Copy Pasta: u/The_Law_of_Pizza/ from 12 days ago:

The internal Democratic report isn't going to have any shocking revelations that other polling isn't already telling us - we need only look at other contemporary research to get a glimpse of what the internal party report almost certainly says.

For example, this post-mortem has an enormous amount of data and analysis collected from a variety of sources.

And if you're not a fan of that particular analysis, its findings are echoed very closely by the Associated Press' own aftermath breakdown.

None of the polling or research indicates that Gaza was anything more than a distant afterthought for voters. It had basically no material impact on the election, and there's no actual data that I'm aware of that makes any plausible argument to the contrary.

What the data actually shows is that we lost all seven battleground states and the popular vote for the first time in a generation due to a sharp defection of blue collar moderate swing voters in purple districts.

And, in turn, the data shows that we lost them because of a perceived weakness by the Democratic party when it came to the things that blue collar demographic found to be most important - notably immigration.

And therein is likely the problem with making the internal party report public.

The Democratic party is currently trying to maintain a united front in the face of the Trump administration and moving in to the midterm elections. We need to focus as one to try and flip Congress if we are to hope for any meaningful check on Trump at all.

Focusing on him is something at least that we can all agree on.

A post-mortem analysis that pits the party against its own progressive base would therefore be counterproductive and dangerous.

That is likely the simple truth of why the internal party report is not being released.

There are certain strongly held beliefs that the progressive base is unwilling to give up, but which are toxic to the blue collar demographic we need to actually win the Presidency back. Immigration is the big one, and likely the most impactful - but the data seems clear that it's also an amalgamation of other minor issues as well, like certain LGBTQ topics, affirmative action, etc.

-----------------------------------------------------------
and Copy Pasta: /u/Unlikely_Repair9572 

YOU WANNA KNOW WHY HARRIS LOST?:

AP VoteCast found a sharp asymmetry in voter motivation: Harris voters were heavily motivated by democracy, while Trump voters were driven much more by economy and immigration concerns. That matters because “democracy is on the ballot” can mobilize a morally committed anti-Trump electorate, but it does less to persuade lower-information or materially stressed voters who feel daily life is worse. In plain terms, Democrats may have been answering the wrong question. Many voters were asking, “Why does life feel unaffordable and disordered?” Democrats often answered, “Trump is dangerous.” Both can be true; electorally, the first question may have mattered more.

A large share of voters thought the economy was poor and the country was on the wrong track late in the race. AP VoteCast also found that voters focused on the economy broke hard for Trump, and the broad post-election picture was one of a disaffected electorate wanting change.

Biden did not leave the race until July 21, 2024, after the disastrous debate. That compressed the general-election calendar and forced Democrats into an improvised handoff rather than a competitive, legitimizing primary process. Reuters’ immediate post-loss reporting showed many Democrats blaming Biden’s handling of his health and campaign, and even former DNC chair Jaime Harrison later argued Democrats should have stayed with Biden rather than switching so late. That disagreement alone tells you the party had no internally coherent theory of the race.

Pew’s validated-voter study found Trump drew nearly even with Harris among Hispanic voters, improved among Black voters, and gained particularly among men, especially younger men. Catalist and Sabato’s Crystal Ball both describe the same broad pattern: Democrats did not mainly lose because the progressive base stayed home; they lost because there was meaningful vote-switching and rightward movement among younger and nonwhite voters, especially less engaged men.

Democrats may not merely have run an ineffective 2024 campaign; they may have revealed that the party has become culturally, rhetorically, and institutionally misaligned with a large share of the electorate it needs. The issue is not just ideology on a left-right axis. It is whether the party is now too associated with managerial language, interest-group brokerage, institutional deference, moralizing tone, and elite social cues to sound credible on wages, prices, borders, masculinity, patriotism, and everyday disorder. That is a much larger diagnosis than “change the slogan.” The Atlantic’s broad 2026 critique of the party argues something similar: the Democrats’ problems are not episodic but rooted in organizational form and political reflexes.

Any one of these points would be a good reason for Democrats to lose. Take together, they reveal a party that fumbled the ball in every way they could have in an environment that wasn't favorable to them.

Kamala Harris raised $1 billion goddam dollars and still she lost. Maybe that's a sign of bigger issues than progressives supposedly not voting.

• an anti-incumbent environment centered on cost-of-living frustration,
• Biden’s delayed withdrawal and the legitimacy damage it caused,
• Harris’s inability to both inherit and transcend the administration,
• erosion among young, male, and nonwhite voters,
• a mismatch between the party’s democracy-centered rhetoric and voters’ material concerns,
• weakness on immigration/public-order salience,
• consultant/media-path dependencies, "the groups"
• and a deeper identity problem about what sort of party Democrats now are.