More than four months after Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin announced that he was breaking his promise to release its autopsy report on the 2024 election, the decision remains highly controversial. Arguments swirl around whether it’s wise to proceed without public scrutiny of what went wrong during the last presidential campaign. But scant attention has focused on how hiding the autopsy provides an assist to Kamala Harris, who currently leads in polling of Democrats for the party’s 2028 nomination.
As Harris eyes another run, she has a major stake in the DNC continuing to keep the autopsy under wraps – and has a lot to lose if it reaches the light of day. She must feel gratified when Martin defends keeping the autopsy secret, saying that the party should not “relitigate” the 2024 election and claiming that release of the 200-page document would result in “navel-gazing.”
Release of the entire autopsy would likely be a blow to Harris’s chances of becoming president in January 2029. Partly based on interviews with more than 300 prominent Democrats and others in all 50 states, it reportedly concludes that Harris’s unwavering support for U.S. weapons shipments to Israel was a significant factor in her loss to Donald Trump.
While she pursued an unsuccessful strategy of wooing scarce “moderate” Republican voters, many in the Democratic base were repelled by the full backing that Harris gave to President Biden’s massive arming of Israel as civilian deaths mounted in Gaza. She adhered to Biden’s admonition that there be “no daylight” between the two of them as she campaigned for president after he withdrew from the race.
At the time, polls showed that Harris was harming her election prospects by refusing to distance herself from Biden’s policy toward Israel. She evades that reality in her post-election book 107 Days, which dismisses antiwar protesters at her rallies as mere “hecklers.”
Harris’s protracted book tour has been beset by disruptions as well as her inability to provide cogent responses.
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FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, DO NOT RUN HARRIS IN '28!! JFC GET A FUCKING CLUE!
Please, no. Unless you want to see President Donald Trump Jr.
I mean they’ll try… I guess?
But she has no fucking chance in God’s green hellscape of making it. Like, Jeb Bush running as a Democrat might have a better shot.
Jeb! Bush
Please clap.
How quaint to think that, if there is a 2028 election, it will be a fair one.
Get fucked with this defeatist bullshit
Martin said that the DNC had “completed a comprehensive review” of the 2024 presidential election…
AKA Schroedinger’s Autopsy
If everybody who says the will vote the Democratic nominee when the DNC gives them a candidate they can vote for would go and vote in the primaries, then we would have that vote-worthy nominee. Our primaries turnout is absolutely atrocious. Have a look here, set filters for position == overall turnout, phase == primaries, turnout population == voting eligible. Not one single presidential or midterm year with a single state hitting even 50%.
Yes, I know that there were no serious challengers running in the 2024 primaries to vote for. But with only 4% of the primary votes being for Uncommitted and that was covered quite heavily and for the first time ever, an incumbent president who already had the nomination locked up withdrew (don’t try and convince me that the donors didn’t factor in the highly covered public opposition into their decisions to push for Biden to withdraw).
So now imagine if we actually had 70% turnout in the primaries and everyone who doesn’t like any of the candidates writes in Uncommitted. That would probably be a hell of a lot higher than 4%. We already know that candidates ignore non-voters, and we saw in 2024 that people voting explicitly for “not these people” has an effect. So please lets amplify those voices for once!
edit: I do think the report should be released, I just don’t think that we the voters should be so willingly subservient to “the party” by not voting in the primaries.
Problem is for people in red states, we don’t get much of a say in anything unless you just attempt to primary out MAGA conservatives for non-MAGA conservatives which are about as easy to find currently as cheap gas. I’ll vote in the primary here, but none of the Dem candidates in my district really give a shit about anything I care about. I’ve messaged every single person on the ballot multiple times and not a single one replied to me. So I’ll just vote independent in the primary since my state doesn’t require you register with a party since they at least pretend to care.
I’m in Texas, so pretty similar boat myself. I actually voted in the R primary in 2020 because our Governor was hell-bent on replacing every R legislator who didn’t back his school voucher plan (which take more money from the public school funds to pay for the voucher than goes into the system for each public school student). So I wanted to at least try and keep the anti-voucher R politicians in place.
