I Read the DNC Autopsy so You Don't Have To

The title of the Democratic National Committee’s 2024 Autopsy (“Autopsy”) is “TITLE PAGE,” a joke worthy of Magritte. In its current state, Autopsy is very like a surrealist collage: Its lack of footnotes has allowed somebody — a DNC intern? — to overlay the text with copious annotations in yellow highlighter and boxed notes in red. Autopsy is innocent not only of footnotes, but of sourcing, bibliography, executive summary, and other editorial structures that one might expect for this sort of deliverable, an after-action report for an election where, after all, the Democrats lost to Donald Trump. For the second time. However, when Autopsy is read carefully, a thesis emerges, despite the permission structure of choral disapproval advertantly triggered by all those red boxes.

Summarizing Autopsy’s thesis:

The modern DNC is defined by a money flow. Money flows into the DNC from two sources: Oligarchs and the dull normal citizenry. Money flows out of the DNC through “payees” (vendors, consultants, “Democratic strategists”). These entities are highly concentrated. They control two outgoing flows. The smaller is for ground operations at the state level. The larger, even an order of magnitude larger, is for media buys. Ultimately, the money for media buys flows to the oligarchs who own the media. Thus, the DNC’s money flow reinforces the power of oligarchs, and disempowers non-oligarchs, as ground operations are chronically underfunded and a form of seasonal labor. The party is never “built,” but the money flow remains, immutable. Unspoken but obvious is that the concentrated payees are doing very well for themselves, thank you.

We know the money flow is immutable because Howard Dean tried to change it with the 50-state strategy (ground operations, state level). He failed. Obama changed it temporarily in 2008 with Obama for America (ground operations, state level) but then for whatever reason folded OFA into the DNC, where it withered. Sanders tried to change it, twice, in 2016 and 2020 (ground operations, state level, small donors). The party threw him under the bus in 2016, and then drove the bus back over him in 2020. Fetterman (bless his heart) ran a brilliant ground operation in 2022 — “Every county, every vote” — beating Amos Oz even after he had a stroke, but he was never emulated (save perhaps this year by the reviled Platner).

I’m about to do a close reading of Autopsy, with my own annotations. But before I do, three points:

UPDATE (1) What, you ask, happens with the lesser money flow that goes to operations at the State level? Recall that the only real distinctive competence of the modern political party is the control over the ballot. Control over the ballot does not happen at the national level; it happens in the states and localities, which is why party apparatus at that level must be kept alive, even if on life support. Not so much money does into that flow because not much money is needed; IIRC, the price for a voting machine contract was a steak dinner. Of course, some small fry operate on principle; others are loyalists; the transaction is not always mediated by cash.

(2) The release of Autopsy was a debacle; first time (2016’s Unity Reform Commission) as tragedy, second time as Streisand Effect. DNC chair Ken Martin first promised to release the report, then kept it under wraps, then released it “after facing intense internal pressure from Democratic operatives.” By the time the unfinished work appeared, the author that Ken Martin had chosen to do the work, Paul Rivera, seems to have vanished from the face of the earth. The whole mishegoss generated a media firestorm. What bugs me is that I can’t think of a Machiavellian reason for why Martin behaved as he did. Martin, after all, hand-picked Rivera, who was a volunteer, presumably to circumvent the Democrat nomenklatura. Well and good, but why didn’t Rivera finish the job, and why isn’t he doing interviews now? In fact, where is he?

(3) Rivera interviewed some hundreds of people (and a parallel DNC effort interviewed in the low thousands). So who were Rivera’s interviewees? Not the party grandees:

Among those not included in interviews: Biden, Harris or Walz. Top strategists, including Biden aides Mike Donilon, Anita Dunn, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed, and top Harris decision-makers like Jen O’Malley Dillon, Stephanie Cutter and David Plouffe, weren’t interviewed either. Neither were close Harris aides Sheila Nix, Kirsten Allen, Erin Wilson, Brian Fallon and Jalisa Washington-Price, or Sam Cornale, the Walz traveling chief of staff who had also been executive director of the DNC._{MR SUBLIMINAL That’s a damn shame.}

I’m guessing, therefore, that Rivera’s interviewees were the troops: those who run the underfunded and seasonal ground operations dictated by the money flow. That would be the reason Rivera promised them confidentiality, to avoid “You’ll never work in this town again.” The thesis proposed above, therefore, reflects their views. But presumably interview transcripts are somewhere. Why isn’t anyone looking for them? And why isn’t anyone seeking to interview the interviewees?

With those two questions, let’s proceed to a close reading of Autopsy.

* * *

[1] Clearly, the DNC intern who did the annotations was no copy editor. The adage “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” is often attributed to Twain but that’s woozle. Worse, “understanding history rarely repeats itself, it does rhyme” isn’t even grammatical; there needs to be a coordinating conjunction like “but” before “it does.” Leaving open the question of whether the Democratic [sic] Party is “effective,” and if so, at what.

