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michael selig
Why the DNC 2024 Autopsy Is a Giant Turd
There is plenty in the report to show that the Democratic Party took lessons from its defeat in 2024. The problem is that it learned all the wrong lessons because the party refuses to ask the right questions.
May 22, 2026
This week the DNC released its autopsy of the 2024 election. DNC chair Ken Martin sat on it for months, assured us there was no smoking gun, promised he’d already been sharing the lessons, and then finally dropped the 48,000 words on a Thursday with a note on the front saying the findings don’t reflect the views of the DNC. He released the autopsy and disowned it simultaneously.
I get why he’d disown it. It’s a big turd. But the whole time he buried it, Martin kept saying the lessons from this report were already being put to work. Lessons. We’re keeping the focus on the lessons, he’d say. We’ve been releasing the lessons. I read it, most of it. It’s not that there are no recommendations. There are plenty. Go heavier on digital and connected TV, lighter on broadcast. Organize earlier. Rebuild the state parties. Those are the lessons. If they’ve taken any of them, they’ve taken the wrong ones, and there’s a reason for that.
Every question in the report is a variation on the same question. How do we campaign better with what we’ve got? How do we market this thing more effectively to the people we’re trying to sell it to? Never once do they stop and ask whether the thing they’re selling is bullshit. Whether the product is any good. Whether a single promise in it would fix a single person’s life.
Every problem this autopsy was built to diagnose is still here in 2026, we’ve yet to solve a damn one of them.
It was never about governing. It was about winning for the sake of winning, with no theory of what to do with the power once they have it. The DNC still isn’t looking for a mission of its own. It tells the campaigns to build their own contrast and definition and leaves the meaning to everyone else. The party is a machine with no idea what it’s for.
To the contrary, it’s pretty pleased with itself. The report never once treats the Biden record as a failure. Its gripe about Bidenomics isn’t that it failed people, it’s that the message leaned on big macro statistics instead of the daily reality people were actually living. When the party lost down the ballot, the report decided strong local candidates just needed to define themselves better. They’re certain Democrats are doing a great job, and that it’s just their inability to explain how awesome they are that keeps them out of power.
What I see in this report is the Biden administration in miniature. Biden was sold to us, by the press and by his own people, as proof of what Democrats could do if they got back to their FDR roots. We got the CHIPS Act. We got the IRA. We got the bipartisan infrastructure law. We were told it was the most historic spending in generations. But the rubber never hits the road. Lives weren’t transformed. Why? Because these people refuse to admit that the systems they are funding are no longer productive.
They refuse to look at the difference between an input and an output. Effort and results. You can pour trillions into a financialized housing market and a six-trillion-dollar healthcare industry, but if you never touch the monopolies and the middlemen and the rot underneath, nothing useful comes out the other side. It’s worse than that. Pour more money into an out-of-control healthcare industry and all you’ve built is a stronger monopoly, a more powerful opponent.
It was never about governing. It was about winning for the sake of winning, with no theory of what to do with the power once they have it.
The net result of all that historic spending is a Democratic Party that seventy percent of voters can’t stand and that can’t get above water with its own base. A lot of money. A lot of effort. Nothing delivered. Same as the report.
If you doubt where the party’s head is, count the words. The report runs 48,000 of them. “Spend” shows up 350 times. “Data,” 226. “Organizing,” 211. “Fundraising,” 150. “Monopoly,” zero. “Cost of living,” zero. “Affordability,” four. “Healthcare,” twice. That’s not an analysis of a country in pain. That’s a sales team studying its own pipeline.
Then there’s the New York Times, coming to the rescue with much-needed polling and data. The paper of record put out a poll a few days ago, I assume in an effort to find out how Americans actually feel and what they want from their politics and government. Among people who plan to vote for Democrats, socialism runs favorable by twenty-seven points, 49 to 22. Those same people turn around and say, 52 to 25, that the party should move to the center to win. The Times wants you to read that as confused voters. They aren’t confused. The question is garbage. This is the paper that fancies itself the one asking the hard questions and uncovering the real America, and the hard question it managed to come up with was whether the party should move left, right, or not at all on healthcare.
What does that mean? What’s the policy? What changes in your life? They don’t say. You decide. They never asked whether you want a zero-copay, zero-cost national health plan. They never asked whether we should go back to a country where the states and the cities and the government own some of the hospitals and the clinics and the research labs. They asked left or right, defined nothing, and then acted stunned when people handed them a tangle.
