What’s Behind the Attacks on the DNC Autopsy Report?

Without naming names, the report’s 192-page forensic analysis implicates those at the helm of the Democratic Party during the 16-year period between January 2009, when DNC Chair Howard Dean, along with his 50-state strategy, was jettisoned by Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, and February 2025, when Ken Martin was elected by the DNC as the party’s chair. The report is devastating in its assessment:

In the 16 tumultuous years since [Barack Obama’s] historic election, Democrats have lost ground at every level of government. These losses are the direct result of missed opportunities to invest in our states, counties, and local parties and candidates.

Paul Rivera, the author of the report, previously served as an adviser to New York State Senate Democratic leader John Sampson. Although his name does not appear on the released draft, news of Rivera’s authorship provoked fractious opinions among party insiders.

This was just one of many points of contention. The report makes a glancing reference to President Biden’s decision to step down months before the election, but it does not mention the Biden campaign’s knowledge of the president’s mental decline, which was so evident in the disastrous debate on June 27, 2024. Nor does it probe the electoral fallout from Kamala Harris’ decision to deny a critic of Israel’s war in Gaza the opportunity to speak at the Democratic National Convention about the killing of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas and the subsequent killing of 73,000 Palestinians by Israel, the largest recipient of U.S. military aid.

As important as these issues are, their omission should not detract from the contents of the report itself. The more the party embroils itself with infighting surrounding the imperfect release of an unfinished report, the more it ignores the critical lessons it contains.

The report, which bills itself “a review and analysis of the systemic and structural issues” that have limited “the reach and success of the Democratic Party,” describes what it sets out to do this way:

In simple terms, this report follows the money, identifying the top spenders and vendors, offering insights into where the money went, including who benefited, and what issues were prioritized.

In the 2023-24 election cycle, Democratic donors, large and small, gave their favored candidates $7.5 billion. The report questions whether the party’s campaign consultants spent that money wisely. It concludes they did not.

Revive the 50-state strategy

The report makes the case that to “re-earn the trust and confidence of everyday Americans,” Democrats must “focus on the voters of Middle America and the South, who have come to believe they are not included in the Democratic vision.”

The report puts it plainly:

Harris wrote off rural America, assuming urban/suburban margins would compensate. The math doesn’t work. You can’t lose rural areas by overwhelming margins and make it up elsewhere when rural voters are a significant share of the electorate. If Democrats are to reclaim leadership in the Heartland or the South, candidates must perform well in rural turf.

Matt Hildreth, the executive director of Rural Organizing, agrees that the Democrats have a rural problem. In 2024, he served as the National Rural Vote Outreach Director for the Harris campaign. He writes:

Before he stepped down, President Biden’s reelection campaign ran for 453 days, from April 2023 to July 2024. During those 15 months, it had no rural program, no resources and no staff dedicated to engaging rural voters.

The Democratic Party is not losing ground in rural America because rural people are unreachable. Democrats are losing ground because the national party, its leaders, its data scientists, its consultants and its super PACs have written off rural voters … .

Regarding the issues Democrats campaigned on, the report observes that the “focus on social issues over economic issues alienated socially conservative voters who prioritized kitchen table concerns.”

So, what should the Democratic Party do to ensure that it can find the winning formula, which the report defines as three-pronged: “perform strongly in urban centers, be competitive in the suburbs and limit the margin of its loses in rural areas”? According to the report, Democrats must change how they campaign, and invest accordingly.

It’s organizing, stupid

The autopsy says Democrats do one thing well: They “bombard voters and grassroots donors, with nonstop fundraising solicitations. … It should surprise no one when many voters say, ‘All Democrats ever do is ask for money.’ ”

What Democrats don’t do, and didn’t do in 2024, is organize effectively. The report says:

Face-to-face organizing is why movement politics can be so powerful—leading through vision, and by pulling people in, rather than solely pushing information out. Instead, for too long Democrats have tried to negotiate with voters through the media without any meaningful level of direct interaction.

The emphasis on spending campaign dollars to advertise in the media is not only inefficient. “In the current media ecosystem, Republicans own and Democrats rent,” the report says:

Democrats pay for seasonal access to the networks, stations, platforms and newspapers owned by Republicans or right-wing entities, to advertise and communicate with voters. … Democrats are essentially raising billions of dollars from retirees, activists, working Americans and organized labor, and transferring most of it to the pockets of legacy and digital media oligarchs.

