By Douglas V. Gibbs
In what can only be described as a masterclass in self-deception, the Democratic National Committee has finally released its long-delayed post-mortem report on the 2024 election, and the results are as predictable as they are pathetic. After nearly two years of internal squabbling and what can only be described as an institutional paralysis, the nearly 200-page document manages to achieve the impossible: it analyzes a historic electoral defeat without mentioning the man who led the party into that abyss.
Let’s be clear about what happened in November 2024. This wasn’t a “barely lost” election, as the DNC would have us believe. This was an overwhelming repudiation of Democratic policies, leadership, and vision. President Donald Trump won decisively, not because of some fluke or because Democrats weren’t “loud and proud enough,” but because Americans rejected the WOKE, DEI, socialist-progressive agenda that has become the party’s signature offering. The party went from JFK to Carter to Bill Clinton to Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders and AOC. It’s a decline that can be easily seen, but they are blind to it.
The irony is thicker than mud, and as clear as crystal. Here we have a party that claims to be “saving our democracy” while simultaneously subverting what they have argued are its most fundamental processes. They bypassed their own primary system, shoved a sitting president aside without voter approval, and replaced him with a vice president whose incoherence and lack of qualifications were apparent to anyone not invested in the delusion. If this is what “saving democracy” looks like? How can a party that can’t even explain what a constitutional republic is even see through their own bull-pucky?
The report’s glaring omission of Joe Biden’s role in this electoral catastrophe tells you everything you need to know about the Democratic Party’s capacity for honest self-assessment. It’s like analyzing the sinking of the Titanic without mentioning the iceberg. Biden’s approval ratings were underwater for years, his cognitive decline was apparent to all but the most willfully blind, and his policies created an economic malaise that affected working families across this country. Yet somehow, the DNC’s analysis manages to sidestep these inconvenient truths.
As The Hill reported, the backlash against DNC Chair Ken Martin is growing, with Democrats like Rep. Marc Veasey correctly noting, “There doesn’t seem to be a plan to turn things around and the clock is ticking.” Rep. Ritchie Torres went even further, suggesting the DNC is in a state of “almost terminal decline.” These are Democrats themselves sounding the alarm bells, yet the party leadership remains deaf to the warnings.
The tragedy here isn’t just that Democrats lost an election. And understand, despite their claim to the contrary, they lost it big. The tragedy, though, is that they’ve learned nothing from the loss. They’ve convinced themselves that their ideas aren’t the problem, there’s nothing wrong and they have the mid-terms right where they want them, and the only issue that is killing them is how they are framing their messaging. They believe if they could just shout their progressive nonsense a little louder, Americans would suddenly embrace open borders, inflationary spending, gender ideology for kindergarteners, and the rest of their radical agenda.
I could have saved them the two years and 200 pages. The reasons for their defeat are simple: WOKE, DEI, and socialism. Add to that their complete inability or unwillingness to debate coherently on substantive issues, and you have the recipe for electoral disaster that played out in 2024. Americans don’t want their daughters competing against biological males in sports. They don’t want their children being taught that they’re oppressors or victims based on their skin color. They don’t want their hard-earned money going to fund the endless parade of progressive social experiments.
What’s particularly revealing is how Democrats are responding to this flawed report. Their complaint isn’t that it fails to provide honest answers about why they lost, but that whoever should have provided that information was “asleep at the switch.” They’re not angry about the content; they’re angry about the timing and optics. It’s like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, and then failing to mention the iceberg in the final analysis. All of it is a pointless jog around the truth while wearing a blindfold. It’s an activity that avoids addressing the real problem.
The path forward for Democrats should be obvious: abandon the radical progressive agenda that has alienated half the country and return to something resembling mainstream American values. But they won’t. They’ll double down on what beat them, convinced that their ideas are too sophisticated for ordinary Americans to appreciate. They’ll continue to treat Trump not as a political opponent to be debated, but as an existential evil whose defeat justifies any means, including the subversion of their own democratic processes.
As we head toward the 2026 midterms, Democrats face a fundamental choice: they can continue their journey into political irrelevance, or they can have a genuine reckoning with why Americans rejected their vision for this country. If their post-mortem report is any indication, they’ve chosen the former. And that’s not just bad news for Democrats – it’s bad news for a country that needs at least two functional political parties competing in the arena of ideas. After all, liberty requires debate, and freedom requires many voices. Coherent voices. Not word-salads.
The American people deserve better than a choice between one party that’s trying to solve problems and another that’s trying to convince us those problems don’t exist. Until Democrats figure that out, they’ll keep wondering why they keep losing elections that, in their minds, they should have won. And to be frank, much of what the Democrats are suffering from were also present in the Federalist Party right before it faded away into obscurity – never to win another election.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
