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election 2024
Electile Dysfunction—Why Can’t the Dems Get Their Polls Up?
The Democratic Party cannot afford to attend to the material needs of its traditional popular base because it is terrified of offending its donor class.
May 27, 2026
“The Republicans go for the jugular; the Democrats go for the capillaries,”—Kevin Phillips
With the recent release of the long-withheld, but little anticipated Democratic National Committee “autopsy” of the 2024 presidential electoral loss, we’re back to the perennial questions of which issues should receive priority; how should messaging and narrative around those issues be crafted; which wing(s) of the party should be amputated before their rot infects the entire organism, suburban soccer moms or inner city youth; and on and on. All good questions, but ultimately, in present circumstances, unanswerable except in the most platitudinous, hand-waving ways. The most fundamental dilemma resides in the Faustian bargain the party entered beginning in the 1970s, and the result of that bargain is neatly captured in Sheldon Wolin’s 2010 coinage “the inauthentic opposition”:
While the transformed Republican Party reveals what a “party of government” might look like under inverted totalitarianism, the Democrats reveal the fate of opposition politics under inverted totalitarianism. The Democrats’ politics might be described as inauthentic opposition in the era of Superpower [i.e., the US after the fall of the Soviet Union]. Having fended off its reformist elements and disclaimed the label of liberal, it is trapped by new rules of the game which dictate that a party exists to win elections rather than to promote a vision of the good society… Accordingly, the party competes for an apolitical segment of the electorate, “the undecided,” and puzzles how best to woo religious zealots. Should Democrats somehow be elected, corporate sponsors make it politically impossible for the new officeholders to alter significantly the direction of society. [This point is exquisitely exemplified by the first couple of years of the Obama administration, when they held the federal trifecta and still managed to privilege the kleptocratic banksters of the housing crisis and the war criminal gangsters of the W. Bush regime.] The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that, for the poor, minorities, the working class, anticorporatists, pro-environmentalists, and anti-imperialists, there is no opposition party working actively on their behalf.
The origins of this current malaise date back to the mid 1970s, and followed the actions taken by business class elites responding to the exhortations contained in the now-famous Powell Memorandum. This was a secret 1971 memo from then-corporate lawyer Lewis Powell to the Secretary of the US Chamber of Commerce. The memo wasn’t revealed to the public until well after Powell had been appointed to the Supreme Court, where he continued to wage his ideological battle in defense of capitalism and corporate power (including, of course, free speech rights articulated in cash). In the memo Powell argued that:
The US Chamber of Commerce should lead an assault upon the major institutions, universities, schools, the media, publishing, the courts, in order to change how individuals think about the corporation, the law, culture, and the individual.
US businesses, Powell suggested, did not lack the resources for such an effort, particularly if they were pooled. That is, if people started to think together as a class rather than as individual firms and corporations. The US Chamber of Commerce took up this challenge in a very dramatic way. It expanded its base from around 60,000 firms in 1972 to about a quarter of a million just a decade later. Other elite organizational forms also began to coalesce around this core following the advice of the memo. These included think tanks (e.g., the Heritage Foundation, established 1973 by Adolph Coors), as well as corporate money pumps to operationalize the memo’s chief objectives.
One of the most prominent of these organizations was the Business Roundtable, founded in 1972, and comprising CEOs whose corporations at the time accounted for about half of the US gross national product. During this period, through political action committees, the Roundtable was spending about $900 million annually on political matters, a very significant sum at the time. These newly emerging entities provided a mechanism for corporations to contribute substantial funds to political campaigns and candidates, authorized in large measure through a number of Supreme Court rulings, several written by Powell himself.
These PACs, which were just beginning to have a political presence (there were 89 PACs in 1974, and around 1,500 by 1982) gave to both parties largely in equal measure in the 70s, but began leaning heavily toward the Republicans, who had little difficulty aligning their platforms with capital corporate interests. This was also the moment that the traditional political base of the Republican Party began to merge with the Christian Right and with white working classes, who were persuaded that they had been left behind by affirmative action and other “illegitimate” policies (now, of course, cloaked as DEI and “wokeness”).
The problem for anyone struggling to get by, as this alliance portrayed it, was not capitalism and the neoliberalization of the society and economy. The real problem was liberals, who had used excessive state power to provide for special groups. The prevalent narrative, more pertinent now than ever, was the idea of unworthy “others” cutting in line ahead of worthy citizens: “You've worked hard. You've played by the rules. You're not getting ahead. Well, it's not that the system is stacked against you. It's that these people, who are undeserving, are getting more advantages than you get.” The Republican political base (and now most particularly MAGAnites) could be energized through positive mobilizations of things like religion and cultural nationalism, but it could also be turned out through very negative, though coded, though I would say increasingly less coded if not blatant, racism (e.g., President Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy”), xenophobia, homophobia, and anti-feminism.
