Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville and longtime political journalist Al Hunt took aim at the Democratic National Committee’s long-awaited review of the party’s 2024 election defeat, arguing that the report failed to address the most obvious reasons Democrats lost the White House and key races across the country.
Speaking on their “Politics War Room” podcast last week, the two Democrats mocked the DNC’s 192-page post-election report, which was released roughly 18 months after President Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election.
Hunt dismissed the report as largely ineffective, arguing that it ignored several of the most significant issues that shaped the race.
“The supposedly much awaited Democratic autopsy on 2024 came out. To call it a total dud would be to elevate it,” Hunt said.
He noted that the report failed to address concerns surrounding then-President Joe Biden’s age, the political fallout from the war in Gaza, and what he viewed as weaknesses in former Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.
“It avoided—it didn’t mention Biden’s age. It didn’t mention Gaza. It didn’t mention Kamala Harris’s campaign problems,” Hunt said.
While Hunt acknowledged that the report may contain useful information regarding campaign operations and digital advertising strategy, he argued that the central lessons from 2024 were much simpler. In his view, Biden remained in the race too long before stepping aside, and Harris ultimately proved to be an ineffective nominee.
Carville agreed with that assessment and pointed to what he viewed as one of the most glaring unanswered questions from the election cycle: how Harris’ campaign spent its enormous war chest.
“If there’s one fact about the 2024 election that you need to autopsy above all, and it’s this: From Labor Day to election day, the Harris campaign had available and spent $2 billion,” Carville said.
According to Carville, the campaign’s spending produced little measurable impact on voter behavior.
“I don’t think we got a vote on election day that we weren’t going to get on Labor Day anyway. Why wouldn’t you want to know?” he asked.
Carville emphasized that he was not alleging any financial misconduct. Instead, he questioned why such a massive amount of money appeared to have yielded so little political benefit.
“Clearly, this was the most ineffective $2 billion ever spent,” he said. “How was it allocated? Why didn’t it do any good? Is there a way that we could have done it better? There has to be.”
The longtime strategist compared the party’s reluctance to thoroughly examine the loss to investigators refusing to study the cause of a plane crash.
“When an airplane crashes, the last thing anybody says, ‘Well, we just need to look ahead. We don’t need to look back,’” Carville said.
He argued that political parties should conduct the same kind of detailed analysis that investigators perform after major accidents, examining every possible factor that may have contributed to failure.
“No, actually, you want to find out, was it the landing gear? Was it the air traffic control? Was it the weather? Was it terrorism? Was it ran out of gas? I don’t know. But the last thing you want to do is say, ‘Well, there’s nothing to see here, folks. Let’s go on,’” he said.
Carville concluded by expressing frustration with what he described as a broader culture within Democratic politics that resists honest self-examination after major setbacks.
“It was a prime example of just staggering Washington Democratic—incompetence gives it too much of a word,” he said, adding that he remains uncertain whether meaningful changes will ultimately be made as a result of the party’s post-election review.