[1] I can hardly blame Rivera for following common usage. However, a “small” (lowercase in original) d for “the will of the people,” and a “Big” (uppercase in original) D for “systems and structures” would seem to invert what the order of things should be, in all-too-familiar fashion), #justsaying.

[1] “Tends to” and not “seems to” “ignore; the first of many grenades thrown. Remember Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy, which the Democrats gutted? Good times.

[2] What a hodge-podge, what a confusion of categories. Obviously, “the people” and “workers” aren’t the same. “Civil discourse” and “fair play” aren’t the same, and are often opposed (see Matthew 21:12-17And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves,And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple; and he healed them.And when the chief priests and scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying in the temple, and saying, Hosanna to the son of David; they were sore displeased,And said unto him, Hearest thou what these say? And Jesus saith unto them, Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise?And he left them, and went out of the city into Bethany; and he lodged there.). And note “working Americans and their families.” First, Democrats can never, ever say “working class”; Rivera is not unique in that regard. Second, not all members of the working class have families, and not all families are the same. (Democrats utter “Working families” in a defensive crouch, as Republicans brandish the big stick of “family values”).

[1] “Follows the money” and “who benefited”: See, there’s your problem.1

[12] The implicit claim that the DNC could or would “independently” “verify” anything amazes but does not persuade.

1 Obviously, Rivera can’t use the more learned-sounding cui bono, because that would imply that those who benefited were crooks.

2 Whoops. Should be “[2]” but don’t have time to redo the graphic.

NOTE: Here my annotations and the DNC interm’s annotations collide. My yellow highlighting (at “in person”) is lighter than the intern’s (at “a range”). I don’t box my text in red. I do use numbers in square brackets for notes (“[1]”).

[1] The project was abandoned before the apparatus (footnotes, summaries, and so forth) was installed. That apparatus is left for last is not unheard of. There is very little value-add in pointing this out over and over again; instead of playing gotcha and waving red flags, the better course of action would be to refute the claims, using evidence (although, to be fair, an intern is unlikely to be able to do this).

[2] It’s not clear whether the 300 “individuals and organizations” Rivera promised confidentiality to overlapped with the 1200 interviews by the DNC and the ASDC (“Association of State Democratic Committees”).

[1] The 2024 margins were, in fact, close. And so—

[2] The DNC intern’s red markup is quibbling (and if you want to quarrel with 270,607, cite to a source).

[1] Thanks, Obama!

[2] Thanks, Obama! Here, Rivera throws Obama under the bus, as indeed he ought to have done. Not only did Obama’s Larry Summers-selected economic team merely reboot the financial system — Iceland put its banksters in jail — the mortage debacle cost the Democrats a key Senate seat in Massachusetts (see Ferguson, T., & Chen, J. (2010). One, Two, Three…Many Tea Parties? A Closer Look at the 2010 Massachusetts Senate Race, now having sadly succumbed to link rot).

[3] “Working Americans.” Never, ever “working class.”

[1] Remember when Obama disbanded Obama for America, folded it into the DNC, and ended its independent status? Good times.

[2] Which Democrats are still feeling today, in the redistricting/gerrymandering battles. However, [genuflects] Obama’s role, as party leader in 2010, in making sure Democrats fought those battles on ever tougher “terrain” is never, ever mentioned.

[1] “You will pry RussiaGate from my cold, dead hands.”

[1] Would it have been too much for the DNC intern to do a quick check in Wikipedia? Ashli Babbitt, Rosanne Boyland, Kevin Greeson, Benjamin Philips, who did die, were all Republicans. No Capitol police officer was beaten to death. Presumably a finalized deliverable would have had a copy editor do some fact-checking, but in the meantime, if you really want to nail Rivera, why not do so, ffs?

[1] “Strong and ethical leaders.” Since when? LBJ? Truman? FDR?

[2] Precisely counter to Tiexiera’s “demographics is destiny” thesis, which dominated Democrat thinking for so many years.

[1] “Republicans own and Democrats rent.” Witty, makes a structural point, and there’s no red mark by the DNC intern, closing the case in Rivera’s favor. Ditto Democrats are empowering reactionary oligarchs, ditto closing the case (modulo details).

[1] Hilariously, despite the DNC intern’s red box, Rivera actually provides sourcing for “Always Late vs. Always On”: a report from Tech for Campains. Did the intern even read the text?

[2] The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!

[1] Source material needed for “All Screens Are Not The Same”?

[2] This claim had to have come from Rivera’s 300 interviews. Assuming (as I do) that these interviews were performed, I’m inclimed to believe the claim. (One small straw in the wind here: Fetterman’s media team ran a brilliant and unorthodox campaign against Amos Oz when their candidate was in a hospital bed. They should be at the top table. They seem to have disappeared entirely. (Readers?)