That sucks that none of the candidates replied to you at all. Looks like OK hovers around 12-25% turnout in primaries most years. It’s no wonder they feel comfortable ignoring people. If you look at the numbers I posted in another comment about independent politicians at state and federal level, that should explain why I advocate for voting for nobody in the D primary instead of 3rd party.
My state, Missouri, seems to be 22-34% for primaries. Not sure how you could get more turnout here. The people I talk to who don’t vote in either the primary or general just tend to not care about the whole thing. Not like “I see no point cause voting is useless compared to direct action”, but just “I see no point cause politicians annoy me and I got better shit to do like sitting on my ass drinking beer”. I feel that seeing elected officials overturn the things we vote for also lowers morale even if you tell them voting for someone that won’t do that would make sure you get it.
I feel that seeing elected officials overturn the things we vote for
Yeah, that’s just inexcusable. Those politicians fighting against the voters should be recalled. So many states don’t even have voter-initiated ballot measures or recall elections, though.
I think we should have mandatory voting, with all elections requiring RCV, a “none of the above” option, and if “none of the above” is the 1st choice of more than 50% of the votes then you have to redo the election with all new candidates.
I’d be curious to see how Missouri could get ranked choice voting back on the table since we banned it. They lumped it in with an amendment making it illegal for non-US citizens to vote here (something that was already illegal, but people don’t care). Not sure if we magically got a Dem that was willing to give us ranked choice voting would they also be seen as overturning the non-US citizens voting part which conservatives would have a field day talking crap about someone doing that.
oh neat … https://lemmy.zip/post/63736351
Solidly red here. Same. Dems in office aren’t letting go until they die or a maga replaces them and blue dogging to campaign against anyone left of Biden. So I’m definitely voting third if they put forth a better candidate.
The US has extremely high turnout for primary elections (and a low turnout for general elections) compared to democracies, the vast majority of which don’t even have open primary elections.
The problem is the two-party system.
The us primary system is used to gaslight the public into the candidates the oligarchy wants. Which is why the dates are staggered with weaker insignificant states first before super Tuesday
I don’t care about the turnout relative to other countries. That doesn’t improve the results for me here. I care about the turnout relative to the amount of people eligible to have voted. And 0-49% is just awful.
We won’t get rid of the two-party system by voting for losing 3rd party candidates. At present there are a grand total of 3 (out of 535) federal legislators who are not either Democratic or Republican. Bernie Sanders ran in the Democratic primary for Senate in 2008, winning the nomination but then declining it to run as an Independent. Kevin Kiley was first elected as a Republican and then declared as Independent after several years in office. In all state legislatures combined, there are a total of 6 state senators and 22 state representatives out of 7,578 total state legislative seats. There hasn’t been a single electoral college vote for a presidential 3rd party candidate sine 1968, and Perot won 19% of the national popular vote in 1992! Unless you already live in a district with ranked choice voting or with an independent elected official, the odds of displacing either of the major parties is effectively zero. So your best opportunity for reform is still to vote for such candidates at the state level in the major party primary.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_and_independent_members_of_the_United_States_Congress
- https://ballotpedia.org/Current_independent_and_minor_party_federal_and_state_officeholders
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Kiley_(politician)
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/Electoral-College-United-States#%3A~%3Atext=U.S.+election+results%2C-Electoral
- https://www.ncsl.org/about-state-legislatures/state-partisan-composition
I don’t care about the turnout relative to other countries. That doesn’t improve the results for me here.
No, but it could help you put into perspective what the problem is - clearly not primary turnout.
We won’t get rid of the two-party system by voting for losing 3rd party candidates.
Yes, that is true. The best bet is to try and get a suitable candidate through a Democratic primary, though even then it’s an extremely long shot at best. Unfortunately, most Americans, even “liberals” and “progressives,” are raised on a diet of jingoist and ultranationalist propaganda, and things probably need to get worse before people start realizing Murica really isn’t number one in any sense that matters for people’s daily lives.
it could help you put into perspective what the problem is - clearly not primary turnout.
You haven’t really made a cogent argument about this. There exists more than one problem to solve.
The problem I’m addressing is that “I won’t vote until the party gives me a better nominee to vote for” is completely backwards, because we the voters are empowered to select the nominee from the primary candidates, without caring who the party heads wanted us to vote for.