Democrats, seemingly, were more conflicted, at least at that time, between support for their base and the need to pursue big money. That ambivalence, at least within the ranks of the Democratic Party establishment in its current manifestation, has now all but disappeared and constitutes the irreconcilable contradiction that plagues the party now. To return for a moment to Wolin:
By ignoring dissent and by assuming that the dissenters have no alternative, the party serves an important, if ironical, stabilizing function and in effect marginalizes any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.
According to critical geographer David Harvey, the structure that emerged out of this political realignment was as simple as it was predictable and durable. The Republican Party could, and still can, marshal massive financial resources and mobilize its popular base to vote against its own material interests on cultural or religious grounds, while simultaneously advancing the capital accumulation policies (ongoing war and arms sales, lowered taxation, massive deregulation, privatization of public goods and services) of their elite masters.
The Democratic Party, conversely, could not, and still cannot, afford to attend to the material needs (e.g., a national healthcare system, affordable housing, environmental and consumer protection, financial and anti-trust regulation, a peace dividend) of its traditional popular base because it was and is terrified of offending its donor class. Given the asymmetry, the political hegemony of the Republican Party became more sure over this period, and has relegated the Democrats, even when in power, to their current position of inauthenticity. If and until this most fundamental contradiction can be resolved, the policies and messaging will remain flaccid, impotent, and unsatisfying. Under these circumstances we can aptly paraphrase Phillips, to wit: So now the Democrats also go for the jugular. Unfortunately, it’s too often their own.
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The 'Autopsy' Written by a Corpse
Stay as far away as you can from this DNC report. Trust me.
May 24, 2026
After an extended pressure campaign, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin finally agreed to release the DNC’s “autopsy report” on the 2024 election. It’s the first document I’ve ever read that would have been better if it had been written by AI. Martin himself said the report “does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards.” That’s for damn sure. As we’ll see, however, that doesn’t let Martin off the hook.
I downloaded the document before reviewing my news feed, where I quickly learned that many like-minded people began exactly as I did: by searching for the word “Gaza.” Result? “Not found.” I then tried “Palestine.” Result? “Not found.” How about “Israel”? “Not found.”
These omissions are particularly striking since one activist group was told by report author Paul Rivera that DNC data showed that the administration’s support for the Gaza genocide was, “in their words, a ‘net-negative’ in the 2024 election.” Axios, which reported on that exchange, added that it “independently verified that Democratic officials conducting the autopsy believed the issue harmed the party’s standing with some voters.”
RootsAction was one of the groups pressing for the autopsy’s release, and co-founder Jeff Cohen called the document “almost worthless.” Cohen condemned the failure to mention “the Biden/Harris administration’s Israel policy that abetted the Gaza massacre,” Biden’s initial decision to run for re-election, and what he called Kamala Harris’ “lack of principles.”
Other words that can’t be found in the autopsy include “war,” “military,” “defense” (in the military sense), “peace,” “Medicare,” and “Social Security.” The report fails to address either the US’ runaway military spending or the ongoing attempts to undermine the country’s social contract.
The report’s only conceivable value will be for future anthropologists, who will find it provides considerable insight into the culture and folkways of the professional Democratic class. Its introduction reads like the kind of word salad a teenager might come up with when asked to write a 1200-word essay on a topic they forgot to study. There’s a lot of meandering, some restatements of the assignment, and a hastily looked-up quotation. Don’t read it unless you’re prepared to wade through prose like this:
... the voters decide which choice is most resonant. One party declares itself the winner, and the other party declares that the fight is far from finished.
Effective parties, understanding history rarely repeats itself, it does often rhyme, make it a point to study electoral outcomes after each cycle to identify potential improvements to every aspect of their campaigns. John Adams argued ‘"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right…and a desire to know."
Believe me, it doesn’t get any better from there.
The document is 192 pages long, but many of those pages are blank. The page called “Leadership Message”: blank. (Any comment about that would be like shooting fish in a barrel.) “Executive Summary”: blank. And so on.
The section entitled “Electoral Landscape” includes sentences like this: “We must organize everywhere to Win Anywhere”—which doesn’t make any sense. You don’t have to organize everywhere to win anywhere. And Democrats already win somewhere! Those “somewheres” are called “Blue States.” The problem is they have to win more “somewheres,” and you can’t win somewhere if you’re “everywhere”! You have to be there to win there!
The next sentence begins, “Winning Anywhere means providing for a renewed focus on the voters of Middle America and the South ...” Wait. One sentence ago we were everywhere. Now we’re in Middle America and the South, which happen to be two readily-identifiable somewheres.
That’s what consultant-speak will do to the human mind.
The document, perhaps unsurprisingly, praises the centrist Democratic orientation of the late 1980s and 1990s. But the same pro-corporate orientation contributed heavily to the party’s 2024 losses. That’s what you get what you call on a party to emulate the centrists’ “future-focused directive”—by adopting a 40-year-old strategy.
The report also states that “the DNC and ASDC (Association of State Democratic Parties) have conducted more than 1200 interviews to assess the health of our 57 state parties—in every state, district, or territory.” Where are those interviews?
