Of course BO was not (gasp), FEMALE as well as black.

“ 'I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards,' Martin wrote in an essay on Substack on Thursday. 'I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it. I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on it. But transparency is paramount.' "

Democrats snatching defeat from the jaws of victory again...

POTUS Biden performed admirably well with wisdom as a POTUS for the People.

POTUS Biden was less infirm than Trump but received less than full backing from our side.

The DNC avoided that topic too.

Identity politics the Republicans were. Your right Kamala wouldn't have gotten their votes no matter how much she went to their state and sucked up to them.

that Republicans and Bill Maher like to fixate on. Kamala mainly addressed economic issues and the dangers of another Trump presidency.

straight, white, overtly religious white men deserve a place a the table as well....to them, that is "too much time on identity politics".

Biden was elected as a one term fixer. It should have been open from day one that his successor would be found from an open process. Events proved that point exactly. The moment I heard he was trying for a second term, I knew there were going to be problems.

It may have been ego. He may have wanted to run (can't really blame him too much for that).

Remember that we all endured the spectacle of Diane Feinstein's last days in the Senate in 2022/2023. Biden thought a little too highly of himself.

He had a long history of public service prior to being president. His years in the Senate and as vice president were all good overall and as president he got substantial legislation passed and helped make the vaccine rollout go as smoothly as possible in states that weren't obstinate. Did some of his policies/legislation contribute to the inflation that brought his approval down? Absolutely, he wasn't perfect, but who is?

I think it's really hard to walk away from a dream as big as being president. Yes, ideally he would have with how he appeared at the debate, but we could say the same about Trump and how he's all but drooling on himself falling asleep in cabinet meetings. It was a job he tried for as far back as 1988. And while I think he had diminished physical capacity (as we all do as we age), it's really really hard to accept that. My grandfather didn't want to accept he couldn't drive any longer until it was found he was parking by bumping other cars. Being seen as "weaker" or "incapable" is hard. Look at how many athletes can't walk away before falling apart.

And no one person is responsible alone for Trump, even including Trump. If there wasn't an appetite for his approach, he'd have had as much success running for office as George Lincoln Rockwell did.

But the fact that he didn't step down was disastrous and it was foreseeable long before the debate. David Axelrod warned about it six months earlier. The error was obvious to many when he announced he would go ahead an run in 2024. From that point it was like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

I know I don’t feel the same about him.

I seriously don't think so. The closest, but not the same, was he would be a transition.

There was an interesting article end of year 2024, that made the speculation that the overall success of the mid terms vs historical precedent might have led to calculations be Biden and others that he should run again. Remember the context then was that especially given the small margins, he was very successful in passing things like the infrastructure bills.

Now imagine, we lost more in the midterms. I would bet he would have been pushed to announce he was going to continue fighting for American fairness as President and not seek a second term.

Note qualifiers of "reportedly"

Intentionally led voters to believe he wouldn’t run for a second term.

Besides, if lots of people felt that Biden shouldn't run again, they should have spoken out/stepped up during the primary. I know that there were a couple non-serious primary candidates, but they obviously did not get any traction.

Biden should have graciously announced he was not running and he should have done it with enough time for a full primary to be held. The results might have been the same. Harris might still have been the candidate. But the country would have felt like they got to choose her. That was a big factor, I felt like. People felt forced into Biden-Trump in 2024, which no one wanted. No one wanted two 80 year old men on the ticket. Terrible choice either way. And no one chose Kamala Harris except Joe Biden. One person picked her. And then after Biden's late withdrawal, the country had another ticket forced on them. If she had run in a primary and been chosen, it would have given her a different sense of momentum, I feel like.

insist that the Vice President is removed as well.

No serious candidate primaried Joe Biden because no serious candidate believed they could actually win a primary over Joe Biden.

No serious candidate challenged Kamala Harris at the convention because no serious candidate believed they could actually win the candidacy over Kamala Harris at the convention.

That would have allowed a regular primary season to play out in winter 2024.

We can nitpick about what he said when he was elected. The reality is he should have known the best thing to do was to do one term, stabilize the country (which he did) and then pass the baton. Haven’t heard a coherent counter argument to any of that beyond “feels”.

Biden was a very good president. I was and still am proud to have voted for him. But I don’t like the way things ended.

the prospect of having to choose between two 80 year old candidates. It sucked all the energy out of the room. It felt like there were zero good choices. No one wanted him to run again. There should have been a vigorous primary, which may have resulted in Kamala being the candidate who ran anyway, but no matter the outcome, it would have made voters feel like they had a CHOICE. The way it played out, voters felt like they had zero choice in Trump-Biden, and zero choice when it ended up being Trump-Harris. This on top of many voters feeling like their dollars weren't buying what they used to and they were in a bad place personally (kitchen table politics), all fresh on the heels of covid, the lack of choice all around led to a lot of resentment, I felt like.