However, it does not add, as the author might have, this deluge of lucre also makes campaign consultants rich.

The report argues that Democrats should go back to the basics of voter engagement by investing more in door-to-door organizing—what has become known among community organizers as “deep canvassing.”

As an example of how to do politics right, the autopsy points to the successful 2024 campaign of Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.). In 2024, Trump won Nevada by 3.1 points, but Rosen bested GOP contender Sam Brown by 1.4 points. The report credits Rosen’s win to her “strong organizing operation and deep roots in the Nevada service economy.” It says:

Rather than relying on paid canvassers from out of state, her campaign developed deep community relationships and deployed authentic local voices. The model worked through several key elements:

• Rosen’s operation maintained constant engagement with voters. This built trust and familiarity that paid off when it mattered.
• The campaign partnered with established community organizations, particularly in Latino neighborhoods and working-class communities.
• Rather than having strangers knock on doors, the campaign deployed people from within communities to talk to their neighbors. A hospitality worker talking to another hospitality worker about kitchen-table issues carried more weight than any paid consultant.
• The campaign connected workplace concerns like healthcare costs, scheduling stability, and wage protections directly to political choices.

This approach helped Rosen outperform Harris by 4.5 points, proving strategic grassroots engagement can still move votes even in a Trump-heavy environment.

Follow the money

In the 2023-24 election cycle, as noted above, Democrats spent nearly $7.5 billion and the Republicans $5.6 billion.

Was this money spent wisely? The analysis presented in the report indicates it was not.

The document points out that an individual candidate and their campaign is focused on winning their own election. The responsibility of the party, on the other hand, is both short-term and long-term. The party must allocate resources in a targeted way to win the race at hand; it must also make investments that will expand the map of where it is possible to win in the future. The report says:

States or jurisdictions outside of the so-called battlegrounds have not received meaningful partisan or nonpartisan organizing investments for years, if not decades. Democrats will not grow in the places they do not sow.

The Harris-Walz campaign spent more than $1.15 billion. Of that $818.2 million was spent on advertising, $101.3 million on campaign events, and $88.6 million on administration salary and overhead. The campaign spent a paltry $65.6 million on voter contact. We can see how well that worked. As the report concludes:

Face-to-face organizing is why movement politics can be so powerful–leading through vision, and by pulling people in, rather than solely pushing information out. Instead, for too long Democrats have tried to negotiate with voters through the media without any meaningful level of direct interaction.

It’s time to again ask voters for their help, for their opinions, and to offer them the ability to be a part of something bigger than a single election. People are ready, it’s up to Democratic leaders to meet them where they are.

Of course, Democratic leaders can’t meet voters where they are if it is done from Washington, D.C. or the metro areas where the party’s favored consultants set up shop. It means getting out to the states, out to the rural counties and knocking on doors.

That is the central message of the 2024 autopsy, and one that Democrats, especially those who have damned the report, ignore at their peril. The DNC’s much maligned autopsy report deserves respect:

Data and science show face-to-face engagement works. Democrats therefore need greater effort in door-to-door canvassing and other forms of face-to-face engagement to earn support and tun out voters. If Democrats instead continue to rely on ineffective tactics instead of thinking through ways to effectively organize communities so neighbors are talking to neighbors, it is acquiescing to an ecosystem defined by its tools, as opposed to designing an effective ecosystem centered on voters.

Afterall, as the 2024 autopsy report makes clear, if Democrats want to win they can’t let tools control our elections.

Joel BleifussMore by this author →

Joel Bleifuss is Barn Raiser Editor & Publisher and Board President of Barn Raising Media Inc. He is a descendent of German and Scottish farmers who immigrated to Wisconsin and South Dakota in the 19th Century. Bleifuss was born and raised in Fulton, Mo., a town on the edge of the Ozarks. He graduated from the University of Missouri in 1978 and got his start in journalism in 1983 at his hometown daily, the Fulton Sun. Bleifuss joined the staff of In These Times magazine in October 1986, stepping down as Editor & Publisher in April 2022, to join his fellow barn raisers in getting Barn Raiser off the ground.