The DNC’s 2024 election postmortem.

Summary

Podcast Summary: Tangle — “The DNC’s 2024 Election Postmortem”

Host: Will Kaback (Senior Editor), with John Law (Co-host), Ari Weitzman (Managing Editor), and additional staff commentary
Date: May 28, 2026
Main Theme:
A deep dive into the Democratic National Committee’s long-delayed and controversial report analyzing the party’s performance in the 2024 presidential election—its handling, findings, omissions, and what it reveals about the current state and future of the Democratic Party.

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Episode Overview

The episode explores the drama and fallout from the DNC’s release of its much-anticipated, yet still incomplete, postmortem on the 2024 election. The hosts and commentators assess the report’s content, critique the process behind its release, address the reactions from across the political spectrum, and consider broader implications for the Democratic Party as it moves toward the 2026 midterms and beyond.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Saga of the 2024 DNC Postmortem

[02:56–07:47]

• The DNC’s post-election review was initially meant to be a thorough analysis guiding future Democratic strategy, slated for spring 2025.
• Repeatedly delayed, then quietly shelved after DNC Chair Ken Martin argued it would distract from the party's focus on recent electoral wins.
• Mounting internal and external criticism led Martin to release the report in May 2026—admitting, “I am not proud of this product. It does not meet my standards and it won’t meet your standards.”* (07:47)
• The released report is missing chunks: no executive summary, conclusion, or analysis of House races; analyses are weak, poorly sourced, and at times factually inaccurate.

2. The Report’s Content & Shortcomings

[08:30–13:34 | 20:36–32:35]

• Core message: Democrats must “organize everywhere to win anywhere,” with emphasis on Middle America and the South.
• The DNC itself overtly distanced the organization from the findings, with Martin explicitly rejecting or annotating many claims.
• Key omissions: No real discussion of Biden’s age, his dropout, the impact of the Israel-Gaza war, economic inflation, or major issues determining the party's losses in 2024.
• The only sections with tangible detail focus on technical campaign execution (ad spending, “define lanes for communications ecosystem,” “upskill organizing staff”) but offer little insight into voter messaging or substantive policy direction.
• The report is laced with self-defeating disclaimers: “This document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC.”* (20:36)

3. Reactions from Across the Political Spectrum

What the Left Says
[13:10–15:31]

• Criticism focuses on Martin's handling, the messy and incomplete process, and especially the report’s failure to engage key policy debates.
• “If Ken Martin had followed through on his original promise, this report wouldn’t be shrouded in a fraction of the controversy it is now...He made a pledge, and he did not fulfill it.” — Zeeshan Aleem, MSN (13:20)
• “The problem...isn’t just that it doesn’t mention Gaza. It’s that it ignores policy and for that matter, politics...The document itself may be useless, but it has yielded one important lesson, nonetheless: The DNC needs new leadership.” — Alex Shepard, The New Republic (15:04)
• Some point out Democrats have quietly adjusted strategy around affordability, border security, and “identity issues” in practice—rarely as a result of the report.

What the Right Says
[15:31–20:36]

• Sees the report (and the Democratic Party) as “in total disarray,” refusing to address the “real reasons” for 2024 defeat.
• “To call the report an embarrassment is an understatement. It was a humiliating exercise that exposed the party's inability to self reflect.” — Kelly Sadler, Washington Times (15:40)
• “Usually, a party that has just lost the White House rises or falls in the midterms based on the incumbent president's job approval, rather than its own political creativity...None of this comes about by having a political strategist talk to a bunch of people about the immediate past election and write a long report about it.” — Rich Lowry, New York Post (17:46)
• Jonah Goldberg lampoons Democratic denial: “Maybe the dogs don’t like it...the ideological activist base can’t accept that the dogs don’t actually like what they’re being served.” (19:24)

4. Host Analysis: “As bad as advertised”

Will Kaback’s Primary Take
[20:36–30:42]