I will always be grateful to Biden for what he accomplished in his term, for the way he took a disastrous situation and turned it around. He is a good, good man. But he made a terrible misjudgment led by ego when he refused to hand over the reins to the next generation within the party, and I blame him (mostly) for 2024, not Kamala.

With that said, I do not think Harris should be our candidate again in 2028. I think the country already had a chance to weigh in and said no. We need to offer up a new ticket with fresh candidates.

I dearly love Joe Biden but he should've realized age was having its way, fair or unfair, and announced he wasn't seeking re-election at the end of 2023 and let a primary process play out. Harris was thrust into an impossible situation and was the only natural answer when in need of a candidate, given the short amount of time left to put together a campaign that got anywhere.

The biggest problem during Biden's tenure was inflation, which started with COVID and the way it ripped through the supply chain. We did not do a good job at educating the public on the root cause there and weren't honest enough about the fact that it was going to take awhile to heal.

Thats pretty much it, everything else is just noise.

In my opinion, this is the order of what caused the losses. Now the DNC can pay me whatever the hell they pay the useless consultants they’re been paying:

Biden’s age
The border
Inflation
Gaza

Then there’s a few specific to Harris:
She never won a primary (not once ever)

She couldn’t admit any faults of the administration or say what she would have done different

Odd VP choice that didn’t quite work (good man, but I personally never quite figured out the Walz pick)

Harris clips from 2020 about taxpayer funded transgender prisoner surgeries (it almost sounded like a parody). This probably had a bigger impact than people realize. The clip was replayed in ads repeatedly. It was gold.

Finally a few general issues with the administration, Other policy issues — not aligning with what the electorate found important compared to what democrats found important (case in point spending on EV infrastructure and heavy emphasis on climate change when the real concern was inflation and economic issues). I don’t think the administration did a good job on explaining or getting the point across on either gender affirmation care for minors or transgender women in sports. Both were classic wedge culture war issues that shouldn’t have become as big of an issue as they did.

The fact that the DNC's report is nothing even close to this thorough is a disgrace.

To me this is an emergency. We need to fire everyone at the DNC and start over.

It barely took five minutes to type this.

There’s no accountability at the organization. It’s pathetic. It’s afraid of pissing anyone off, so it pisses everyone off. They spit out this generic and bland piece of garbage that addresses absolutely nothing.

Trump coming back to power is one of the greatest tragedies in this country’s history. This second term’s negative impact on our republic’s standing can’t be understated. We needed a comprehensive reporting of what actually happened and concrete recommendations for each political level, from those running at the county level to the senate.

We also needed this covering issue by issue, messaging, media, demographic groups… everything. When Obama won in 2008 and 2012 democrats were the party of data and using it to turnout its voters.

I don't think anything has disturbed me this much in years.

The Republicans are stealing the world and there's no apparent organized opposition.

If you watched college football or the NFL in the fall of 2024, you saw that commercial over and over. It got played constantly on CBS and Fox. The Harris campaign admitted they saw polling that showed the commercial was killing them, and they never countered it because they couldn't figure out how.

Most posters on DU would have had some suggestions. Not to mention millions of other Democrats. Wow.

This is beyond appalling.

I saw so many posts on here at the time blaming Abbott for the bussing (and to be fair, I can't stand the man), but I was just like, why on earth isn't Biden stopping the huge migrant surge? It was terrible optics and he did stop it... but only a few months before the election--far too late. That should have happened a few months after he took office.

...catering to those tropes is what has us twisting our party away from it's most dependable of supporters because of feeding into the fears and lies about brown-skinned Americans.

The only reason that republicans are able to use issues like immigration against Democrats is because we've repeatedly bent over as republicans waged openly racist, demagouging attacks on people in this nation with brown skin.

Now the very same peeple in this party who acquiesced to that political hype to try and protect themselves in elections are simply being forced to retreat even further away from defending people who make our nation prosperous and strong.

So much enablng of racists, to the extent that we have Democrats scolding the party for not being as cruel and abusively controlling as republicans toward the humanity breaching our borders; migration which our nation has ALWAYS benefited from, but has been bastardized to the point where ALL brown-skinned people in this are being abandoned subjugated to this privileged politics by a white majority clueless that THEY are the ultimate targets of this racism for dominance by this fascist government and others.

