Autopsy Dissection

A truncated version of the Democratic Party's autopsy of the party's 2024 election loss to Trump is out, and it essentially says that the party didn't relate to voters enough.

Thank you, Captain Obvious!

I have no hope in the Democratic Party learning from its mistakes, mainly because it never has - at least not in the past 45 years.  Also, progressives and moderates see the failure of the party to communicate effectively with voters see the results of the autopsy - such as they are - and derive entirely different takeaways.  Progressives say that Kamala Harris lost because the party wouldn't condemn Israeli atrocities in Gaza (which the autopsy did not mention) and threw marginalized groups under the bus while not talking enough about issues like climate change.  Moderates - and sympathetic ex-Republicans like Rick Wilson - say that Harris lost because they were afraid to offend marginalized groups - hence the party's failure to respond to the Trump campaign's attack ads about transsexual issues - and talked too much about issues like climate change and not enough about the economy.

Both progressives and moderates have this much in common - they both despise DNC chairman Ken Martin.     

Martin is considered a party hack who thinks that all he has to do is tweak the practices of the mainstream Democratic Party and deliver a milquetoast message that tries to appeal to progressives and moderates but ultimately satisfies neither.  The only Democratic strategist who has championed him in recent months is Simon Rosenberg, who insists that Martin is doing the work to strengthen state parties in states dominated by Republicans that Democrats had previously written off.  In other words. Rosenberg is praising Martin for bringing the same pablum message to Alaska, Texas, Iowa and North Carolina that Democrats tried in all seven swing states in 2024 to no avail.  And lest you think that Simon Rosenberg is a seasoned Democratic operative who knows Ken Martin better than I do and therefore I shouldn't critique him so harshly, I need to remind you that Rosenberg was the chap who spent the 2024 election campaign saying that he'd rather be a Democrat than a Republican ("I'd rather be us than them")  and that the Democrats were winning but hadn't won yet.  

The day after the election, I commented on one of Rosenberg's YouTube videos, saying, "I'd rather be them than us."

This disagreement between progressives and moderates, by the way, is not only toxic, it could undermine Democratic chances of winning back one or both houses of Congress.  Take the U.S. Senate race in Michigan, for example.  Progressive Democrat Abdul El-Sayed is leading in the Democratic primary polls over two women, Mallory McMorrow and Hayley Stevens, who are more in the vein of Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer.  Progressives like noted centrist-basher Jennifer Welch are rooting for al-Sayed to win, while veteran Democratic strategist James Carville, who can't stand progressives for being so sanctimonious and elitist, is hoping that one of the women withdraw from the campaign to avoid splitting the anti-El-Sayed vote.  If the movers and shakers of the Democratic Party can't be united in the primaries, how can they be united in the general midterm elections?  

This division in the Democratic Party has been evident for a decade, from the divide between moderate Hillary Clinton and progressive Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential campaign to the 2025 DNC chairman election in which the chief contestants were the moderate Ken Martin and progressive Ben Wikler.  In both contests, a third candidate offered a more unifying strategy to build up the party - Martin O'Malley.  In both cases, he was ignored and came in third place - both times too distant a third place to matter. 😡 

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. 

Where's Ken?

Martin O'Malley must have a sixth sense.

He was right when he said that the Democratic National Committee's failure to concentrate on down-ballot elections in 2010 would lead to a Republican blowout.  He was right when he said that Hillary Clinton could not beat Donald Trump in 2016.  And when Trump won again in 2024, O'Malley must have known what was coming at the Social Security Administration - Musk firing everybody there - when he quit at the end of November and decided he was better off running for the Democratic National Committee chairmanship to help the party fight back.

But after a decade of O'Malley being out of elective office, O'Malley found out that the Democrats still don't care about him.  The chief contestants for the DNC chairmanship election were Ben Wikler, chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, and Ken Martin, chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Martin (below) prevailed in the election last month.

Ominously, Will Saletan of The Bulwark said that O'Malley, in addressing the DNC, gave the clearest and sharpest speech in making his case for what he felt the Democrats needed to do going forward.  But, as usual, Democrats didn't want to hear it.  (Unless, of course, Democratic committee members who elected the chair wrote in "Martin" because they were voting for O'Malley by his first name and the votes got miscounted for Ken Martin, but I doubt that.)

As soon as he became party chair, Martin published a memo, titled "Democrats Will Fight Against Trump's War on Working People."  In it, Martin said that too many Americans see the Democratic Party as the "party of the elites" and the Republican Party as the "party of the working class."  Martin also pledged to get the party out in the country and essentially follow Howard Dean's old fifty-state strategy, going on a national tour of his own that started in early February.  Talking to NBC News, Martin said, "It's time for the DNC to get out of D.C. That means getting out of our comfort zone, having tough but honest conversations with voters, and showing that we're willing to fight for people."   He continued, "It's time for Democrats to show up in all 3,244 counties—red, purple, blue—to make our case."