• Kaback sought to be contrarian and find hidden value in the report before reading it; ultimately, he agrees with consensus criticism.
• “The report lacks a clear, consistent theory of the election...the only through line...is the DNC’s apparent incompetence at every stage of compiling, presenting, and releasing it.” (21:19)
• Report is incomplete and riddled with errors. “Even a year after its initial due date, the report was still nowhere near ready for primetime.” (22:13)
• Analysis focuses on “arcane” process refinements (ad buys, communications structure) with little reference to what actually alienated voters.
• “A deathly allergy to potentially controversial stances pervades the document...the absence became the story. Once again, the failure or unwillingness to wade into choppy waters renders the entire exercise pointless.” (26:53-27:52)
• Kaback credits a few honest lines about the party’s stagnation and denialism, but finds it baffling that the report then immediately backpedals or refuses to offer solutions.
• “He should have ripped the bandage off earlier, yes, but given the no-win situation he eventually was in, releasing the report, as shoddy as it is, was ultimately the right decision.” (28:43)
• What actually matters for Democrat prospects, Kaback concludes, is not the report, but whether the party is truly learning and adapting—questions that won’t vanish with the postmortem’s publication.

Notable Quotes:

• “The DNC actually destroyed its own report’s credibility before anyone else had the chance to.” (21:47, Will Kaback)
• “These lines feel spot on...it’s strange, then, that the ensuing pages embody that same denialist attitude, avoiding discussing solutions to broad directional problems.” (26:18)

5. Staff Concurrence & Broader Context

[32:35–33:35]

• Ari Weitzman, Managing Editor, agrees mismanagement was the root problem:
  “For all the disclaimers the DNC ran in its annotated document, the report’s main issue doesn’t seem to stem from its author, but rather from the project’s management. Why hire just one person...to publish a report if you actually cared about what it said?” (32:39)
• The DNC’s choice to wall off actual campaign stakeholders and outsource self-reflection is seen as the core error.

6. Historical Comparisons and Party Postmortems

[33:35–34:50]

• John Law reviews the history of party postmortems—Democratic efforts after Carter’s 1980 loss and the GOP’s 2012 autopsy (whose recommendations Trump famously ignored in 2016).
• Highlights the mixed record of such reports in facilitating real party adaptation and electoral success.

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• Ken Martin’s Exasperated Disclaimer: “I am releasing the report as I received it in its entirety, unedited and unabridged, with annotations for claims that couldn’t be verified. I am not proud of this product. It does not meet my standards and it won’t meet your standards.” (07:47)
• Kaback’s Sarcasm: “It’s kind of like a tennis coach trotting out a woefully unprepared player and then loudly proclaiming how weak and ineffective they are before a single point has been played. Is that more of a reflection on the player or the coach?” (22:22)
• On Avoidance of Substance: “A deathly allergy to potentially controversial stances pervades the document...the absence became the story.” (26:53–27:52)
• Ari Weitzman on Outsourcing Accountability: “To exclude any 2024 campaign stakeholder from contributing to this postmortem or to outsource a self reflection...was Ken Martin’s biggest error.” (32:54)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:56] — Episode introduction, scope and drama of the postmortem’s release
• [07:47] — Ken Martin’s statement disavowing report, contents overview
• [08:30–11:16] — Background on the postmortem’s timeline, controversy, and missing sections
• [13:10] — Perspectives from the left
• [15:31] — Perspectives from the right
• [20:36] — Will Kaback’s detailed analysis and take
• [32:35] — Ari Weitzman’s staff concurrence
• [33:35] — Historical context for party “autopsies”

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Episode Takeaways

• The DNC postmortem became a lightning rod not for its insights but for its omissions, poor process, and failed expectations of party accountability.
• The report failed to grapple with the most significant issues of the 2024 election—Biden’s age, Gaza, message authenticity, and voter priorities—opting instead for platitudes and process tweaks.
• Both the left and right see the DNC and its postmortem as emblematic of a party at a crossroads, perhaps adrift.
• Listeners are left to wonder whether the Democratic Party has learned anything substantive from its losses or is simply hoping its opposition will falter.

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This summary omits promotional segments and unrelated content, focusing exclusively on the episode's substantive discussion of the DNC's 2024 election postmortem.

Transcript

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This is Tangle.

