Another election postmortem

Readers will probably remember the Liberal Party’s postmortem on last year’s federal election, which came to conclusions the leadership disliked and which it therefore vainly tried to suppress. We’re trying not to talk about the Liberal Party for a while, so instead let’s look at a surprisingly similar case from the other side of the Pacific.

The Democratic Party in the United States did not, unlike our Liberals, lose the last election in a landslide. Contrary to the impression you might have picked up from the media, Kamala Harris lost in 2024 only very narrowly, winning 49.2% of the two-party vote. But because she lost to a candidate that the party had beaten before and who on most criteria seemed unelectable, it was a traumatic experience, so it’s no surprise at all that the Democrats commissioned a review to find out what went wrong.

Paul Rivera, the consultant engaged by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), duly produced a report – or at least a draft of one. The exact sequence of moves from there is obscure, but evidently the DNC was unhappy, Rivera left, DNC chair Ken Martin refused to release the report, and then inevitably, last week, backed down and did so, albeit with prominent disclaimers and dissenting annotations. You can read it here.

There’s some good stuff in the report, including lots of detail about finances and organisation. It points to the need to maintain continuity in campaign infrastructure at ground level, and highlights the dilemma that the party faces in concentrating its resources. While “spending on states not initially in the battleground array would have been a distraction or a diversion of resources,” “[n]ational campaigns also need to think about how they are faring in the ecosystem outside their battlegrounds.”

But there are some glaring omissions: partly because it’s clearly just a draft, lacking a conclusion and executive summary, and lacking references for most of its data claims. But there are also issues that it avoids, such as Joe Biden’s initial decision to run for re-election and the consequent late and hasty start for Harris (although its criticism of the administration’s earlier unwillingness to promote Harris hints at the problem). Some party activists have pointed particularly to its failure to consider the impact of the war in Gaza.

None of the report’s contents, however, have been anything like as newsworthy as the fiasco over its release and non-release. Martin is now regarded as living on borrowed time, and voters have had their impressions of Democrat incompetence reinforced. As Ed Kilgore puts it at New York magazine:

[T]here is neither an assessment nor a prescription that rises to the level of offering clarity to anguished Democratic Party members. Instead, the message that comes through is that Democrats are still processing what happened and what to do about it, but you’ll have to get back to them later for anything the least bit definitive. ‘Democrats really are in disarray’ is the unmistakable takeaway.

Whether any of this will matter for this year’s midterm elections, or even for the presidential election in 2028, is another question. Oppositions often win without having addressed the causes of their prior defeat, simply by waiting for their opponents to fall over. The key factor in the coming elections will be voters’ verdict on the Trump administration, not what they think about the Democrats.

But in a system already deformed by the way that one party has taken collective leave of its senses, it surely matters if the other one is too dysfunctional to even carry out a proper review of its past performance.