Stand up for people in this nation, not just the citizens. It's literally in the text of the Constitution which acknowledges the rights of all PEOPLE in the country; not just our citizens.

...didn't bother to show up to defeat Trump by voting for Kamala Harris.

Democrats flipped nine Republican-held seats, mostly in blue states, and gained one seat each in Alabama and Louisiana due to new congressional maps

Republicans’ majority shrank to the narrowest since 1930.

As if legislators needed to convince Democrats who voted to stop Trump four years earlier need to be mollycoddled into doing the same again.

What are we supposed to believe these people needed to hear from anyone?

They fucked us supremely, and we're still holding their hands and telling them they were justified in enabling the election of a megalomaniac, convicted felon.

I'm not a Democratic strategist, and I don't come here to make Democratic strategy, but fuck those people to hell for what they did in dicking around about Biden or Harris.

What the actual fuck did they think Trump was going to do about the things they were complaining about? Their stupidity is only exceeded by their hubris.

Not faulting him for those reliable Dem voters who didn't show up for Harris, just pointing out he said they'd be replaced by (two!) suburban GOPers.

He was wrong

...that's not a credible interpretation of his quote.

“For every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in western P.A., we will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin,” he said.

He was making an inartful point about how predicted the race would go. It didn't drive anything but his critics and media hacks writing underneath clickbait titles.

And ANYONE claiming republicans have ever given blue collar workers more than lip service is just lying, and doesn't deserve to be mollycoddled because they chose a wealthy criminal and a party that does nothing but enrich themselves and their CEOs over a party that doesn't little else but represent the people.

Of course, I don't expect anyone who thinks this is a credible attack on Schumer to bother to mention the reams of other words he's used over his decades long career in Congress in actual support of legislative efforts that support working class people in this country.

Anyone who claims the party doesn't is just lying. That's not Schumer's fault that some people choose, anyway, to believe pure bullshit about him and the party.

Democrats have always worked to support the working class, while republicans just talk about it as they undermine them with EVERY vote they take on behalf of their wealthy benefactors instead of working Americans.

It's just mindnumbingly misleading and false to claim he believes or said "we don't need blue-collar workers." It's just sickening to twist what he said just to oppose him. It's just denigrating of Democrats, not to mention his entire career standing up for working people.

I really don't expect, though, that people who make broadsides at Schumer or the party to bother to look to see what his actual advocacy has been, instead of misleading lies like this old, tired claim people other than you have made, encouraging others to adopt this sophistry.

To what end? That people who engage with this lie believe Democrats don't support the working class? Why bend this out of context? It makes no sense at all to me for anyone in the Democratic party to engage in self-destructive sophistry like this.

To what end?

....and it's just sophistry to claim he believed or was expressing that we didn't need WC voters.


Moreover, I'd challenge anyone to find any significant number of voters who read or heard that quote. It's the height of navelgazing, and actually just gobbling up deliberate media fuckery against Democrats and regurgitating it to party supporters.

To what end?

Yeah, sure. I'm supposed to believe that people voted for Trump because, they heard what Schumer said, and they believed that republicans, who've been screwing the working class for decades and decades, believed the grifting Trump and his country club party cared more about them and voted against Democrats for that inanity?

The 'working-class' meme was a euphemism used to describe white supremacist voters who the republicans convinced blacks and immigrants were keeping them from opportunity, instead of the republicans robbing them blind.

The fact that it's being thrown around like it has some deep meaning other than a Klan dog-whistle is really something to behold for this old, black voter.

They voted against the black woman, while their republican party campaigned against the Democratic president and party that lifted the working class up out of the economic mire of EVERY modern republican president in my lifetime.

People who claimed to support blcaks, migrants, and women sat on their hands, and the racists flooded the polls like they flooded the capitol.

He made his statements at a forum sponsored by The Washington Post in June of 2016

(snip)

...he didn't say that the party doesn't need working class voters.

That's a sly attack on the leader and our party which so many have adopted; no matter how incongruous to the truth of what the leader said or what he's advocated and helped advance for the working class all of his career.

It's a bullshit attack that supposes republicans should be more attractive to 'working class voters, but what is really implied for the political purpose that attracts republicans is 'WHITE WORKING CLASS MALES.'

More to the point, white supremacists who are euphemistically described as the 'working class' in these political representations of what the Democrats stand for.

From where I've worked and lived all my life, BLACK WORKERS, who support Democrats in huge percentages in elections, are as 'working class' as any racist voting republican because they've been convinced some brown skinned person like me took their job.