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Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking and a little bit of our take. I'm your host today, Senior editor Will K. Back today we're going to be turning back the clock or maybe that's not quite right. We'll be looking back to look forward to understand the present or something along those lines. It's all very convoluted for reasons that will become apparent shortly. We're covering the Democratic National Committee's 2024 Post Mortem Analysis on the election. Now this was a report that was initially touted as a thorough review of why Democrats struggled, why they lost the presidency, why they struggled in down ballot races. And it was supposed to offer the party a roadmap going forward to this year's midterms and the next presidential election. But then now, infamously, the report was stashed away. It wasn't going to be released at all. And then finally, just last week, they reversed course again and put it out, albeit in a very incomplete form. So we're going to dive into what exactly is in the report that was released, whether it has any value at all either for Democrats or just as voters in general. And we're also gonna talk about what the saga as a whole tells us about where Democrats are in the moment. Before we get into that, though, a very exciting announcement to share with all of you. Last week we shared that we will be coming to West Virginia for an in person event in Berkeley Springs on June 14th. And today we are announcing that Free Press commentator Kat Rosenfield will be joining our existing panel, which includes Tangle Executive Editor Isaac Saul, our editor at large, Camille Foster and Longview editor, and the Daily Co creator Andy Mills. It's gonna be a great conversation and we're super excited to have Kat joining us. We're gonna be talking about artificial intelligence, national politics, where things stand in the country heading into this critical midterm election period. And it will be a fantastic opportunity to bring the Tangle community together again, be with you all in person and hopefully have some spirited debates and conversations outside of the event itself. That's all to say, it's going to be a great event. We'd love to see you there. Tickets are still available and we'll drop the link in today's show notes if you're interested. If you can make it, please come out and join us and it's going to be a great time. We're about three weeks out and we're super excited to get together with all of you. One last plug before we get into today's edition. Our latest episode of Suspension of the Rules is out today. After some discussion about aliens last week, Ari, Isaac, Camille, they move on to the next big thing, which is of course, athletes using steroids. Then after that discussion on cheating in sports, they dive into the electoral ramifications of the primary runoffs this past Tuesday. Then Isaac addresses some criticisms he's received recently. The guys speculate on Representative Thomas Kean's absence from Congress, and Camille tries to defend what can only be described as the the indefensible. So the most recent episode is up on our podcast page. It's also on YouTube if you prefer to watch. And again, we'll drop the link to it in the show notes. All right, I am going to hand it over to John to get us into today's topic and then I will be back in a bit to read my take. John over to you.

[Podcast Co-host/Commentator (e.g., Camille Foster or Ari Weitzman)]

Thanks Will and welcome everybody. Here are your quick hits for today. First up, U.S. central Command said it shot down Iranian drones directed towards a commercial ship in the Strait of Hormuz, the latest military engagement between the sides amid ongoing peace discussions. Number two, former President Joe Biden sued the Justice Department seeking to block the release of audio related to a prior investigation into his handling of classified documents. The lawsuit alleges the potential release is politically motivated. Three Former Attorney General Pam Bondi shared that she has been diagnosed with thyroid cancer and is undergoing treatment, said she is doing well. Number four, Ugandan authorities announced a closure of the country's border with the Democratic Republic of Congo due to the Ebola outbreak. Separately, the Trump administration said it will establish a quarantine and treatment facility in Kenya for Americans exposed to Ebola in the region. And number five, the Justice Department has reportedly launched an investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the writer who successfully sued President Donald Trump for sexual assault related to statements she made in a 2022 deposition that she did not receive outside financial support. Her two civil lawsuits against the president.