The lack of third party representation is a separate problem. The two party “system” really isn’t so much an entrenched “system” as much as it is a mathematical byproduct of first-past-the-post winner-take-all elections. So we need election reform. So we need to candidates who will fight for that to win. They won’t win as a 3rd party in the vast majority of districts above a county/local level. So they have to run in the major party primary. Which brings us back to turnout in the primaries to put better nominees on the ballot in the general.
You haven’t really made a cogent argument about this. There exists more than one problem to solve.
Yes, but if other countries manage to have decently functioning democracies without high primary turnout or even open primary elections at all, then it is not obvious that “low” primary turnout is a problem that requires a solution.
Would you care to make an actual suggestion as to how to address it, then?
Just copy-paste a working system and think about how to improve things from there.
How to convince your fellow citizens to pursue this? Realistically, you probably can’t. You need a paradigm shift in society to address the problem I mentioned. It’s a pervasive one; for example here on Lemmy one may commonly encounter calls to implement ranked-choice voting, whereas even the most rudimentary glance at what we already know about what works and what doesn’t would be sufficient to conclude this isn’t the way to go. If even well-meaning and partially educated people cannot manage to unchain themselves from the propaganda drilled into them, there is a long journey of deprogramming ahead.
Primary turn out is atrocious because more people are acknowledging their material needs are ignored regardless which shade of fascism sits in the halls of government.
We already know that candidates ignore non-voters, and we saw in 2024 that people voting explicitly for “not these people” has an effect
Does it? If every one of those people had voted for Harris, she still would’ve lost by a landslide. If I’m a democratic strategist, I’m looking elsewhere to gain voters.
Which isn’t to say the morality of opposing genocide isn’t a worthy goal in itself, of course, but when it comes to winning the election Gaza doesn’t move the needle enough.
So my question is what else? Don’t get hung up on Gaza like it’s a solution. It’s a small piece of any winning strategy.
There are essentially no MAGA/Democratic swing voters. There are tens of millions of voters who stay home because the Democratic Party is more into fence-sitting than actually believing in anything.
If they went and voted in the Democratic primary, they could put better nominees on the ballot instead of waiting to be catered to.
Does it?
I mean we all just saw it happen in 2024 when 4% of primary voters specifically voiced that they don’t want anyone who is on the ballot, media covered it, polls reinforced it, donors pushed for it, and Biden dropped out. Kamala and Waltz seemed like they might have got the memo, but then the strategists came in and ruined it and she let them. Have we ever had a primary with more voters than that writing in or leaving it blank? I’m not aware if we have.
If every one of those people had voted for Harris, she still would’ve lost by a landslide.
Do you mean every one of those 4% of primary voters? I’m guessing most of them probably did vote for Kamala. I think the people who didn’t vote because of Gaza also didn’t vote in the primary at all because it was Biden with no serious challengers. It’s the non-voters I’m addressing here. I’m convinced that if all the left-leaning non-voters who opposed Biden because of Gaza had gone and voted “Uncommitted” in the primary, the DNC strategists would have run a different campaign.
If I’m a democratic strategist, I’m looking elsewhere to gain voters.
That is clearly the strategy taken by just about every campaign from both major parties in regards to non-voters. Someone who doesn’t vote isn’t likely a gainable vote, so why spend the resources? Casting a ballot in the Democratic primary shows that you’re a gainable vote. I think if that percentage of voting for none of the above goes up appreciably, the campaigns would at least do some canvasing/polling to see what issues are important. They might not adopt it, but it’s at least an incremental improvement over completely ignore the people who don’t vote.
Someone who doesn’t vote isn’t likely a gainable vote, so why spend the resources?
That’s a false assumption. They don’t vote unless they see a point in voting. People turn out when they think it’ll make a difference, not to choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
That’s a false assumption. They don’t vote unless they see a point in voting. People turn out when they think it’ll make a difference, not to choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
That is the reality as stated from the perspective of the non-voter, yes. But it’s clearly not from the perspective of the campaign strategists. Is there any provision in your state election laws that a minimum percentage of eligible voters must cast a vote for a winner to be declared? Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 campaign for Senate was considered quite unique for simply going out to every county and talk to everyone where there are. But we haven’t really seen nominees since then repeating it. We’ve instead seen more of the same, winners declaring they have a mandate from the people after winning with less than a quarter of the eligible voting population having voted for them. They don’t care why you didn’t vote. But they sure started to care why that 4% voted for Uncommitted.