Martin reportedly told DNC members that Rivera no longer “is with or advises the DNC in any capacity.” But the buck stops with the boss, not the consultant.
I get it; Martin has a tough job. But he campaigned for his position by promising an autopsy. When Rivera’s proved to be unusable, Martin was obliged to have it re-done. By failing to do so, he reneged on his campaign promise. In the meantime, a little transparency would have gone a long way toward avoiding the mess he now faces.
Don’t read the DNC document unless you’re a masochist or a journalist (provided there’s a difference between the two). Read this one instead. Stay far away from the DNC report. Trust me, you’ll “win somewhere” by being anywhere else.Keep ReadingShow Less
'Not Up to the Task': Calls Mount for Ken Martin to Resign Over 2024 DNC Autopsy Debacle
"The DNC should select a new leader who demonstrates competence, creativity, moral clarity, and a relentless commitment to actually changing the broken Democratic Party brand.”
May 22, 2026
The disastrous release of the Democratic National Committee's 2024 election "autopsy" report on Thursday has brought about a reckoning for the committee's chair, Ken Martin, who is facing calls to resign from legislators and other influential figures in the party.
The 192-page report, written by strategist Paul Rivera in the wake of former Vice President Kamala Harris' loss to President Donald Trump, was panned as amateurish and incomplete, even more than 18 months after the election. Rivera was reportedly fired on Friday.
Aside from being filled with glaring spelling and factual errors and containing several unfinished sections and self-contradicting annotations, it neglected key issues widely believed to have contributed to the Democratic nominee's defeat: Most acutely, her continued backing of Israel as it perpetrated a genocide in Gaza, her inability to address working- and middle-class voters' concerns about affordability, and the shambolic attempt by former President Joe Biden to run for a second term despite his old age and his earlier indications he would serve for only four years.
Many Democrats now see it as a damning indictment of Martin, who was elected as DNC chair last year in part on promises to conduct a thorough and transparent review of the party's defeat. Not helping was his sudden pivot in late 2025 to attempt to bury the report he once championed, only releasing it this week after it leaked to CNN despite mounting pressure from party members.
On Friday morning, Axios quoted an ideological mix of Democratic legislators describing the report's release as the final straw for Martin.
"He should resign," Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) told Axios, citing "his lack of leadership" and saying it is "utterly nuts it took us this long to release the autopsy."
In a radio interview Thursday, Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said in response to a caller who argued Martin should be replaced: "I agree... Having what we have right now is not doing it."
Rep. Marc Veasey (D-Texas) told Semafor that "there doesn't seem to be a plan to turn things around and the clock is ticking... I believe it's time for him to move on."
Despite a push by Martin's allies to arm state party chairs with talking points expressing that they are "fully confident in his leadership," NOTUS reported that inside private DNC group chats and one-on-one conversations, dissension is brewing, and there is even talk of forcing a vote of no confidence to oust the chairman.
"People feel gaslit" by Martin's flip-flopping, one unnamed DNC member told the outlet. "You kept telling people it was coming, then when you didn’t release it, you didn’t even tell everyone the real reason why.”
“While I don’t believe that there are enough votes to pass a vote of no confidence yet, I think there’s more of a permission structure now to have a more open conversation about it,” said another member who NOTUS described as an ally of Martin's. “If they think this is going to make things go away, no, this is only going to ramp up now.”
That's the hope of many in the party's grassroots, who said the entire saga demonstrated Martin's unfitness for a role with major responsibilities as Democrats head into existentially important elections in 2026 and 2028.
Dan Pfeiffer—a former Obama administration staffer whose Pod Save America podcast cohosts held Martin's feet to the fire as he fought to keep the autopsy hidden—called the release "a disaster of his own making."
"He didn’t pick a qualified person to run the autopsy. The fact that he was apparently shocked by the work product shows there was no oversight of the process," Pfeiffer said on social media. "Once he saw that the report was poorly done, he just decided to start lying to everyone about why it wasn't being released."
"In '28, the DNC will set the primary calendar, decide how delegates are awarded, sponsor the debates, and put on the convention," he said. "If no one trusts the DNC, it will be harder to unite the party around the eventual nominee."
Amanda Litman, the president of Run For Something, a group that recruits progressive candidates for office, said in a video posted to social media Thursday that putting together a report composed of "pure gibberish," without access to any of the underlying interviews or materials that buoyed its conclusions, called into question the DNC's ability to be "a fair, competent... conductor of the Democratic presidential primary."
"Ken Martin is not up to the task of being DNC chair—the most important part of which is preparing to run the presidential primary process with trust and competency—and should resign," she added on Friday.
David Hogg, who served as the DNC vice chair in 2025 before being pushed out by Martin over his efforts to support primary challengers against some entrenched party elders, said the autopsy saga was a "demoralizing joke" for the party.
In a release from his political action committee, Leaders We Deserve, Hogg said, "Martin should resign, and the DNC should select a new leader who demonstrates competence, creativity, moral clarity, and a relentless commitment to actually changing the broken Democratic Party brand."
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