They asked exactly one real policy question in the whole poll. Whether you’d rather have a candidate who lowers prices by going after corporate monopolies and price gougers, or one who lowers prices by deregulating and building more. Better than two to one, people said go after the ones with the power. The reason was sitting right there. The good sense was sitting right there. They just wouldn’t go looking for it anywhere else.
The good sense was sitting right there. They just wouldn’t go looking for it anywhere else.
They keep us trapped in left and right because it’s the frame they know how to sell. But the world isn’t left and right, and I’m not sure it ever was. It’s something they lay over the top of us, the same way they sort us into black, white, Latino, Jew, Gentile, Muslim, Quaker, the way a zoologist sorts fish into types. It might be a fine theory for eking out a marginal election here and there. It’s a useless theory for fixing a broken system. And there’s overwhelming agreement out there that the system is broken.
Every problem this autopsy was built to diagnose is still here in 2026, we’ve yet to solve a damn one of them. The NYT poll proves it. Same disgust, same broken trust, same party underwater with its own people. Nothing got fixed because nothing got understood. And they’re going to win anyway. Not because they earned it. Because the other side is handing it to them.
So they’ll win in November, call it proof the model works, and walk right back into the same wall in 2028 having learned nothing. Winning is the very thing that lets them skip getting better.
We’re in a deeply unpopular war in the Middle East. Gas is climbing. The president is corrupt as hell and everyone can see it. The headwind is so strong that, as Pelosi once put it, you could run a glass of water with a D next to its name and win in half these districts. So they’ll win in November, call it proof the model works, and walk right back into the same wall in 2028 having learned nothing. Winning is the very thing that lets them skip getting better.
So no, I don’t think we live in a left-right world anymore. We live in a world of capacity, of competency, of outcomes. That’s the whole game now, and it’s exactly where the government and the corporations have failed us, over and over, while the political class argues about a spectrum that means nothing to a family trying to buy groceries. It is not baked in. I’ve spent ten years trying to build something that takes that seriously, and I’m going again, harder, with my latest political project: A Fight Worth Having.
How we do it, and why I think the people telling us to keep our hands clean have it exactly backwards, is next.
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Palestinian UN Ambassador Drops Bid for VP of General Assembly Following US Threats
“A Palestinian vice presidency at the General Assembly would not change power realities on the ground, but it would normalize Palestinian statehood claims... That is precisely what the United States is attempting to block.”
May 22, 2026
The Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations withdrew his bid to become a vice president of the UN General Assembly on Thursday following threats from the Trump administration to strip the visas of the entire Palestinian delegation, according to NPR.
The Palestinian envoy, Riyad Mansour, has been an outspoken critic of Israel's actions toward Palestinians, particularly since the beginning of the genocidal war in Gaza, which he said has entailed "the collective punishment of over two million Palestinians."
He has been Palestine’s permanent UN observer for more than two decades and had earlier this year planned to run for president of the General Assembly, though he bowed out following US pressure.
The Guardian reported that on Tuesday, the US State Department sent a diplomatic cable to the US embassy in Jerusalem instructing it to pressure the Palestinian Authority (PA)—the governing body of the occupied West Bank—to withdraw its bid for one of the 21 vice presidencies of the General Assembly as well.
General Assembly vice presidents have a role in setting the body’s agenda and filling in when the president is absent. The UN is scheduled to hold elections amongst Assembly members on June 2.
The US cable said Mansour “has a history of accusing Israel of genocide"—as leading human rights groups and experts have—and that his presence would “undermine” the objectives of President Donald Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” in Gaza, which a recent Human Rights Watch report said has fallen fall short of its promises to provide aid to Palestinians and has allowed Israeli forces to continue killing them with little pushback despite a ceasefire.
The cable said, “We will hold the PA responsible if the Palestinian delegation does not withdraw its [vice presidential] candidacy” by Friday, “and consequences will follow.”
The cable threatened to revoke the US visas of all Palestinian officials. The US already revoked most of them back in August, but rolled back the ban on those who were visiting as part of the annual UN summit. “It would be unfortunate to have to revisit any available options,” the cable said.
It also threatened that Israel would continue to withhold tax revenue that it owes to the Palestinian Authority, which was blocked by Israel's far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, at the beginning of the war in October 2023. The money being withheld by Israel accounts for 60% of the PA's revenue.
A person familiar with the matter told NPR that Mansour specifically would refrain from running for the position for the next two years, which was interpreted as a reference to the end of Trump's term as president.
The US is prohibited from blocking UN officials from visiting the body's New York headquarters under a 1947 agreement. However, the US has blocked visas for officials from enemy countries, including Russia and Iran, as well as the former leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Arafat.