[1] “The media consultants may not like it.” See, there’s your problem. Little Madison’s violin lessons are at stake!

[1] The candidate, however, has to believable in.

[2] Surely Obama for America was exactly this “deep level of engagment”? The intern flagged this in red, so I suppose hopes to advance on the media side of the house.

[3] This tendency to focus only on what’s “needed to win” is, I think, chronic. That’s why the Gore campaign. in Florida 2000. only challenged the count in precincts that would put them over the top, instead of taking the moral (and political) high ground of a state-wide recount.

[1],[2] $150 million for voter contact vs $1.04 billion for media, and all we get is pasted in verbiage in a red box. That’s an order of magnitude difference. Are precise numbers really needed?

[3] Sounds like a plan, even if a new “division of labor” is implied.

[1] Contrast the old-school Democrat idea of a “precinct captain” (which old school commenter DCBlogger wished to resurrect).

[2] There is no Democrat Turning Point USA; I suppose the closet they come to a hardy perennial is an entity like Elias Law Group or Perkins Coie.

[3] The precinct captain was always there, “always on,” delivering concrete material benefits to voters.

[1] Ugh, “human capital” (usage example: “Bank boss sorry after describing workers as ‘lower value human capital’”). If you want to be a party of the working class, by the working class, for the working class — and it’s not clear Rivera wants that — it’s not enough to avoid language like that; you have to avoid thoughts like that, habits of thought like that, ideologies like that.

[1] So the entire get-out-the-vote operation had a single point of failure, which almost failed? To be fair, media buys are a lot simpler, technically.

[2] Since there’s virtually no citation apparatus at all, it seems a little disingenuous for the intern to call out “centers the user experience of organizers and volunteers” with a red box. Perhaps the real issue is that “the user experience of organizers and volunteers” should not be centered?

[3] I think it’s OK to merely claim that reliance on a single point of failure raises “concerns.” Come on.

NOTE There’s are many tables of financial data, for Presidential, Senate, and House races, for both donors and “payees” (vendors the DNC purchased services from). Donor detail will naturally be utterly obfuscated, and we’ll have to wait for Thomas Ferguson and his team to straighten all that out. (To my knowledge, Ferguson’s team includes Jie Chen and Paul D. Jorgensen, but new members may have signed up for election 2024). So I will “follow the money” only with regard to payees, will regard party vs. independent expenditures as in essence the same, and only consider the Presidential election (which was, after all, the real shocker).

[1] Underlining the concentration of payees: “Waterfront Strategies again led all payees…. with 46.9% of all Democratic Presidential independent expenditures.” And: note “the concentration of spending among a relatively small group of vendors and organizations.” (Interestingly, Republican payees aren’t nearly to concentrated). Concentration has been a continuing problem for Democrats, at least since 2016. Remember the Unity Reform Commission? It was convened after the Democrats lost to Trump for the first time in 2016. Here’s commission member and national co-chair for Obama’s 2012 campaign Nomiki Konst:

I made a partial transcript of the most interesting part, starting at 0:36:

[NOMIKI KONST] This smells…. [T]he budget of the party was never put before … the people who have a fiduciary responsibility…. Over half the executive committee right there had no idea where the money was going. We spent a billion dollars, lost the easiest presidential race you could possibly imagine, with joint fundraising agreements. State parties weren’t being funded. During the DNC chair’s race there were some state party chairs who said “I’m an acting executive director. I have $3,000 cash on hand.” How are you supposed to rebuild the party if you have no idea where that money was spent? And you know what I did go through FEC filings, and it doesn’t look good. It smells. We’re talking about close to $700-$800 million dollars between a joint fundraising agreement and the DNC being spent on five consultants.

If you’re in Arizona and you have an ectopic pregnancy you can’t go to a Planned Parenthood clinic [because] it’s gone, [because] that state legislature is lost, so you have to drive over to Mexico, and if you bleed to death on the way, you know whose fault that is in my mind? That’s a Democratic Party that wasn’t funded, recruiting candidates, [not] investing in local parties, and that is our fault because we have put that money to the top five consultants… [T]his is outrageous, it’s unethical, it’s bad governance, and frankly it’s excuse me [fucking] corruption.

Hilariously, the five consultants were not named. Now, for all I know, the DNC cleaned up its budgeting process. However, a central thesis of the 2024 Autopsy is that the two central problems Konst identified — concentration and opacity among the payees (“five consultants”) and neglect of the state parties — persist.

[1] Concentration once more.

[1] Concentration once more.

[1] Concentration once more.

[1] Concentration once more.

Reminds me of John McCain’s quip: “Russia is a ‘gas station masquerading as a country.’” The Democrats are a mailing list masquerading as a party.

[1] None of this apparatus exists.

[2] Despite all the hoopla about missing sources, there seems to be no effort to get the original data from the DNC Office of Strategy and Innovation, or from Rivera himself. Odd!