The narrative of the vice president’s heartbreaking defeat by Donald Trump on November 5 was centered on how Kamala Harris’ campaign spent over $1.4 billion in just 15 weeks.
The four candidates for the next head of the Democratic National Committee say they want to learn as much as they can about a 2024 election in which Democrats lost the White House despite having more resources and personnel. However, there are some problems that only the campaign itself can address.
The DNC chair candidates told NBC News that the party should be prepared with a post-mortem to draw lessons from an election when the Democratic presidential nominee lost the popular vote and all of the battleground states as it enters 2025.
The candidates each stated that they supported a thorough analysis of the events leading up to the White House loss, including examining messaging, voter outreach, and the distribution of resources. However, the DNC would not have the authority to conduct a forensic investigation into the Harris campaign spending because it is a separate organization.
According to DNC vice chair and Minnesota Party head Ken Martin, the party needs a comprehensive assessment of its voter outreach strategy. The DNC and its sister organizations, which support Democratic advances in Congress, should be audited by a third party, he demanded.
It’s A through Z, Martin replied, and I believe you’re looking at everything. It’s not just contracts and consultants, it’s not just media buys and ad spends.
Martin claimed he was not alluding to the Harris campaign when he specifically attacked consultants, stating they must leave.
Martin stated that this is not a critique of any one campaign. It is a critique of Washington, D.C. culture.
Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, stated that the party’s best chance of winning future elections is to focus on 2024 data.
We need to take all the lessons we can from what happened, and that applies to the entire ecosystem, Wikler stated. It’s about taking stock of what worked, what didn’t, what we can learn, and how we can win as many elections as possible while making the most of all of our resources in the years to come. A smart method to do that is to learn from what just happened.
Wikler is also calling on the party to consider other avenues of reaching voters, including as making appearances on programs that are often geared toward conservative viewers and creating progressive news outlets devoid of right-wing propaganda.
Wikler and Martin have declared their intention to run for the DNC chair, which will be decided on February 1, along with former Maryland Governor Martin O. Malley and New York State Senator James Skoufis.
What effect a post-mortem of any sort would have is unknown. Reince Priebus famously conducted a Republican “autopsy” to better understand what went wrong after Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election. One of the results was that the party needed to improve its messaging on immigrants and was too old. Then, Trump’s victory in 2016 disproved a lot of the report’s claims.
To work out some of the election’s specifics, the DNC Rules and Bylaws committee will convene on Thursday. Throughout January, Democrats will host four public forums for the candidates.
President Joe Biden is stepping down, and his hand-picked DNC chair, Jaime Harrison, has announced his resignation. The election coincides with Biden’s departure. The DNC chair position is up for grabs when Republicans control the White House, and the winner has significantly more authority than when Democrats do.
Biden gave his campaign chair Jen O. Malley Dillon extensive political authority, which caused a great deal of agitation in the DNC and other campaign areas over what detractors characterized as a top-down decision-making process. Harrison had limited authority at the time, which several DNC officials stated ought to change going ahead.
“You can’t shelve the chair or the chair’s voice in this process, whether or not you have the White House,” a DNC official said in a 2024 campaign interview. This cycle ought to be the final one to occur.
Particular attention has been paid to how Democrats handled their enormous resources after Harris’s presidential campaign raised and spent an astounding $1.4 billion in just 107 days. The speed alarmed funders, supporters, and even some campaign staff, who bemoaned extravagant celebrity expenditures and continuous fundraising efforts long after the election’s defeat.
The good, the bad, and the ugly of this most recent cycle must all be thoroughly reviewed and formally evaluated, according to Skoufis. I firmly believe that the collaboration between the DNC and the Harris campaign should be examined as part of that more comprehensive review. Did it work? And indeed, was the funding used properly for both the presidential campaign and the DNC side?
O Malley did not demand a forensic probe of the DNC or Harris campaign, pointing out that they are two different organizations, but he did call for an after-action report detailing what worked and what didn’t for the party’s 2024 strategy.
According to O Malley, we require an objective after-action to determine what worked and what didn’t. I won’t refer to it as an autopsy.
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