Hady Amr, who served as a senior State Department official on Palestinian affairs under the Obama and Biden administrations, told NPR that expelling diplomats is extremely rare outside of "extreme situations like Russian espionage or election interference."
Amr said, "Generally, it's counterproductive because you need diplomats to work out problems between countries, and by expelling diplomats, you're undermining not only their ability to solve problems, but the abilities of the United States as well."
Tawfiq Al-Ghussein, a London-based researcher who specializes in modern Middle Eastern history and the displacement of Palestinians, said on social media that "the significance of this is not merely procedural."
"Washington is effectively trying to prevent even symbolic Palestinian institutional visibility within the UN system because it understands that international legitimacy matters politically, legally, and diplomatically," Al-Ghussein said. "A Palestinian vice presidency at the General Assembly would not change power realities on the ground, but it would normalize Palestinian statehood claims within the architecture of international governance itself. That is precisely what the United States is attempting to block."
“The irony is extraordinary: The same power that lectures the world endlessly about democracy and international order is reportedly threatening visas and diplomatic consequences to stop Palestinians from holding a largely ceremonial UN role,” he continued. "It reveals once again that the issue was never 'peace negotiations' as such, but control over who is permitted institutional legitimacy in the international system."
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Crypto, AI Industries Setting Up ‘Pop-Up Super PACs’ to Defeat Big Tech Critics in Dem Primaries
The goal of these political action committees, explained one journalist, is to make sure voters “never find out who is funding ads before a campaign happens.”
May 22, 2026
Corporate interests are meddling in Democratic primaries by setting up what are being described as "pop-up super PACs" aimed at taking down candidates who are critical of Big Tech.
During a Friday episode of The Intercept Briefing podcast, political reporter Matt Sledge outlined how US campaign finance law allows for moneyed interests to swoop into political campaigns at the last minute and flood the airwaves with misleading ads about progressive candidates.
Specifically, Sledge said that Big Tech-affiliated groups have figured out how to "game campaign finance deadlines and create super PACs, or political action committees, to funnel money to other super PACs so that reporting deadlines are missed."
As a result, said Sledge, these “pop-up super PACs" can bombard voters with last-minute propaganda in the closing days of campaigns—and voters will "never find out who is funding ads before a campaign happens."
"Some of these newer industries that are getting in on the campaign spending game, like crypto and artificial intelligence, are also setting up entire networks of super PACs," Sledge added, "sometimes a mama or a papa super PAC, and then a Democratic-affiliated super PAC and a Republican-affiliated super PAC so that both donors can channel their money to one party affiliate and to make it a little harder for voters to track where all the money is coming from."
A Thursday report from Politico documented how a mysterious super PAC called Lead Left has been been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to benefit Maureen Galindo, a Democratic candidate for US Congress in Texas who has been broadly condemned for comments about transforming a local immigration detention facility into a "prison for American Zionists."
Democrats have accused GOP-backed interests of funding Lead Left, which they say is misleadingly posing as a progressive organization, to boost the prospects of fringe candidates such as Galindo.
In a video posted to social media on Friday, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) noted that members of his caucus from across the ideological spectrum had condemned Galindo, and said that "Republicans must immediately stop boosting her candidacy."
"This candidate is being propped up by a Republican shadowy super PAC to elevate her in the primary," Jeffries said, "because they know she'll be an incredibly weak general election candidate."
People of goodwill have forcefully rejected the antisemitic and anti-American candidate in the TX-35 run-off.
Republicans must immediately stop boosting her candidacy. pic.twitter.com/CUFhqvEdLQ
— Hakeem Jeffries (@hakeemjeffries) May 22, 2026
According to Politico, such operations have been occurring throughout the country.
"Shady PACs have become a staple of the cycle, and modern campaigns generally," Politico reported. "In two House special elections last year in Virginia and Arizona, pop-up PACs spent on ads and avoided having to disclose who was behind them until after primary contests were complete. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has used shell PACs to shield its involvement in some races this year. Another group, Real Change PAC, started spending in New Jersey’s 7th District on Wednesday."
Last week, the Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission, accusing Lead Left of both "strategically gaming federal reporting deadlines to avoid disclosing the sources of its election spending," while also violating "federal campaign finance laws requiring full transparency about the recipients of that spending" in a scheme to conceal "crucial information about how it is spending its money."
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'Good Riddance': Tulsi Gabbard Resigns as Trump's Director of National Intelligence
"She never should've had this job to begin with," said one Democratic lawmaker.
May 22, 2026
Tulsi Gabbard resigned on Friday after serving as US President Donald Trump's Director of National Security during his second term in the White House.
"Good riddance," said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) in response. "She never should've had this job to begin with."
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