Matt Shinners
After months of stonewalling, the Democratic National Committee finally released its post-mortem on the 2024 election. The autopsy was written by Democratic consultant Paul Rivera, who worked on it as a part-time volunteer.
DNC Chair Ken Martin shelved it after receiving it, claiming that releasing it would only serve as a distraction. It took pressure from senior figures and the Democratic base to finally make the report public, which happened just this week.
The reception has not been kind. The DNC itself released the report with a disclaimer splashed on every page in red text stating 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 apologized in a Substack post accompanying the release, writing that when he received the report "it wasn't ready for primetime. Not even close." Instead of getting it ready for primetime, the report was shelved, which played into a Streisand Effect and rampant speculation as to what was so embarrassing in it that it couldn’t be released.
Outside of the drama around its creation and release, critics have been quick to point out a variety of things they believe the report gets wrong. But the most glaring failure isn't what the report got wrong—it's in what it doesn't address at all: independent voters.
Despite referencing independent expenditures over a hundred times (i.e., super PAC spending), the report fails to mention this voting bloc as a key element in former Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat last November. It seems the DNC has forgotten that people, not dollars, vote.
This is not a footnote omission. It is a catastrophic blind spot. According to Edison Research exit polling, independents made up 34% of the 2024 electorate, essentially tying Republicans and actually outpacing Democrats, who came in at just 31%. Independents are now, by the numbers, a larger voting bloc than the Democratic Party itself.
And in 2024, Trump won a majority of swing states by winning over independents, breaking from the national trend that saw independents leaning towards Harris. In 2020, independents supported Biden by 13 percentage points and gave him the presidency; by 2024, Harris saw that advantage go down to just 3 points. That’s a collapse of 10 points in a single cycle.
A party that loses independents by that margin, especially in swing states, doesn't just lose an election; it loses its coalition. Any autopsy that fails to grapple seriously with how Democrats can appeal to this growing, decisive bloc isn't a diagnosis. It's denial with a cover page.
I guess it didn’t even get a real cover page…