[Podcast Host/Announcer (e.g., Will Kabeck or John Law)]

The Democratic National Committee released a long awaited yet still incomplete report into what went wrong during the 2024 presidential election. The report had initially been shelved, but after months of consternation and criticism, DNC Chair Ken Martin said he released it today in the name of transparency. He also said it, quote, wasn't ready for prime time and rejected its findings, writing, I am not proud of this product. It does not meet my standards and it won't meet your standards. I am releasing the report as I received it in its entirety, unedited and unabridged, with annotations for claims that couldn't be verified. Those annotations are found throughout the 192

[Podcast Co-host/Commentator (e.g., Camille Foster or Ari Weitzman)]

pages on Thursday, May 21, the Democratic National Committee released a report examining the party's performance in the 2024 election. The 192 page postmortem argued that Democrats must organize everywhere to win anywhere, and particularly advocated for a renewed focus on the voters of Middle America and the South. However, the organization distanced itself from the document's findings. In a substack post accompanying the report's release, DNC Chair Ken Martin said, I don't endorse what's in this report or what's left out of it for context. Martin made a 2024 postmortem a central part of his campaign for DNC chair. Upon his election, he asked Democratic consultant Paul Rivera to compile the report, initially slated for a spring 2025 release. However, the retrospective was still in progress in July 2025, though the DNC had reportedly begun privately circulating some of its findings. Additionally, reports emerged that the DNC had decided to forgo analyzing key elements of the 2024 presidential election, such as President Joe Biden's decision to run for reelection before dropping out in July 2024. In December 2025, Martin announced that the DNC would not publicly release the report as expected, instead choosing to focus on its recent victories in off cycle elections. This decision drew significant criticism, particularly after Martin's appearance defending the decision on the podcast Pod Save America in April 2026. In a substack post accompanying the release, Martin apologized for his handling of the issue, writing, I didn't want to create a distraction. Ironically, in doing so, I ended up creating an even bigger distraction. CNN was the first outlet to release the DNC autopsy in full, although it is still missing several sections, including analyses of Democratic performance and House of Representatives races, lists of sources for major claims, an executive summary, and a conclusion. Additionally, much of the report's provided analyses are unsupported or contradict publicly available information. The DNC later issued an annotated copy of the report highlighting its errors. The report's delay and release have drawn significant criticism of Martin and the dnc. Democratic aligned organizations have criticized the report's failure to address concerns over Biden's age and his administration's handling of the Israel Hamas war. Representative Ro Khanna, the Democrat from California, told reporters, I mean, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to know Gaza was one of the big issues in the 2024 election. In the wake of the release, some Democrats have called for Martin to step down. Representative Seth Moulton, the Democrat from Massachusetts told Axios he should resign, while Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama advisor and Pod Save America co host, said Martin could not repair the trust. Today we'll share perspectives on the report from the left and the right, and then senior editor Will Kabeck will give his take.

