TO: DNC Chair Ken Martin
FR: Paul Rivera
DT: December 2025
RE: The Autopsy
Well, boss, here is the 2024 “autopsy” you requested. You’re going to love it. You and I both know it is a crock of sh*t. LOL. As you required, it explains everything except the cause of death.
I blame the consultants. The pollsters. The turnout models. The field operation. The digital strategy. The messaging architecture. The sequencing of the paid media. And this is my favorite: Though we brutally outraised Trump, I even blame our fundraising.
At one point, I believe I blame typography.
Everybody gets tagged in here except us: the people who actually drove the car into the ditch.
What else can we do? This was our second loss to the orange lunatic we compared to Hitler. If voters still picked him over us, we don’t want anybody asking the unhelpful question: “What if the problem was not the campaign?”
Per your instructions, I was careful not to blame President Biden, may he rest in peace. History will record him as a noble statesman tragically overtaken by time, gravity, and stairs. The less we say about his condition, the less awkward it becomes that the entire party apparatus insisted, right up until the debate, that he was Abraham Lincoln pedaling a ten-speed.
The worse we make Biden look, the less the blame falls on Kamala. And we can’t have her running again in 2028. That woman couldn’t finish a jigsaw puzzle if only one piece remained.
Still, she’s got a base. So, we portray her not as an incompetent candidate, but as the victim of insufficient “message definition,” “narrative permission structures,” and “surrogate deployment inefficiencies.” That’s all Washingtonese for: Nobody could figure out how to make her sound normal. I dream of the day we have put racism and sexism so far behind us that we can all concede that giggling Kamala was the world’s worst candidate, even though she was black and female!
That day is not today.
To be fair, the loss was not entirely her fault. For nearly a decade, our party convinced itself that demographic symbolism was a governing philosophy. We became so addicted to virtue signaling our superior status that we lost the ability to make ordinary human judgments about talent, right and wrong, and what is real.
The good news? Many of our leaders now say they want to nominate a white, six-foot-two governor who talks like a football coach and eats meatloaf. Why? For the same reason they nominated Kamala: Not because they’ve abandoned identity politics, but because they believe America is still racist and sexist.
Throughout the entire 192-page autopsy, as you asked, I never awakened the corpse.
At no point do we ask if voters recoiled from a party culture that increasingly regarded them with contempt.
We do not ask whether working-class Americans grew tired of being spoken to as though they were unenlightened villagers awaiting instruction from a faculty lounge. We do not ask if our anti-semitism and support for Hamas crossed any lines among average Americans.
We do not ask whether constantly informing people they are privileged, fragile, colonizing, transphobic, or insufficiently fluent in the latest pronouns might eventually produce a backlash. We do not ask why young men rolled their eyes when we told them barbecuing was a toxic guy thing.
We do not ask whether a party that spent years lecturing Americans about “their truth” accidentally lost touch with the truth.
Instead, this autopsy bravely concludes that our real mistake was failing to produce enough short-form video content for TikTok.
I scrubbed out God, character, and morality. I erased all the stuff about Democratic Party leadership during COVID. There is no point in reminding people of the years we spent lecturing them that they were selfish Neanderthals if they wanted to open their businesses, visit dying relatives, or send their children to school.
At that time, which voters unfortunately recall, many of our party officials attended maskless dinner parties, enjoyed spas and salons, and participated in public street protests blessed by “the science.” These activities left the inconvenient impression that our movement had evolved into a kind of secular clerisy: morally superior, permanently credentialed, and exempt from pedestrian rules.
Nevertheless, we are the party of democracy. It would not be prudent to include these points in this analysis.
Instead, we focus heavily on “message fragmentation among emerging constituencies.” That tested better in focus groups than “people stopped trusting us when we lied to them.”
Additionally, on no occasion do we touch the central moral problem: Modern progressivism asks Americans to believe obvious untruths in public as proof of moral goodness. It was for their own good, of course, but still, we asked voters to believe that men and women are interchangeable except when vaginas have special rights. That inflation would never happen, but if it did, it would be transitory. That the border was secure. That crime statistics mattered more than whether someone’s daughter was raped and murdered by an illegal alien. That biological reality itself was somehow negotiable as long as HR approved the language.
Eventually, ordinary people figured that if our party asked them to deny what they could plainly see, it would probably lie to them about other things, too.
So, as you directed, none of that gets a vowel or consonant here.
What would be the point? In our party, anything close to normal is being devoured by status-seeking, power-hungry, cannibalistic children, feasting on the bones of yesterday’s centrism. Our party is not getting less socialist, radical, or authoritarian. We are reveling in those things.
Why look in the mirror? What’s the point of self-reflection when AOC is what we see?
As Pogo once said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
There is no need to say that in this autopsy. So, I didn’t.
Let’s blame the apparatchiks and say we didn’t spend enough on social media. Let’s attack Trump, call him Satan, and quietly hope he defines our party for the next hundred years.
Boss, here is your autopsy. People are going to laugh at it. They are going to wonder why we spent so much money doing surveys and interviews to produce this wretched piece of taxidermy.
But that’s the point, isn’t it?
This autopsy is perfect when there is nothing we can fix.
***
Alex Castellanos is a co-founder of Purple Strategies, a bipartisan public affairs firm, and appears regularly on Fox News.
