DNC briefs top Democrats on audit of 2024 White House loss

Late spending, exacerbated by a mid-battle candidate switch, and lack of attention to voters’ top concerns are among the reasons Democrats’ lost the White House last year, the Democratic National Committee says in its assessment of the defeat.

The DNC started briefing top Democrats this week on parts of its post-election review, a highly anticipated post-mortem for a party still divided over what led to President Donald Trump’s second victory and how to forge a path back to electoral power.

DNC officials argued Democrats didn’t spend early or consistently enough to engage and persuade voters, one of several problems the party faced in 2024, the committee said. Swapping Joe Biden with Kamala Harris atop the ticket intensified those systemic, long-term problems for the party, the officials said, according to two people briefed by the DNC this week and granted anonymity to discuss those conversations. So far, Biden's age has not come up, they said.

The DNC officials said the party’s failure to respond to voters’ top issues led to losses across once-core constituencies, including working class voters. One of the people briefed said they understood that assessment to mean Democrats “didn’t talk enough about bread-and-butter issues, and instead, we talked about social issues, social anxieties.” That could portend a DNC critique of the Harris campaign, which some Democrats said emphasized abortion and democracy over the economy and immigration.

The DNC is not expected to release its post-election report until after the New Jersey and Virginia elections in November, arguing privately they must focus on the off-year races in which Democrats appear poised to win the blue states.

The third person briefed on the report said it will examine Democrats’ role in the media ecosystem, advocacy, organizing and technology, and make recommendations for how the party can improve. It will also analyze paid content, messaging, candidate travel and spending decisions from last year.

One of the people described the takeaways as “one, we can’t invest late in building out infrastructure in the states, and two, long-term investment is more important than late investment.”

“The problem with our side — we saw it in 2016, 2020 and 2024 — the money comes late and we need the money to come earlier. The issue for our side is not the lack of money, it’s how late it comes,” the person added.

Even so, it’s not clear how some of these conclusions square with reality.

The Biden campaign did only maintain a skeletal on-the-ground staff in some battleground states, worrying in-state Democrats, as POLITICO reported in December 2023. But Biden’s campaign also started communicating with voters earlier than any other modern presidential reelection campaign.

Biden’s campaign dropped $25 million on ads in September 2023, earlier than both Barack Obama and Donald Trump’s reelection timelines. It spent another $30 million in March 2024 on ads. At the time, Biden’s team argued this early investment would activate key voters.

What questions the DNC tackles in its post-mortem, what conclusions it draws, and who it blames, if anyone, will inevitably inflame Democrats, reopening wounds over an election in which the party lost ground with voters across every demographic and ceded every swing state.

DNC Chair Ken Martin pledged to publicly release the results after he was elected in February, turning what would end up in the post-election review into a parlor game for frustrated Democrats. Some hope the party will take aim at the consultant class, a position Martin ran on during his in-house race. Some Democrats want the leadership of Harris’ campaign to receive more direct blame, while others point fingers at Future Forward, the flagship super PAC that backed her bid. And others believe the DNC needs to more aggressively reevaluate its own role in the defeat.

It’s also not clear if the report will tackle Biden’s advanced age — a top attack line from the GOP that his team downplayed, but one that was put on national display during his disastrous debate performance — and well as his decision to not exit the race until three months before the election.

So far, in these sessions, the DNC did not call out any person or entity by name, these two people said, but one acknowledged, “I don’t know what’s in the full document.”

When asked about the briefings, a DNC aide said the committee was in regular contact with Democrats to share early insights of its analysis, but added the report was not complete and interviews are still ongoing. The aide warned that topics not covered in the briefings may be addressed in the final assessment.

Two of those briefed said the DNC is also using the sessions to prepare for the New Jersey and Virginia elections, where it’s piloting new voter contact projects.

“The DNC has this core role as an infrastructure hub, and they’re looking critically at where that wasn’t strong enough and early enough,” the second person continued. “There were a lot of conversations about what kind of quality persuasion tactics should be deployed, how long that stuff takes, the perpetual problem of talking to voters at the very end of the cycle.”

They also said the DNC shared an analysis of the Republican ecosystem, particularly focused on their online communications, where Democrats “tend to go dark in the off-years in a way [Republicans] don’t do,” the person added.