This was an interesting read. I'm not sure whether all the conclusions in Part 3, but this is much more accountability than anyone in the DNC has shown thus far. We need more of this.

Here’s What I Told the DNC Autopsy:

We Don’t Have a Coalition Big Enough to Win Yet

Over the last decade, Democrats traded downscale voters for upscale ones. The people we picked up along the way—college-educated suburbanites, wealthy urbanites, Never Trump Republicans—don’t outnumber the people we lost. The resulting coalition, which has involved a shrinking share of working-class voters of color, especially men, just isn’t big enough to beat a motivated MAGA base.

This was obviously true in 2024. But it was already nearly true in 2020, when Biden won the battleground states by a relatively small margin in the middle of a pandemic and an economic collapse, against an incumbent the country had soured on. If the wind had blown in a different direction just a bit, we would have lost.

Democrats will likely win the House this year, even with all the congressional redistricting going on. We may win the Senate. But those wins will paper over the structural problem: Our party still speaks the language of, and to the priorities of, people who care about our institutions and believe they basically work.

There isn’t a left-right solution here; this is an up-down problem. The voters we need to win back are the ones we already had and lost: the multiracial working-class coalition we thought we were assembling in 2020, which has frayed badly, especially among men. They are waiting for a party that sounds like it’s on their side against a system that isn’t working for them.

That requires economic populism with teeth, candidates with genuine charisma, and—hardest of all for a party staffed by institutionalists—a posture of real contempt for a status quo we are arguably part of. And we need to do it without losing the new members of our coalition who joined us over the last decade.

The next campaign should not have a “digital department.” It should have a campaign where every function understands how to operate in a digital environment, with specialists embedded throughout, and a senior leader whose job is strategy and integration—not running a siloed shop that makes the internet stuff. In a perfect world, my job doesn’t exist.

My theory is that the campaign should be broken up into three verticals by audience (call them what you want):

Elites and high-information people—people who actually follow politics.

Persuasion targets—voters you are trying to convince to vote for you, or to vote at all. (I’d put paid media and creators in this category.)

Mobilization targets—base voters, organized groups, the long-term ecosystem (this would be organizing, fundraising, and the like) you need to keep warm.

You need people managing each of these verticals who not only understand their audience in both their online and IRL manifestations, but who also understand how these audiences—and the tactics for reaching them—overlap and influence each other. If the campaign doesn’t treat “digital” as a thing woven through every part of our lives, then it will just get eaten alive by its offline counterparts. And absent that, the old model holds: Digital needs to band together to amortize its cross-functional leverage. Divvied up into departments without an advocate, it gets picked apart.

[Trump] is not agonizing over engagement vs. persuasion. He’s getting attention and setting the tone.