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Newsflash. I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday, and you can find Fantasy fanfellas wherever you get your podcasts. All right, first up, let's start with what the left is saying. The left says DNC chair Martin mishandled the report. Some say Democratic leaders are changing strategy regardless of the report's shortcomings. Others critique the postmortem for omitting substantive policy analysis. In msnow, Zeeshan Aleem called the DNC report the worst of all worlds. If Ken Martin had followed through on his original promise, this report wouldn't be shrouded in a fraction of the controversy it is now, aleem wrote. It was initially supposed to come out in spring 2025, but then he delayed and delayed until he ultimately said he refused to release it at all. He had ample time to either clearly lay out expectations for the report's quality or to fix what was submitted. And when he torpedoed the report, he did not explain why, other than to say that the party ought to look forward. The result is a failure on his part. He made a pledge, and he did not fulfill it. One can't help but wonder, too, if Martin has preemptively derided the report as so bad it needed to be shelved because he sought a way to avoid tussling with activists who would have assailed the report's assessment of issues like Gaza, Aleem said. If the DNC had released a report similar to this when it initially was expected to, it would likely have caused a few days of debate between moderate and progressive Democrats. But Martin's process of delaying it, quashing it, and then releasing a sloppy, incomplete report has attracted far more scrutiny than it would have gotten otherwise and made the party look cowardly and incompetent in the process. In Vox, Andrew Prokop said Democrats don't need an autopsy to know what they did wrong. If you're looking for insights into why Democrats lost in 2024, you won't find many in the DNC's disavowed autopsy, Prokop wrote. There haven't really been any dramatic attempts by Democrats to change their party brand going forward. But behind closed doors among many Democratic elites, a reckoning has indeed taken place, and a quiet consensus about at least part of the path forward has emerged. The most obvious midterm plan is a laser focus on affordability and on criticizing President Donald Trump evident in campaigns across the country. Democrats have also recalibrated on various other issues where many in the party believed they had gotten too far out of sync with mainstream voters over the past decade, most notably border security, crime, climate change and identity issues. Prokop said this more restrained approach to changing the party's image may well pay off in the midterms. In the New Republic, Alex Shepard argued Gaza wasn't the biggest omission in the report if you've read anything about the Democrats autopsy and its 2024 election loss, it probably highlighted what the report doesn't include any mention of Gaza, shepard wrote. But the overriding focus on this one omission misses a more important point. The problem with the DNC autopsy isn't just that it doesn't mention Gaza. It's that it ignores policy and for that matter, politics, how policies are messaged and what role they're playing in coalition building. Altogether, a report that reckoned with aspects of Democratic messaging and voter targeting while also examining political and policy issues like Gaza, inflation and Biden's stubborn refusal to hold onto power could be useful, Shepard said. But that would have been too obvious a path for Ken Martin, it seems. The document itself may be useless, but it has yielded one important lesson nonetheless. The DNC needs new leadership. Alright, that is it for what the left is saying. Which brings us to what the right is saying. The right critiques the DNC report for avoiding the party's biggest problems. Some argue that retrospective reports are mostly irrelevant. Others say the postmortem proves Democrats don't know what voters want. In the Washington Times, Kelly Sadler argued the Democratic Party is in total disarray. To call the report an embarrassment is an understatement. It was a humiliating exercise that exposed the party's inability to self reflect. Nowhere in the document is it critical of the party's cover up of former President Joe Biden's clear cognitive decline, no mention of his disastrous debate with President Trump, and no blame on Mr. Biden for dropping out of the race early, Sadler wrote. There was no mention of inflation, boys competing against girls in sports, gas prices, pronouns, Gaza or religion of any kind. Realigning their party before the midterms and the 2028 presidential election also seems far off, Sadler said. Democrats haven't shifted on any of their losing 2024 policy stances, which include a weakened border, support for illegal aliens, transgenders competing in women's sports and being soft on crime. The only economic policy they rally around is tax the rich, as they point to raising taxes as a policy achievement. Indeed, the only good thing going for Republicans is that Democrats are a complete mess. In the New York Post, Rich Lowry said Democrats should be grateful that the stakes of their autopsy are so low. The report acknowledges that Democrats are out of touch and too dependent on the Republicans making poor candidate choices. It fails to grapple with the issues of inflation and immigration, lowery wrote. The history of such party appraisals isn't a good one. Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 by taking the recommendations of the GOP autopsy after its 2012 election defeat and basically doing the opposite. Democrats may be rudderless and increasingly extreme, but that doesn't mean they won't have a good election night this coming November. Usually, a party that has just lost the White House rises or falls in the midterms based on the incumbent president's job approval rather than its own political creativity or inherent appeal, lowry said. As for winning the White House, that typically depends on nominating someone who is charismatic and fresh, who has an unexpected approach to politics, and who develops a new coalition. Think Barack Obama in 2008 or Donald Trump in 2016. None of this comes about by having a political strategist talk to a bunch of people about the immediate past election and write a long report about it. In the Los Angeles Times, Jonah Goldberg compared Democrats to a business executive asking, why aren't we selling more dog food? In an apocryphal story, a dog food executive asked, why aren't we selling more dog food? After a long silence, a small voice from the back ventures a guess. Maybe the dogs don't like it. Simply put, the ideological activist base can't accept that the dogs don't actually like what they're being served. This denial has a long history, goldberg wrote. Ever since FDR's administration, both parties have organized around an enduring myth of American politics. If everyone voted, Democrats would win. This idea more than any other explains why Republicans favor tighter controls around voting and Democrats want looser ones. Another related assumption by Democrats we're obviously right, so we just have to do better at getting our message out. Goldberg said the autopsy offers more of the same, arguing that Democrats need to copy the always on media and activist infrastructure of the right now as tradecraft. None of this is indefensible, but in context, it's the same argument that has hobbled Democrats for decades. There's nothing wrong with our dog food. We just need a better ad campaign. All right, let's head over to Will for his take.