The entire characterization is lost on me, because if it's about me, or people who look like me, it's a complete lie. Democrats are the ONLY party that's EVER supported me as a black man working in this country.

But some people work overtime to convince me that white males who have received the lion's share of benefits and jobs are the one's I should spend political and tax dollar attention on; even as that white majority is being coddled and feted; even as my own community of color is being denigrated and deliberately disadvantaged.

'Working class' in today's politics is just a euphemism for white males. We shouldn't perpetuate such speciousness to the detriment of the most vulnerable among us who don't share their whiteness.

I take your points

More than anything, I wish you could sit down with Schumer and tell him how his words should be crafted in such a way that party faithful aren't burdened with explaining them later

...all of the rest of their concerns could and can still be argued and reconciled in an actual democratic system - one which the person they enabled into office has made impossible to resolve anything these people claimed to care about.

The denial is with the voters who claimed to care about something or the other, but allowed Trump to get back into office.

ZERO responsibility for that defeat taken by these people, and most of them are back today still claiming Gaza, or Biden's age, or 'working class' was the reason they dragged the Democrats more than they ever did republicans, demanding our historically successful incumbent president step down, and expecting his VP to win a THREE MONTH RACE.

It's fucking ludicrous how much time is being wasted blaming the people who actually fiught all throughout for Democrats to win, instead of taking every opportunity to drag them down, and then standing back and going, 'who me?' when they succeeded.

Clearly, they were not addressed, and enough voters rolled the dice for Trump. When you lose twice to a demagogue, you should want to examine everything.

...it gives fealty to people who chose a known felon to serve in the White House again.

And it excuses people who claim to be concerned about issues that Trump and republicans were certain to exacerbate and exploit in a diamatrically opposite manner than ANY Democrat, but refused to show up and vote for the Democratic nominees.

And it reduces the campaign that I witnessed every day of the THREE meager MONTHS Kamala Harris was given to save democracy to the memes that the media and opposition made up out of whole political cloth.

My memory is that too many Democrats did more dragging of the nominees than they did the opposition, like all they knew how to do was wring their hands in apathy, and then sit on them when it was time to vote just to satisfy their own personal pique.

The people they're dragging today were the ones I remember fighting like hell to win.

gives you the feedback you need.

Unfortunate decision.

...and what do they plan on doing with it?

Is the effort to attract more voters to gain the majority in a few months?

Is it to increase the number of Americans voting Democratic?

Where's the through line from the complaints to some productive result for our prospects of a Democratic majority?

What are the actual motivations behind all of the nitpicking? Are they advantaging a personal or issue-driven agenda?

How does this help organize a Democratic majority in November?

It can help through an objective examination, evidently, which did not happen.

...isn't the one looking to exploit this report against themselves.

I mean, who says they haven't made adjustments based on what they believe is relevant and helpful?

This is really about the people who have been whining for this report who are now predictably attacking the Dem party as if that's the point of our advocacy, instead of focusing on republicans.

brow beating, finger pointing, and self-recrimination while MAGAS rush out to vote for more Trump scams, shams, grifts, and wars.

"This divergence [white rural voters shifting Republican] made rural America less politically competitive, giving both parties little incentive to devote substantial resources to winning votes there. Yet it's only Democrats who are endlessly lectured about 'ignoring' rural America, and they do largely ignore it -- if all you're talking about is politics and not policy. ... What isn't widely understood is that Republicans ignore many rural areas, too, for essentially the same reason as Democrats: They know the races there won't be competitive, so they don't need to bother.

"'For the most part, Republicans rack up big margins in red areas by default,' says Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler. ... 'Candidate after candidate would tell me they were working their socks off and never seeing any evidence of a real campaign on the Republican side,' Wikler told us. 'And some of those candidates right before the election told me they were really confident they'd win, because their opponent had essentially done nothing, had barely filed any fundraising, had no field presence to speak of. And yet the Republicans would still win by these massive margins.'"

Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, "White Rural Rage"

...navelgazing instead of focusing our political energy and opposition on the republicans.

Replacing Biden was as good as a republican op. Probably originated as one.

The number of Democrats who have come to believe that dragging their own party is some sort of political genius that gains the party votes at election time is staggering.

I've been told by those on high that this is good and normal, but does it attract votes? Does dragging our own party get us the majority?

If constant critics can't answer that question, they don't deserve to be dominating the political discussions and debates.

There's NOTHING this report is good for except dragging Democrats and providing aid and comfort to the opposition.

what the hell happened, I'd be so fired if I dismissed his questions as "navelgazing".