I’m convinced that if all the left-leaning non-voters who opposed Biden because of Gaza had gone and voted “Uncommitted” in the primary, the DNC strategists would have run a different campaign.
I misunderstood what you were saying. Yeah I believe you could be right about this. I’m on board with your analysis now.
Go third or go home.
eh?
Corrected. Thank you!
I have another comment in this thread with sources on the reality of the failure of third parties in the US for anything at the state or federal level in districts without RCV. They’ll never displace the Democractic or Republican parties without election reform, which we won’t get by voting for parties that don’t win, so the only way to push the needle is thru the Democratic and Republican primaries.
Oh please. If all you “it’ll never work” people would actually try something different instead of stuff that obviously hasn’t been working, it would probably actually work.
https://ballotpedia.org/Current_independent_and_minor_party_federal_and_state_officeholders
I already cited numbers from that same link in my other comment. Perhaps you didn’t read the link and notice how the majority of the state legislators on that link are from US territories rather than states (Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and Northern Mariana Islands). Within the 50 states there are 28 out of 7,578 independent and 3rd party state legislators. That’s less than half of one percent. When you keep looking, you often find the many were elected as a Democratic or Republican nominee and then switched in office, and win re-election as an incumbent, rather than first attaining office while running as an independent or third party.
I have voted for 3rd parties in the past but I stopped when I saw the numbers because the reality is that it’s just not feasible at the state and federal level unless you are already have RCV or already have an incumbent third party. I do hope you’re at least noticing that I’m qualifying at what level of government I think it becomes pointless to vote third party. I do want third parties to be viable. But we need politicians at the state level to effect the election reform to make that a reality, and the numbers say that’s not going to happen by voting third party at the state level without RCV.
You’re going to need the Artemis launch system to get her anywhere near public office again.
Don’t.
You know it took 80 years between the time someone who looked like Obama could vote, and the time that someone who looked like Harris could. It shouldn’t be surprising that this same pattern would appear in electability.
Harris probably can’t win, but it’s not her policy or resume’. It’s her vagina. Because at the end of the day, two women have run for the chair, and Trump beat both of them. Maybe their weakness is the obvious thing they have in common?
Harris lost because America is such a misogynistic country, it’s a problem on the left too.
If you disagree, then please explain why Harris’ weaknesses don’t apply to the (cock having) Joe Biden. I don’t remember Biden being a socialist hero, but he was still able to defeat Trump without leaving his basement.
Hey it’s the wokescold, here to make us all forget how she was down with genocide
It’s more they did nothing to differentiate themselves from the old white men that we hate. The DNC incorrectly assumed if old white men status quo rhetoric was coming out of the mouth of a white woman like Hillary the public would accept it without question. Then they tried the black woman approach expecting different results and try to claim it’s a misogynist thing.
Yeah, exactly. It’s the policies that were no good, not how they were articulated or by whom.
To a certain extent, I understand where you’re coming from, and it doesn’t surprise me we had a black president before a female president, but Hillary won the popular vote. I think if Hillary didn’t have an already well established hate campaign against her and was not carrying the Bill Clinton baggage, she would’ve won. I think Elizabeth Warren would have done well had she not had to contend with the more progressive Bernie.
I think people forgot what Trump was like and people were suffering economically under Biden and there wasn’t enough acknowledgment of that. I think had Warren been the pick instead of Biden the first time she would have won. Biden was a filler episode as a president and people wanted someone willing to do something, or at least give them the appearance of having done something. Trump does a great job of that.
Harris getting all chummy with Liz Cheney, pandering to gun nuts and refusing to deviate in any way from the Biden administration line on any topic mattered a lot more than her ethnicity or gender.
She worked so hard for the R votes and didn’t even move the needle.
They ran her because they didn’t want to win