[Podcast Host/Announcer (e.g., Will Kabeck or John Law)]

All right, thanks, John. Hey everyone, this is Will, Back here to read my take. I'll admit it. I read all of the negative articles about the Democratic National Committee's 2024 election report before I read a word of the report itself. Now, if you've read any of those articles over the past week and you just heard a few of them from what the left and right were saying, you know they're brutal. Whether they're coming from the left or the right. Case in point, we reviewed 32 overall pieces of commentary for today's edition, about 15 from the left, 17 from the right, and and literally not a single one had a positive slant on the report or its takeaways. Now my contrarian instincts pushed me to seek out redeeming qualities in the report. When I finally did read it, I was confident that I could unearth some overlooked, valuable, thought provoking insights buried in the lengthy document that others had ignored, either for lack of interest or fear of deviating from the emerging consensus. But yeah, this is about as bad as advertised. The report lacks a clear, consistent theory of the election or any grounding argument that connects the disparate pieces of evidence presented across the 11 sections. Actually, the only through line in the postmortem is the DNC's apparent incompetence at every stage of compiling, presenting and releasing it. The DNC actually destroyed its own report's credibility before anyone else had the chance to all 192 pages are tagged with a bright red header that states this document reflects the views of the author, not the dnc. End quote. Effectively turning its author, a consultant handpicked by DNC chair Martin, into a whipping boy for the DNC to excise from their political body and castigate. The disclaimer at the top also says the DNC was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews or supporting data for a report that the DNC itself commissioned. As if that weren't enough, the organization thoroughly annotated the autopsy to highlight factual errors, mystery, sourcing and tenuous conclusions. And it's kind of like a tennis coach trotting out a woefully unprepared player and then loudly proclaiming how weak and ineffective they are before a single point has been played. Is that more of a reflection on the player or the coach? Now, with that said preemptive self reproach was probably the best available option here. The report simply isn't close to finished. Almost comically so at points, the executive summary Blank large portions of the what happened? Section, which you'd think would be one of the most important parts of a postmortem analysis. Also blank. Most sections lack any sourcing for their core claims. And to cap it off, the conclusion is also blank. Equally perplexing, the content that is there contains huge factual errors beyond what you'd expect even in a first draft. Like the claim that a Capitol Police officer was beaten to death by the insurrectionists on January 6th. Or the suggestion that 2022 Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker would have done, quote, little more than rubber stamp the president's agenda, end quote. The president in 2022 was, of course, Joe Biden. Even a year after its initial due date, the report was still nowhere near ready for primetime. But given its length and the time already sunk into it, you'd expect it to contain some concrete analysis and conclusions. And it is dense with charts, polling and numbers, albeit mostly unsourced, including findings on how different campaigns deployed capital and what kinds of media placements they prioritized. Frustratingly, though, it avoids drawing direct conclusions. The report spends dozens of pages making painstaking comparisons between Democratic and Republican strategies, building up to five empty corporate speak recommendations such as Define lanes for Communications ecosystem and upskill organizing staff to meet the moment. Ironically, these takeaways embody the exact kind of wooden HR approved rhetoric that a better report would have identified as part of the reason Democrats failed to connect with voters in 2024. The section on the media contains a bit more meat, breaking down ad spending by party and medium and showing that Republicans spent less across virtually all categories and got more bang for their buck. Some tangible analysis follows about how Democrats may have overinvested in media at the end of the election cycle instead of creating a more balanced spread at all times, and how the media could have been targeted differently for a phone versus a tablet versus a television and so on. All salient stuff, sure, but again, the document rarely moves from modes of messaging to the message itself. Instead, it's