first place or exited the race earlier than he did, and whether Kamala Harris was the right choice to replace him.
Let’s not forget that when Trump left office in January 2021, both his poll numbers and his reputation were in the political toilet. He left office with just a 34 percent job-approval rating in the Gallup Poll (62 percent disapproved), and as the only president in polling history never to reach a 50 percent job-approval rating. A CNN poll taken at the same time found the same 34 percent approval rating, but also that 55 percent believed he deserved a great deal of blame for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol building. The poll found that 55 percent of Americans deemed his presidency a failure, while only 41 percent deemed it a success.
How do you lose the presidency less than four years later to someone who was evicted from the White House with those kinds of numbers and circumstances?
Biden and his team committed a political cardinal sin: misreading their election and presuming a mandate when none existed. They seemed to focus on his 4.5-percentage-point margin in the national popular vote, which is a bit like deciding a football game by the total yards gained by each side. As Al Gore or Hillary Clinton could attest, the coin of the realm is in the state results, not the national vote margin.
Far more relevant was Biden’s margin in the tipping-point states—just 42,918 votes scattered across just three states: 11,779 in Georgia (.24 percent), 10,457 in Arizona (.31 percent), and 22,682 in Wisconsin (.63 percent), about three-hundredths of a percentage point of those cast nationwide.
What’s more, with the Senate 50-50, Democrats had a majority only by virtue of Vice President Harris’s ability to break ties; things were not much better in the House, where Democrats had lost seats but managed to cling to a 222-211 majority.
The political reality is that the country is so narrowly and evenly divided that the kind of big wins that create landslides are no longer possible.
During Biden’s first six months in office, his Gallup approval ratings ran between 54 and 57 percent, his disapproval ratings between 37 and 42 percent. In the evenly divided and deeply partisan country we have today, that is about as good as a president is going to get. His approval dropped 6 points to 50 percent in July, then to 49 percent in August, 43 percent in September, and to 42 percent in November, never to rise above 45 percent again.
A real autopsy would focus on those first nine months of 2021, and perhaps the weeks between the 2020 election and the beginning of 2021. Decisions were made that planted the seeds of this loss.
Politically, the Biden presidency was dead after the first 10 months of 2021, hopelessly lost in a political Bermuda Triangle of the border and soaring inflation, which eventually reached a 40-year high; Biden left office with the cost of living 25 percent higher than when he took office. The debacle that was the withdrawal from Afghanistan was just icing on the cake.
In her book 107 Days, Harris argues that if Biden had dropped out sooner, the extra time would have enabled her to run a winning campaign. I don’t think extra time would have made a difference. I doubt that if the 2024 Democratic nominee had been male rather than female, or white rather than Black, or gay rather than straight, any of it would have made much difference, nor would a different campaign team. The reality is that any vice president or member of the Biden Cabinet would have been found guilty by association.
The question is, the next time Democrats get into power (likely in just over a year’s time, at least in the House), will they be any wiser? Will the decisions they make be as politically tone-deaf as we saw in 2021? The agenda must align with the victory, and if the victory is meager, the agenda should be somewhat more restrained as well. While I am quite convinced that Democrats will win a House majority next year, I would be surprised if it matches the 26-seat average loss that presidents’ parties have averaged since the end of World War II. But governing decisions can be more politically fateful than decisions made during the height of a campaign.