Here’s exactly why Democrats lost in 2024*

This week, several separate reports were released that attempt to offer definitive explanations for why Democrats lost in 2024 and guidance on where the party goes from here. Through dozens of interviews and hundreds of pages of new data and analysis, these “autopsies” aim to shape public and private conversations about how the Democratic Party can find its way out of the political wilderness.

Project Enduring Majority

The first of these post-mortem reports is called Project Enduring Majority, commissioned by the progressive funding and organizing network Strategic Victory Fund (SVF) and authored by Scott Anderson, Stephanie Schriock, Marc Solomon, Michael Frias, and Joe Hill. This group’s 114-page report drew on interviews with more than 100 stakeholders—including elected officials, strategists, funders, operatives, and policy experts—to assess what went wrong for Democrats last year and how the party can rebuild.

The team behind Project Enduring Majority found that despite having a supermajority in the Senate in 2009, Democrats have failed to adapt in recent years while their majorities have evaporated. “We’re not changing our behavior. We’re not changing how we spend our money. We’re not listening to, or reflecting, the voters we need to engage. Instead, we’ve built a political ecosystem that is insulated from the consequences of losing — and increasingly detached from the voters we must win over,” they wrote. 

Among other findings, they outline how Democrats have failed to invest in year-round communications infrastructure to counter right-wing media dominance, and explain that donors typically fund campaigns and causes too late in the election cycle. The authors also issue a stinging critique of pollingism and “cost per net vote” methodology, which has been a funding requirement among certain billionaire Democratic donors.  

“We have become experts at analyzing data, building models, and testing messages in a lab. We’ve created a science around measurements like “Cost per Net Democratic Vote” (which if carried to its logical end means Democrats can never lose a race if they spend enough money). And we’ve certainly become good at efficiently buying TV commercials even though fewer Americans are watching. But politics is more art than science. And the art part has fallen behind.”

You can read the full Project Enduring Majority report at this DocSend link. 

Deciding to Win 

Another long-form 2024 autopsy was released Monday by a centrist group called Welcome, which sought to pin the party’s losses on its left wing. In “Deciding to Win,” authors Simon Bazelon, Lauren Harper Pope, and Liam Kerr attempt to provide data to reinforce their theory of the case - that ultimately, voters have stopped voting for Democrats because they view them as too liberal. 

“To give ourselves the best chance to win, we recommend the following changes to our approach. Democrats need to: ... Moderate our positions where our agenda is unpopular, including on issues like immigration, public safety, energy production, and some identity and cultural issues.”

Their solution, which is summarized in this video, is that Democrats should do two things: focus on prioritizing the issues voters actually care about, and position themselves closer to voters on issues where the party brand is unpopular. Those aren’t exactly revolutionary ideas.

Dave Weigel at Semafor has a good write-up of Welcome’s report here, and you can browse the whole thing for yourself at this link. 

Building a More Effective, Responsive Government 

A third report, less focused on campaign tactics and more on policy delivery, comes from the progressive Roosevelt Institute. Titled “Building a More Effective, Responsive Government,” it reflects on some of the Biden administration’s policy failures and outlines what a future Democratic administration should pursue.

“The Biden-Harris administration often sought to restore the governmental institutions and norms that had existed prior to the first Trump administration, rather than dramatically reimagining them to create more progressive, action-oriented government institutions…Future administrations should…Select and relentlessly prioritize broadly resonant big swings whose results will be concretely felt on the ground within the term, involving simple, memorable, and universally accessible program designs,” the authors write. Read the full report from The Roosevelt Institute here.

What’s the Value of an Autopsy?

All of these reports were released as the Democratic National Committee finalizes its own autopsy, which Ken Martin ally Paul Rivera is steering, and is sure to be dramatic. Former Harris Campaign Manager Jenn O’Malley Dillon is also pulling together another one, not meant for public distribution. Various reports have cast doubt that those 2024 election lookbacks will include any substantive critiques of Biden or Harris themselves. 

It has now been nearly a year since Democrats’ catastrophic loss on November 5th, 2024. All of these lookbacks are critical tools to spark conversations and provide data that fuel the debate about the party’s future, and they can offer genuinely helpful tactical insights to guide donors and strategists toward improving voter outreach. But every report has its own agenda and biases, and no single explanation for Democrats’ 2024 loss will be universally accepted by the party’s many factions.

In 2012, Republicans lost the presidential election in a campaign that they thought they could win. Months later, the RNC issued a widely-touted post-mortem with recommendations for the party’s future. It included advice for candidates to moderate their positions on issues like immigration and make the party more inclusive to young people, women, and minorities. 

“The Republican Party is one of tolerance and respect, and we need to ensure that the tone of our message is always reflective of these core principles,” the report reads. “In the modern media environment, a poorly phrased argument or out-of-context statement can spiral out of control and reflect poorly on the Party as a whole. Thus, we must emphasize…the importance of a welcoming, inclusive message in particular when discussing issues that relate directly to a minority group.”

Several years later, Donald Trump descended his escalator in Trump Tower, and the rest is history. 

Sen. Chris Murphy, who has turned out to be one of the Democratic Party’s most effective communicators in the second Trump era, went on YouTube talk show The Adam Friedland Show last week. The Connecticut senator and the millennial comedian discussed the Democratic Party’s challenges, the appeal of populism, and one of Murphy’s signature issues: loneliness and social isolation.

Watch the full episode below:

Partisan congressional redistricting battles are erupting across the country as Republicans race to redraw electoral maps ahead of the 2026 midterms, while Democrats scramble to counter with their own gerrymandering strategies. In multiple states, both parties are deploying increasingly aggressive tactics to rig their maps against the opposing party and entrench their power:

Meanwhile, last month Missouri passed a new map that would eliminate a Democratic congressional district, and California voters head to the polls next week to rig their own map in favor of Democrats. And of course, Texas started this whole thing at Donald Trump’s urging by passing their map to wipe out Democratic representation in the state. On top of all of this, the Supreme Court is considering striking down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act next year, which could see the elimination of Democratic-held congressional districts across the South. 

With high-stakes court rulings looming and each party racing to secure every advantage before 2026, the fight over who draws the lines has become a full-blown arms race. Regardless of how each state’s battle plays out, by 2027, our country’s congressional map will look very different from how it does today.