just more corporate speak. Democrats need to meet voters wherever they are. They need to be always on. They need to inhabit the habits of voters, and they need to, in all caps, listen. Yeah, that should do it. A deathly allergy to potentially controversial stances pervades the document. One section compares Kamala Harris performance in North Carolina, which she lost, to then state Attorney General Josh Stein's performance in the state's gubernatorial election, which he won. It tees up some thorny topics, like the male voter problem, but the takeaways there are threadbare. Harris saw dramatic drops in support among young Latino men and young black men compared to Biden's 2020 performance, it reads, quote. However, Stein recovered significant ground with both groups, suggesting his campaign found effective ways to reach these voters. What were those strategies? The report doesn't say, instead moving swiftly onto a section on educational polarization with more unexplored allusions to Stein's comparatively better performance among white, non college voters. The closest thing to a conclusion it offers is that Harris focused too much on women, which still doesn't explore what made Stein's approach effective, or how those Differences explain a 11 point gap with male voters. Finally, as most commentators have noted, the absence of any discussion on the war in Gaza or of President Biden's fitness for office is conspicuous. Obviously, any statement would have become a lightning rod for criticism. Or, as Zeeshan Aleem wrote under what the Left Is Saying, a few days of debate between moderate and progressive Democrats. Instead, they chose to say nothing, and the absence became the story. Once again, the failure or unwillingness to wade into choppy waters renders the entire exercise pointless. Now, the report isn't completely bereft of value. Certain passages are strikingly lucid on the party's ongoing challenges. Since the high point of the 2008 Obama landslide, the Democratic Party has vacillated between stagnation and retrogression. One early section reads, quote these hairsplitting margins of defeat in 2024 may lead some to argue Democrat leadership and candidates may need less changing of their message and approach and more massaging of their ideas for widespread adoption. That kind of thinking denialist at its core prevents the party from seeking real accountability, reads another. As someone who felt national Democrats badly misread the electorate in 2024, these lines feel spot on. It's strange, then, that the ensuing pages embody that same denialist attitude, avoiding discussing solutions to broad directional problems in favor of more arcane issues about ad placements and managing campaign funds. I honestly feel for DNC Chair Martin, but he has no one but himself to blame for the situation. This entire fiasco flowed from his promise to conduct this audit while campaigning for chair, and that commitment eventually left him with no good choices, stuck between the escalating speculation about what he was hiding and his knowledge that the report would only serve to embarrass the party. He should have ripped the bandage off earlier, yes, but given the no win situation he eventually was in, releasing the report, as shoddy as it is, was ultimately the right decision. Before he relented, though, Martin argued that it was pointless to release the report now, with the midterms months away. I suspect many TANGLE listeners had a similar response when they heard today's topic. And I'll be the first to say that this document, even if it had been completed on time, won't greatly impact the midterms or the 2028 presidential election. The campaigns the parties run and the political conditions during the elections will, of course matter far more. However, I think this line of thought misses the entire point of why voters wanted this audit in the first place. Everyone knows democrats failed in 2024. Many people have their theories about why, and they all want to see what the DNC has learned. Did the party err in how it handled Biden's age and fitness issues? What were Harris's weaknesses as a candidate? How impactful was the war in Gaza? And how do Democrats change voters perception that they're inauthentic? The DNC's ongoing inability to grapple with these critical issues raises another set of uncomfortable questions. Have Democrats actually learned any hard lessons from 2024, or are they simply banking on being anti Trump? Are they organized and competent enough to capitalize on the current political environment, or might they squander a potential blue wave? What happens when President Trump is gone? Frankly, I don't think these questions are going away, even with this report now mercifully in the rearview mirror.

