The Democratic National Committee finally released its 192-page post-mortem on the 2024 election — eighteen months after the fact, and only after sustained pressure from inside the party.
Government Accountability Institute Vice President Eric Eggers says the document is less a genuine reckoning than a product shaped by Kamala Harris’s political interests, and that its most revealing quality is what it leaves out.
“One of the takeaways is that Democrats did better down-ballot with Kamala Harris than if Joe Biden had stayed on,” Eggers said. “I think that’s just the most absurd takeaway from what happened in 2024.”
The report says nothing about the Biden-Trump debate that effectively ended Biden’s candidacy.
It does not acknowledge that Harris received the nomination without a primary.
And it is silent on Gaza and Israel, despite both dominating the campaign conversation.
DNC Chair Ken Martin, releasing the document under duress, offered little in the way of endorsement.
“I’m not proud of this product,” Martin said. “It does not meet my standards and it won’t meet your standards. I don’t endorse what’s in this report or what’s left out of it.”
For Eggers, Martin’s own resistance to releasing the report tracks with the chairman’s larger record. Martin spent roughly fifteen years running the Minnesota Democratic Party while the Feeding Our Future fraud ring — the largest such scandal before California’s — unfolded on his watch.
The financial picture of the DNC today, Eggers argues, reflects those same instincts. The RNC currently holds $123.9 million cash on hand. The DNC holds $14.4 million against $17.5 million in debt.
“The Democrats are having massive money trouble,” Eggers said. “They apparently bought a fundraising list from the Harris campaign for around $6 million. They’re sending money to offices in places like Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands where it’s not really going to help control a congressional race.”
On the question of replacing Martin, Eggers takes a contrarian view: the greater threat to the Democratic Party isn’t Martin’s continued tenure — it’s what fills the vacuum if he goes.
“If you get rid of him — then who? The far left wing of the party is the one clamoring for him to get out,” Eggers said. “Ken Martin is essentially the thing holding the radical left from taking over the party.”
That tension shapes the 2028 field. Polls currently show Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leading Democratic primary speculation, a dynamic Eggers views as a reflection of name recognition rather than electoral viability. DC insiders are privately circulating names like Andy Beshear and Roy Cooper — a quiet acknowledgment, Eggers argues, that the party’s identity-first candidate selection framework has failed twice running against Donald Trump.
The approval numbers among men underscore the problem. A recent Quinnipiac poll showed Democratic Party approval at 16 percent among men, with 78 percent disapproval. Eggers traces the number directly to the party’s attempts to engineer masculine-coded messaging — including a flannel-shirt ad on behalf of Harris — that he says exposed how little the party understands the constituency it’s trying to reach.
“It looked like an AI simulation of what Democrats think men look like and talk like,” Eggers said, “and it telegraphed that they knew they had a real problem.”
He points to a telling early sign from the other side of the party: Gavin Newsom’s first ten podcast guests after the 2024 election were all white men. “That tells you everything,” Eggers said — a quiet pivot by a potential 2028 contender who had already read the results more honestly than the autopsy his party just released.
Watch the clip above.