No one learns anything and going forward time is wasted.

...the one where people who voted for Biden to keep a convicted felon out of office, refused to vote for the black woman who was running to keep the convicted felon out of office.

Those voters refused to fdo THEIR jobs, and I think it's despicable that they risked the things they claimed to be so concerned about by enabling someone into office who was diametrically opposed to EVERYTHING they claim to stand for.

The election was about preserving the ability of Americans to debate and reconcile our differences in a democratic and legislative system of government, and THAT'S what people who claim to be so concerned about the midterms had better start expressing in these posts on this platform they have available.

It was an existential crisis when they abandoned Kamala Harris, and it's an even more existential crisis now.

What are they going to do in the face of it? Sit on their hands again?

What epic fuckery do people who refused to show up and vote the last time around have planned for this next attempt to defend and protect our country? Blame someone else?

It would be as if they're just fine with Democrats arguing among each other in a permanent minority. I mean, what the actual fuck did they expect to happen when they began tearing at Trump's opposition?

Did they imagine that was attracting people they encountered on the platforms where they were spouting their bullshit about the party; where they were dragging the incumbent president and his VP; did they imagine that fuckery was some kind of special super-duper magnet for voters to cast their ballots for Democrats?

Where does their own superior campaigning for Democrats actually begin? Where is their advocacy of the Democratic majority we need to provide a check on the republican regime that enables the corruption and abuse from the Trump WH and government?

When are they going to ever get around to supporting Democrats in a way that makes a positive difference for the party on election day?

It's one thing to advocate for an issue. It's quite another to advocate in this self-defeating fashion that's all the rage among the internet pols today.

How does opposition to the DNC get Democrats to a majority months from now? We shouldn't just pretend all it takes is dragging Democrats and the DNC, and then presto, we're in the majority.

How'd that work out the last time we did just that?

Was this report written by Fox News?

We lost a must-win election in 2024 and our party leadership didn't even bother to analyze why.

This report is nothing but a collection of online speculation, and it is grossly incomplete at that.

We need to fire everybody leading the DNC, fire the high priced consultants, and rebuild from the bottom up.

...they claimed to be so concerned about.

If we can't get a grip on that fuckery then we're bound to repeat it.

The notion that Democrats who didn't show up to vote agaqinst Trump did so because of something the DNC did or said is really some delusional stuff.

Just thinking about someone sitting on their hands while Trump slipped back in, people who showed up to vote for Biden 4 years earlier, because of the fucking DNC?

What kind of party fucking shit is that? It makes my blood boil.

You're talking about voters and their responsibilities, and I agree with what you're saying about voters.

I'm talking about the Democratic National Committee, which is an organization responsible for promoting the election of Democrats. It's our party's organization. It's useless right now. We're spending untold amounts of money to pay consultants and DNC staff exorbitant salaries and fees - and we're getting nothing.

Apparently the DNC didn't bother to analyze why Democrats got crushed in 2024. That's verging on criminal malfeasance. It's arguably fraud to be taking so much of our money and doing nothing.

We need analyses. We need strategies. We need data. We need blueprints for ad buys and online marketing to promote our brand. We can't count on voters to be informed and make the right choices. We are way past that.

...but I'd be pressed to find more than the party faithful who even know what they are, much less depend on them to make up their minds about candidates.

I get everything about them except the importance of the 'analyzing,' which you can see only serves the party's detractors, and does absolutely nothing to generate the support for the party at elections that their critics claim they want DNC to produce at election time.

Look at what it's being used for here.

There's no true line between what their detractors say they want from DNC to any responsible or credible organizing effort; at least not in anything you've written here.

What is the throughline from the analysis to getting voters? I'd guess it's going to fall right along individual political aims, rather than some universal appeal.

That's because the best of what the DNC does is a crap shoot of disbursing resources they generate through their outreach to viable candidates. The messaging complaints aren't any better at generating voters than whatever the DNC is politicking with, so it's a wonder any of these folks complaining about them believe they have something substantive to offer that would get more people to vote Democratic.

I mean, the entire campaign was full of these people grandstanding against this Democrat or another Democratic org like THAT was the bee's knees of political opposition, instead of just going straight after republicans.

I mean, when should we have expected the actual support of the Democratic party in that election to begin from those folks?

We all warmed them. But no, they have all kinds of excuses why they allowed Rump to get elected twice. Unfortunately it may be too late to go back to being a Democracy. Fascism has taken control. The 250 year old experiment in Democracy is over.

The fact that we still have to fight to elect Democratic candidates says it all.