this is why democrats lose
sorry to be a bernie bro here, but brief recap: kamala harris became the VP nominee in 2020 in exchange for jim clyburn endorsing joe biden so he could win south carolina convincingly and kill bernie sanders's campaign after biden barely contested the first three primaries. this implication is written on her wikipedia page. it isn't some kind of fringe conspiracy theory. biden-harris won the general election in a landslide not because they were some unsinkable generational talent in campaigning -- joe ran for president twice before and didn't make it past the primaries, and kamala dropped out of the 2020 campaign before a single vote was cast -- but because trump did a godawful job of responding to the economic shock of COVID-19 and the social-political shock of the 2020 uprisings.
joe reneged on the quiet suggestion that he would be a one-term president that he made to get voters in 2020 to stop worrying about how old he is, everything blew up in his face because he's not aging well, kamala got elevated to presidential nominee because -- especially given the circumstances under which she got onto the ticket -- even running an open primary would be insulting to both her and a core party constituency, and the democrats spent more money than the republicans to lose "the most important election of our lifetimes" to them worse than they lost the 2016 election, the last "most important election of our lifetimes".
the democratic party promised that they would have some kind of explanation for how and why they burned $1,500 million in six months to lose, then word got out that it wouldn't actually talk about the candidates or the campaign process, and today they declared that actually it won't get released publicly at all.
the parts that leaked up front make it sound like the important lessons learned in the after-action report are "spend more on ads on youtube and netflix,"1 so, like, no great loss, but two points:
- if you think they're actually keeping this party-distribution-only, I've got a state highway bridge that's failed its past five structural inspections to sell you. they will sneak it into the hands of big donors and bundlers in order to go through the motions of self-reflection to try to open rich people's wallets back up (who knows if this will actually work for them, but they'll try), while keeping it away from the media and public.
- the real poetry of american politics is that, after losing two must-win elections in a decade through a series of poor decisions made in smoky backrooms to try and fail to secure a posterity for important party figures rather than to actually serve as a functioning political party, the democrats -- now almost broke, and feckless as an opposition -- preemptively scoped anything out of the report that could reflect poorly on important party figures, and now they're making sure that even the pro forma report left over never gets seen by anyone who will talk about it, because they're hoping that they can just sit back and watch while the other guy runs the country so badly they can win the next election without having to change anything at all.
I love the power of democracy.
the one substantive learning mentioned in the NYT writeup is that democrats "operated from a defensive posture on issues like public safety and immigration, while ceding ground on the economy to Republicans." I'm sorry but they were constantly talking about the economy at the time. they didn't "cede ground" on the economy to the Republicans, they just had no interest in doing anything about it beyond pointing at the line in the monthly jobs report going up and bragging about how things weren't as bad as everyone thought they were.↩