So where is he?

No, really where is he?

As far as I know, Martin is still on his tour.  But I don't hear about it much - and I've been getting most of my news from anti-Trump podcasts.  The hosts of these podcasts want to know where Martin is, too, and they have more access to what goes on in Washington politics than I do.

This is no small deal.  The end of Joe Biden's political career and the spectacle of Kamala Harris (this is the first time I've mentioned her name here in five weeks, and it may be longer still before I mention it again) being forced into early retirement have left a leadership vacuum in the Democratic Party.  That "deep bench" of Democratic talent hasn't yielded a person who could lead the party into the 2026 midterms and beyond with a positive, inspiring message.  There are no governors who have shown a desire to take up the Democratic mantle.  In Washington, you have New Yorkers Charles Schumer as Senate Democratic leader and Hakeem Jeffries as House Democratic leader - and even though the word "leader" is in their titles, looking to these Brooklyn bumpkins for leadership is like running up to the bridge on a sinking ship and finding out that the captain is Daffy Duck.

Therefore, Ken Martin, as the leader of the Democratic Party's national committee, is the de facto leader of the party at large.  And he'd better start acting like one. Republican National Committee chairs have always acted like the chief honcho in the GOP, even when a Republican is President. As a result, people knew who Lee Atwater, Haley Barbour,  Reince Priebus, and Ronna McDaniel were.  The less media-savvy Ken Martin is as much a cipher as his predecessor Jamie Harrison was. 

Until Martin gets his sea legs as party leader, the Democrats will have to rely on free agents among those in elective office - Eric Swalwell of California, Jasmine Crockett of Texas, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and Jamie Raskin of Maryland in the House and Chris Murphy of Connecticut in the Senate.  But the party really needs someone to lead from the front.  Martin O'Malley, who knows a thing or two about that sort of thing, could have provided that leadership for the party, if not for the country as President.  But again, Democrats weren't interested.    

With the threat of Trump possibly executing dissenters under martial law, let's hope Democrats don't get bored . . . to death.

He's Back . . . Again.

Just when I thought Martin O'Malley's story had an ending, and a happy one at that . . . the semi-legend continues. 😉 

O'Malley resigned as commissioner of the Social Security Administration (SSA) in late November, after only a year and change on the job.  He instituted a number of reforms at the SSA and streamlined the bureaucracy in his brief tenure as commissioner before deciding to move on - a decision he wouldn't have made, I'm sure, if Kamala Harris had won the presidential election.

Instead, O'Malley is running for the job many of his supporters - all twelve of us - were promoting him for in 2016 when Trump won the White House the first time . . . chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

On paper, O'Malley looks like a shoo-in for DNC chair.  He's held three executive positions in public office (mayor, governor, SSA commissioner), he knows how to repeat a message and not make it sound stale when you've heard it for the 2,314th time, he has appealing policies, and he has a solid record of achievement.  But he has stiff competition from Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chairman Ken Martin, who is known for his communication skills and his desire to reach out to as many different demographic groups as possible and make everyone in the Democratic Party understand the stakes they have in ensuring the party's success, and Ben Wikler, the chairman of the state Democratic Party in Wisconsin, where he's had big successes in a state more politically divided than the country is in getting Democrats elected statewide.  Wikler, for his part, believes that the Democrats need to follow the Republicans' example and start "a nationwide permanent campaign, with a battle plan and resources for every state and territory in the country."

Also, both Martin and Wikler are younger than O'Malley, which is a 180-degree flip from when he was the youngest 2016 Democratic presidential candidate among the top three contenders and was shamed for what was perceived to be ageism-charged slights against the (much) more popular Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.  At 62, O'Malley isn't a senior yet, but as the one contender among the top three candidates for the DNC chair who's old enough to have a grandchild in fifth grade, he certainly looks the part of an aging patriarch.

I'm not a Democrat - I prefer to maintain politically independent, even in New Jersey, a closed-primary state - so I will not express a preference for anyone in the DNC chair campaign.  But I will wish O'Malley well.  And may the best candidate win.

Which is another way of saying that I hope Marianne Williamson - another DNC chair candidate - doesn't get it.     

The picture of Martin O'Malley shown above is a screenshot from a YouTube interview he did on one of the site's many podcasts.  Notice that, immediately behind O'Malley's left shoulder, is a portrait of him . . . unfinished, much like Gilbert Stuart's unfinished portrait of George Washington, and, despite being framed, propped up against the wall, not yet ready for proper hanging.  How symbolic.  Because, contrary to what many people may have thought many times before, Martin O'Malley's story is a story that has yet to be completed.