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The Democratic National Committee is now in the process of performing its “autopsy” on the 2024 election, and early reports indicate that it will, in fact, sidestep the cause of the great Democratic failure. The DNC, the New York Times reported, will “mostly steer clear of the decisions made by the Biden-turned-Harris campaign and will focus more heavily instead on actions taken by allied groups.”

The autopsy is expected to “avoid the questions” of whether Joe Biden should have run for reelection and whether Kamala Harris was the right choice to replace him as a candidate. Instead, according to six people the Times spoke with, it appears DNC leadership will dodge the presidential election altogether and key in on the 2024 election as a whole, focusing on the performance of outside groups and super-PACs that spent hundreds of millions of dollars boosting the Biden and Harris campaigns through advertising, voter-registration drives, and various turnout efforts.

If this is true — if the tactics of the Harris campaign are not being scrutinized and the Biden decision itself is not being picked apart — then it is yet another example of the Democratic Party’s fecklessness and general inability to reckon with its most monumental errors. Ken Martin, the new DNC chair, cannot be blamed for the losses last year since he was chairman of Minnesota’s Democratic Party, but the DNC, if it has any purpose at all, should be wrestling with these sorts of problems. What Martin, as a party chair, does bring to the organization is an interest in winning back red states and trying to be competitive in hostile territory, the way Howard Dean, once upon a time, aggressively tried to drag the DNC out of Washington.

Avoiding Biden and Harris, though, is an awful choice. Biden’s decision to attempt another presidential run before crumbling in his debate with Donald Trump was one of the worst political decisions of the modern era, a unique blend of hubris and ineptitude that should ensure that all aides close to him are jettisoned out of politics for good. Harris was then anointed without winning a single primary vote and proceeded, under challenging circumstances, to run a dismal campaign, mostly dodging mainstream and alternative media for large stretches of the summer and failing to formulate a coherent policy vision. It was hard to know what Harris wanted to accomplish as president or what she stood for. Trump, meanwhile, hammered her on immigration and inflation, and enough voters were convinced to give him another shot. If his recent approval ratings are any indication, they have buyer’s remorse.

What the DNC should explore, but won’t, is how so many Democratic politicians and operatives willfully ignored reality for so long. As far back as 2022, it was becoming obvious that Biden, entering his 80s and slipping mentally, wasn’t fit to run again. Anyone who dissented from the party line was shouted down as a MAGA apologist. When Dean Phillips, the Minnesota congressman, stepped in to primary Biden, citing concerns about his age, he was entirely ostracized. This was not merely groupthink — it was cultish behavior that matched the delusions of the MAGA realm. Historians will have a difficult time understanding, decades from now, just what went on from 2022 to 2024. Some Democrats, and members of the media, were genuinely ignorant and should be censured for not having the wherewithal to recognize what was in front of them. Others, though, knew better and decided to deceive themselves and others. They closed ranks. They laid the groundwork for Trump’s comeback. In a just world, they wouldn’t have a political future.

All the chaos of 2025 can be laid at the feet of the Democrats who failed to stop Trump. They are lucky the party itself is not doomed: American politics is too cyclical, and the duopoly too entrenched, for the Democrats to disappear. They will rise again because they’ll win downballot elections and probably flip the House next year. Finally, in 2028, they’ll hold an open presidential primary, and the strongest candidate will win. They are lucky, too, that Trump has no obvious successor. J.D. Vance is the top contender for the nomination, but he lacks Trump’s crowd-pleasing charisma. He can certainly win in 2028, but he won’t have the same ability to repel attacks or inspire crowds. He’ll be far more ordinary.

What Martin should do, if he’s serious about the autopsy, is try to figure out why Democrats fostered such an environment in which free discourse was, in almost every sense, impossible. How were so few senators, governors, and powerful party apparatchiks unable to head off such a disaster? How were the conditions created for such an insidious level of groupthink? If the DNC truly doesn’t care, these failures, in some form, are bound to repeat themselves.

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