Nothing To See Here, Folks

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has conducted an autopsy on the 2024 presidential campaign (thus, it simultaneously conducted an autopsy on Kamala Harris' political career) to see what went wrong, aside from everything.  The report is now completed and awaiting review.

Except for one thing: DNC chair Ken Martin (below) won't release it to the public.

Martin is trying to rebuild the Democratic Party after it lost a great deal of credibility with voters in 2024 and he should be doing the opposite of what Trump does by calling for full transparency in how to run things.  Yet, Martin, the de facto leader of the Democratic Party, won't share with anyone his committee's findings on why Harris lost in 2024. 

Maybe he's afraid to admit to anyone that, yes, perhaps it was a mistake to nominate a black woman with a Jewish husband to run for President.  More likely, he found a damning defect in the party's messaging that might offend a key demographic in the party's coalition - say, that the party shouldn't have campaigned so much on the rights of non-heterosexuals when more people wanted to hear about the economy.  And short of this report being leaked, we'll never know just what the main finding was.  But it takes a lot of gall to lead a party demanding the release of the Epstein files (which I support) for the sake of transparency while keeping the DNC 2024 autopsy report under wraps. 

As for Martin's tenure on running the Democratic National Committee and thus, by extension, the Democratic Party, I can't evaluate how well he's been doing his job, because I frankly can't find any evidence that he's doing anything.  He's not out there answering Trump's lies, and he's given candidates for office minimal, almost token support.  Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia owe their gubernatorial election victories to themselves and to their talented campaign teams, not Martin, and I think I can safely assume that Martin and the DNC gave no genuine support to Zohran Mamdani in his New York City mayoral campaign.  Releasing the autopsy report on the presidential election that broke America is one of the many things, in fact, that Martin has not done.

Once again, Martin O'Malley, Maryland's sixty-first governor, has been vindicated for his warnings despite the fact that no one seems to care.  (Wait - did I just type "seems to"?)  O'Malley had been calling for a hands-on approach to down-ballot elections ever since he was in his first gubernatorial term in Maryland, warning the DNC back in 2009 - 2009! - that the Republicans were already doing the groundwork necessary to gain more power in state legislatures, as well as win congressional seats and governorships, with the knowledge that those who control the state legislatures control congressional redistricting. O'Malley's advice went unheeded, and in 2010 the Republicans won up and down the ballot all over the country.  Then-DNC chair Tim Kaine was deposed, but his successor was Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, whose role in screwing up the 2016 presidential campaign you already know about.

Anyway, O'Malley ran for DNC chair in early 2025 after quitting his job as Social Security Administration commissioner (before Trump could fire him), and he'd already shown what it takes to win elections for every available office, given his Win Back Your State (WBYS) political action committee's success in helping to flip fourteen state legislative chambers to the Democrats in 2018 . . . success that the mainstream press and even The Nation declined to acknowledge.  Given all that - and given that Democrats likely confuse WBYS with an AM radio station in a little Illinois town southwest of Peoria with those same call letters - O'Malley finished a distant third in a three-person field (sound familiar?) in his bid for DNC chair, mainly because no one knew who he was (sound familiar?).

Times may change, but one thing remains constant - no matter how many times Martin O'Malley shows how hip he is to the Democratic Party's troubles, all Democrats hear coming from him is a faint buzzing.  And rather than listen to what he has to say, the Democrats would rather try a different guy to run their party because he has a more impressive CV in party operations.

Martin ran the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party for fourteen years beginning in 2011 and has a record of success in Minnesota, having gotten the state party out of debt and won numerous elections.  When you realize that Minnesota hasn't elected a Republican U.S. Senator since 2006, hasn't elected a Republican governor since 2006, and hasn't been carried by a Republican presidential candidate since 1972, though, it's hard not to think that, at the time of his elevation to DNC chair, Martin was already coasting.