A post-election autopsy of the Democratic Party, released May 20, 2026, indicts Democratic leadership for decades of disinvestment, strategic malpractice, and a fundamental failure to listen to voters — and warns that without a 10-year rebuilding plan, the party risks structural irrelevance.
The report, titled “Build to Win. Build to Last.” and produced for the Democratic National Committee, draws on more than 300 interviews with individuals and organizations, as well as publicly and commercially available data. The DNC issued a disclaimer stating the document “reflects the views of the author” and that the DNC “was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein.”
The report does not name its author.
The Losses, By the Numbers
The report frames 2024 not as a catastrophic collapse but as the latest chapter in a 16-year erosion.
“Since the high point of the 2008 Obama landslide, when he received nearly 10 million more votes than John McCain, the Democratic Party has vacillated between stagnation and retrogression,” the report states.
In 2024, the report says 270,607 votes across four states decided the presidency — approximately two-tenths of one percent of all ballots cast. It says 327,557 votes across four states decided the U.S. Senate, and 7,309 votes across three districts decided control of the House of Representatives.
The report identifies the 2010 midterms as a turning point. Democrats lost 63 House seats, seven Senate seats, six governors, and 20 state legislative chambers — a “shellacking,” as the report describes it, that coincided with the decennial Census and enabled severe Republican gerrymandering that Democrats have never fully recovered from.
The Uncontested Primary and a Nominee No One Voted For
Perhaps no section of the report lands with more quiet devastation than its account of how Democrats arrived at their 2024 presidential nominee.
Party leadership cleared the field for President Biden to run unopposed in 2024’s primary. No serious challenger emerged. No competitive debate forced Biden to demonstrate fitness before a national audience. No primary electorate had a meaningful choice. The report does not interrogate that decision directly — but its downstream findings expose its cost with clinical precision.
When Biden stepped aside after a disastrous debate performance, Vice President Kamala Harris became the nominee through an accelerated internal party process. No primary vote took place. No voters were asked. And when Harris’s campaign team went looking for the research that would tell them how to introduce her to a general election audience, they found nothing.
“An incumbent Vice President. With no research to share once she became the nominee,” the report states.
The report reveals that the White House had directed the DNC to conduct research on how Dr. Biden could support her husband — exploring “the settings, the issues, and the messages needed to create an effective framework” — but no comparable research was ever conducted on Harris herself. The campaign’s “message polling” team was not fully onboarded until December 2023. Three experienced polling firms described their work as “underutilized” during their initial engagement. Before the candidate switch, the pollsters say they never reviewed ad copy and “did not see ads until after they were airing, in some instances reading about the ads in the media.”
The report also notes that Harris’s handling of immigration — the portfolio Biden assigned her — was weaponized against her. The label “border czar,” the report states, “was not the official title, but it was the one that the media propagated and the White House failed to contradict or correct.”
The result of the cleared primary, the late start, and the absence of preparation: a candidate handed the nomination on compressed time, with no established message, no defined contrast with Trump, and no tested response to attacks that Republicans had spent years preparing.
The pollsters ultimately identified three key failures. First, the Vice President never found separation from the status quo. One pollster cited “a single speech delivered on a Friday afternoon with little amplification” as a differentiation attempt on immigration — describing it as “too little, too late.” Second, the Trump attack ad targeting Harris’s prior statements on transgender Americans was deemed “very effective” by the polling team, which concluded there was no viable response. Third, and most critically, the campaign failed to drive down Trump’s favorability. “His retrospective job approval was too high,” the report states. “The Republicans had a defined framework for attacking the Vice President, but the Democrats did not have a defined or consistent theory for attacking Trump.”
The report says national exit polling shows Harris lost voters who identified the economy as their top issue by 18 to 81 — a negative 63-point margin. She also lost voters earning between $30,000 and $100,000, who represented 48 percent of the electorate, by six points.
Josh Stein’s Blueprint: What Winning Actually Looked Like
The report points to North Carolina Governor Josh Stein’s 2024 victory as a model the party has failed to replicate nationally.
Stein, then the state’s Attorney General, defeated Republican Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson — who the report notes had described himself as a “Black Nazi” on a pornographic website — by 54.8% to 42.7%. Harris, running simultaneously in the same state, received only 47.7%.
The gap between Stein and Harris across demographics was stark, according to the report:
- Men: Stein won 51% to Harris’s 40% — an 11-point gap
- Rural voters: Stein 38% to Harris’s 29% — a 9-point gap
- White non-college voters: Stein 50% to Harris’s 43% — a 7-point gap
- New voters: Stein 56% to Harris’s 48% — an 8-point gap
The report attributes Stein’s overperformance to early investment by the Democratic Governors Association — $18.4 million in supportive advertising from May through August 2024, focused on his record clearing a backlog of untested rape kits and cracking down on fentanyl — as well as a campaign that pursued men, rural voters, and irregular voters as persuasion targets rather than writing them off.
“The Lesson,” the report states, is that “Robinson imploded, but Stein’s results suggest a fundamentally different campaign approach to address the weaknesses the national campaign struggled to fix.”
By contrast, the report describes New Hampshire Democratic gubernatorial candidate Craig as failing to define himself beyond “not Ayotte/Trump” — a definition problem that mirrored the national campaign’s struggles. Craig ran 6.4 points behind Harris in a state she won.
The Senate: Personal Brands Held the Line, Then Broke
The report examines six Senate races in detail.