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All right, that is it for my take. Managing editor Ari Weitzman had a concurrence today, so I'm going to pass it over to him to read that and then John will take us home from there. Ari, over to you. This is Managing Editor Ari Weitzman with a staff concurrence to willstake for all the disclaimers the DNC ran in its annotated document. The report's main issue doesn't seem to stem from its author, but rather from the project's management. Why hire just one person, a shifty, unpaid politico once described as someone who didn't know what the fuck he was talking about, to publish a report if you actually cared about what it said? The root decision? To exclude any 2024 campaign stakeholder from contributing to this postmortem or to outsource a self reflection. That was Ken Martin's biggest error.

[Podcast Co-host/Commentator (e.g., Camille Foster or Ari Weitzman)]

Thanks, Will. Here's your under the Radar story for today folks. On Tuesday, the Energy Department identified five companies for advanced negotiations on a potential plan to repurpose Cold War era weapons grade plutonium as fuel for nuclear power plants. The plan could address a key hurdle to building out nuclear power infrastructure a dearth of enriched uranium for fuel. However, some nuclear proliferation advocates and lawmakers have questioned the plan, noting the technical and financial challenges encountered by similar efforts in the past. The New York Times has this story, and there's a link in today's episode Description and now for a deeper look. Parties responding to defeat with Election postmortems and reorganization isn't new, though the methods of analysis have certainly evolved after President Jimmy Carter's loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980. Representative Gillis Long created the Committee on party effectiveness in 1981 to spearhead a reorganization of the party. The CPE's recommendations did not prevent crushing Democratic defeats in 1984, and centrist Democrats created the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985 in an effort to moderate the party while Republicans won the White house again in 1988. The council's efforts eventually paid off with former DLC chair Bill Clinton's 1992 victory. The modern election autopsy is more recent. Following Mitt Romney's 2012 defeat, Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus announced the Growth and Opportunity Project to better understand recent GOP messaging failures. The report was released in March 2013, and it called for the GOP to become more inclusive toward minority groups and suggested that the party had sound policies but needed to communicate them more effectively. However, the eventual 2016 Republican candidate Donald Trump did not incorporate the report's recommendations into his campaign. And now for the road not taken where we talk about the process of the stories we chose to cover and not cover this week, it took a long time to get exactly where we started. At the beginning of the week, we wanted to discuss Tulsi Gabbard's resignation, the Cornham Paxton primary, and the DNC retrospective. By the end of the week, that's exactly what we discussed. But the path to making our final decision for today's topic was far from straightforward. We spent a good deal of time debating whether to provide an update on Iran negotiations or the new guidance from President Trump for green card applicants to apply from their home countries. We opted against an Iran update since peace negotiations remain in flux and the administration's characterizations of negotiations have proven unreliable so far. And while the green card changes are set to have a large impact on our immigration system until they are actually implemented and begin to affect on the ground processes and drive more commentary, we want to hold off on covering the topic. As always, we may not be the first to cover a story, but we will always be thorough when we do. And last but not least, our have a nice day section the pandemic reshuffled daily life in many ways, not all of them negative. One American dads started spending a lot more time at home Research from the American Institute for Boys and Men found that between 2019 and 2024, college educated fathers cut paid work hours by six per week, while adding more than four hours to cooking, cleaning and childcare. Millennial dads now spend as much time with their kids as moms did in 1985, and the shift appears to be voluntary. The most financially secure fathers, those with the most flexibility to choose, increase their homemaking hours the most. This is the biggest increase in the amount of hands on fathering in half a century, aibm President Richard Reeves said. The Progress Network has this story and there's a link in today's episode description. Alright everybody, that is it for today's episode. As always, if you'd like to support our work, Please go to retangle.com where you can sign up for a newsletter membership, podcast membership, or a bundled membership that gets you a discount on both. Once again, we're excited to announce that Free Press columnist Kat Rosenfield will be joining our OnStage lineup at Tangle's next in person event in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia on June 14th. Kat will share the stage with Tangle Executive Editor Isaac Saul, Editor at Large Camille Foster, and Longview Editor Andy Mills for a conversation about artificial intelligence and national politics. We're excited to bring the Tangle community together for the latest installment of our live event series, and we would love to see you there. Tickets are moving fast, so get yours while you can with a link in today's episode. Description Our latest episode of Suspension of the Rules is available on Spotify, Apple Music, and you can head over to our YouTube channel to watch the full episode. Also, while you're there, please do us a favor and subscribe to the channel. It helps boost our presence in the algorithm so that we can get more views from other people on YouTube. We'll be back in your ears again on Monday. In the meantime, for Isaac, Will and the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have an absolutely fantastic weekend, y'.

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Our Executive Editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our Executive producer is John Wall. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman with Senior Editor Will Kaback and Associate Editors Audrey Moorhead, Lindsey Knuth and Bailey Saul. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. To learn more about Tango and to sign up for a membership, please visit our [e-mail].

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