Political parties rarely like releasing autopsies of electoral defeats because they often become excuses for score settling or agenda pushing, but the 2024 autopsy is one that the Democrats can’t touch with a ten million foot pole for all the obvious reasons.
Yes, the core election issue was the economy and the Democrats would have probably still lost even if Biden hadn’t run again and they had swapped out Gov. Gavin Newsom, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer or Gov. George Wallace, but any autopsy can’t get away from two really dangerous issues.
1. Biden was suffering from diminished capacity and the party along with its political allies in the media (and the assorted experts) covered up for it. Then when the issue was forced, they rapidly and illegally brought in Kamala who lost the election probably even worse than he would have.
2. The party’s descent into wokeness alienated men on an unprecedented scale leading to major problems even with the minority vote.
Both of those issues are third rails. It’s not just Biden or as the party keeps insisting “a small inner circle”. The Democrats ruthlessly cleared the deck for Biden to run again and shut down all criticism. This goes well beyond anything Jill Biden can be blamed for. It suggests a level of systemic corruption that requires major house cleaning. Democrats now widely distrust their party in the way Republicans came to do. Hiding the autopsy is a doomed effort to avoid coming to terms with that.
Finally, wokeness is a symptom of the party’s radicalization and takeover by the Left. The usual lefty autopsies insist that the Dems didn’t go far enough leftward. (Real Communism has never been tried.) But this time it’s abundantly clear that the party went too far leftward. Yet trying to release an autopsy that says so would unleash a party civil war, along with cries of ‘transgender genocide’ and political victimhood.
And so, there can be no serious autopsy. What went wrong in 2024 is catastrophically system. So it will have to stay the world’s worst kept secret that everyone but the party knows.