In Ohio, Sherrod Brown won 120,000 more votes than Harris — outperforming her by 7.6 points — and still lost to Bernie Moreno by 3.6 points. A former Ohio Republican Party chair is quoted in the report: “I really believe Sherrod Brown ran the best race he could. . . I don’t know he could have won that race in the time that Donald Trump was on the ballot.”
In Nevada, Jacky Rosen won by 1.4 points, running a year-round community organizing operation that the report credits with delivering culturally competent, bilingual outreach and member-to-member voter contact. The report says Rosen outperformed Harris by 4.5 points.
In Arizona, Ruben Gallego won by 2.4 points, running nearly 8 points ahead of Harris. The report attributes his performance to his working-class background and consistent presence in Latino communities.
In Montana, Jon Tester won 19% more raw votes than Harris and still lost by 7.5 points to the Trump wave.
The Latino Vote: A Seismic Shift Democrats Cannot Ignore
Trump improved his performance with Latino voters by double digits compared to 2020, the report says, particularly among Latino men.
In Texas, Starr County — which is 97% Hispanic — flipped to Trump, voting Republican for president for the first time since 1892.
In Nevada, Trump won Latino men by 12 points, a reversal from 2020. In Arizona, Democrats’ margin with Latino voters dropped from 24 points in 2020 to 8 points in 2024.
The report argues that Gallego and Rosen demonstrated that year-round presence, economic messaging, and cost-of-living focus reached Latino voters more effectively than “traditional approaches like Spanish-language ads and late-cycle surrogates.”
Editor’s Note: The report includes internal notations flagging that several specific claims in this section lack sourcing and that some figures contradict public reporting.
Republicans Own the Media. Democrats Rent It.
“In the current media ecosystem, Republicans own and Democrats rent,” the report states bluntly.
The report says the 2024 presidential media spend totaled over $3.1 billion by and on behalf of both nominees. Harris and affiliated committees spent $903 million. Trump and affiliated committees spent $435 million.
Despite the spending advantage, the report argues Democrats are pouring money into the wrong channels. Corporate America, the report says, now invests approximately 72% of ad spend on digital and connected television and 28% on broadcast and cable — yet Democratic campaigns continue to favor broadcast. Trump ended up with a broadcast share of 56.7%; Harris had 42%.
The report draws on a Tech for Campaigns analysis to describe Republicans as “always on” across the media calendar while Democrats make massive investments toward the end of an election cycle and then “go dark.”
“By the time Democratic candidates show up, often in the last few months of a campaign, it can be too late to persuade voters when the other side has been framing and shaping partisan information flow for months, if not longer,” the report states.
The DGA and DAGA’s early investment in North Carolina in 2024 is cited as a proof point: the DGA’s $18.4 million buy from May through August, and DAGA’s $4.5 million to define Republican Dan Bishop — invested months before the general election closed — provided the foundation for Stein’s and Jeff Jackson’s performances.
Organizing: $150 Million When $300 Million Was Needed
The report accuses Democrats of systematically underfunding direct voter contact while pouring money into media consultants.
The campaign invested approximately $1.04 billion in media expenditures through the DNC, campaign, and joint fundraising committees from 2023-2024, according to the report. Campaign leadership estimated roughly $150 million went into voter contact through coordinated campaign structures — a ratio the report describes as “simply too small a piece of the pie.”
Using historical spending cap formulas, the report argues the 2024 context should have meant approximately $300 million in organizing investment.
The report details a damning internal timeline: a 2022 DNC post-election analysis had recommended building a national coordinated team by Q1 2023, selecting a relational organizing tool by Q2 2023, and launching Campaign Schools by Q4 2023 to build a pipeline of trained staff. “None of these recommendations were implemented on the proposed timeline, if at all,” the report states. Senior state staff hiring began in the spring of 2024 and lasted through August. Final state staffing hires were made in October — weeks before Election Day.
“As Speaker Tip O’Neill shared decades ago, ‘people like to be asked,’” the report states. “Organizing, at its core, is the process of developing the ability to reach as many people as possible to earn as many voters as possible through direct voter contact.”
The Demographic Time Bomb
Population shifts threaten to compound Democratic structural disadvantages. The report cites Brennan Center for Justice research projecting that up to 12 Congressional seats and Electoral Votes could shift from California, New York, and Illinois to Texas, Florida, Utah, and Idaho after the 2030 Census.
“With radical midterm redistricting efforts underway, the writing is on the wall,” the report states. “We either adapt to the changing conditions of the arena, or history will leave us behind.”
The Path Forward: Organize Everywhere to Win Anywhere
The report calls for a 10-year strategic plan, a “Majority Party Strategy,” and invokes former DNC Chairman Ron Brown’s 1989 turnaround — when, after three straight presidential losses, Brown led the party back by challenging it to, as he put it, “get real about the politics of success.”
“It was Ron Brown who understood every corner of America was hurting,” the report states. Under his leadership, Democrats won the Virginia governorship, the New York City mayoral race, and the White House in 1992.
President Barack Obama, the report notes, later acknowledged he was president “because of the example he set, because of the organization that he brought to the Democratic Party.”
The report argues the current DNC must do the same — investing in state parties, moving to year-round organizing, recruiting candidates with rural credibility, and meeting voters where they are rather than parachuting in at the end of cycles asking for support from candidates voters have never met.
“Democrats will not grow in the places they do not sow,” the report states.
Palestine
The Democratic Party report makes no mention of Gaza or Palestine or Palestinians. Despite the fact that many voters turned their backs on the party over the genocide, the Democratic Party acts like it was never an issue - the Palestinian exception.