Victor Davis Hanson: What Did Democrats’ Say in Their 192 Page Autopsy?

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.  

The Democrats have an autopsy report that was just released that supposedly would explain why they lost the 2024 election. They were shocked. Remember the NPR poll, for example, on the eve of the election said that Kamala Harris was beyond the margin of error. 

In other words, she was ahead by more than three points just before the balloting began. Remember the Iowa poll that said that Kamala Harris was going to win by three points, and she lost by eight or nine, I think. So the point is they were shocked, and they wanted to know what happened. And they should want to know what happened because they had more money. 

She raised a billion dollars. If you look at the aggregate Biden-Harris total campaign chest, they outraised Donald Trump by a billion dollars. Donald Trump was also, for much of 2022, 2023, and 2024, sidelined off the campaign trail dealing with five criminal and civil lawfare suits. So they thought they should have won. 

And that’s in addition to the media. You remember the debate with J.D. Vance and Tim Walz and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris debates with Donald Trump. The moderators were more or less on the side of the Democrats. 

 So they had all these advantages, support, and they lost. So they wanted to know why. Well, you and I know why they did. 

Because they had an agenda, and what was that agenda? The trans issue, the open-borders issue, the 10 to 12 million illegal aliens issue, the 500,000 criminals who came across issue, the highest urban crime rates in a generation issue, the war on fossil fuels issue, the 9.2% inflation in 2022 under Biden and, in the aggregate, on key staples, maybe a 20% or 30% rise in prices, the catastrophe in Afghanistan, the sense of appeasement that allowed [Vladimir] Putin to think he could go into Ukraine. 

I could go on. Two theater wars, one in Ukraine, one in the Middle East, etc., etc., etc.  

They didn’t mention any of that. They didn’t mention any of that because that is the agenda, the platform, the policies of the new Democratic Party. They feel that the Green New Deal is great and we should war on fossil fuels, cut back on gas and oil production. 

They believe that there are three sexes and that biological men have a perfect right to dress in girls’ dressing rooms or compete in women’s sports.  

They believe the border should be open. They believe that 10 or 12 million illegal aliens wasn’t enough. They believe that it was good to get out of Afghanistan the way we did. 

They didn’t criticize that. They believe in DEI and racial preferences. So they weren’t going to say that that agenda, none of it which is supported by the American people, was the undoing.  

They also didn’t say that the party that talks about democracy and that Trump is a dictator didn’t talk about the manner in which Joe Biden, who won 14 million votes in the primaries, was forced out by a bunch of backroom insider politicos. 

One day he was there, one day he was forced off the ticket, and almost within 24 hours, Kamala Harris was coronated as the nominee. Everybody came in lockstep, endorsed her. The vote at the convention a few weeks later was pro forma. And guess what? She had run in 2020 against Biden and had not gotten one delegate. 

So that was an entire coup, so to speak, that was contrary to the perception of the Democrats that they were the party of democracy. They weren’t going to talk about it being far left.  

So what did they say in this 192-page, poorly written report? It was written by Mr. [Paul] Rivera, who’s a politico analyst, an activist, an analyst, a friend of Ken Martin’s who did it. 

The report has misspelled words. It’s kind of incoherent. There are no footnotes. He didn’t want to release it, but he was forced to because he had earlier made a promise that he would. Those were the admissions. Well, what was the commission? Well, it was that you didn’t attack Donald Trump hard enough. They attacked him all the time. 

They called him a fascist. They called him a liar. They called him a dictator. But they had to say that.  

And then, second of all, they said that they didn’t properly prepare Kamala Harris. They did prepare Kamala Harris. They kept her out of reach from media and the public for 30 or 40 days. They did all they could to coach her. 

They had private planes for her staff. They had wardrobe consultants. They had speech consultants. They had Hollywood producers advise [her]—they had everybody. But they couldn’t do it, not because they didn’t try, because Kamala Harris was one of the most inept candidates that we have seen in modern political history. 

Any time that she got on the stage and she started talking about metaphysics, time, being, thought, her eyes would sort of go into a corkscrew and Twilight Zone music would come on, and she was just, you know, coconut palms and being and what could be and all.  

And it was just embarrassing. It was so embarrassing that people thought she was intoxicated because her sentences, her paragraphs, her grammar, her syntax made no sense. 

So it wasn’t that they didn’t prepare her; it’s that they handed a nomination to someone who was selected after the aftermath of George Floyd on the basis of her gender and race, and she had nothing, nothing in her past that would show that she was qualified.  

She did have one thing. She was the most left-wing senator based on her voting record, to the left of Bernie Sanders, in the entire U.S. Senate. 

So what would an accurate autopsy say? The accurate autopsy would say our message is too far left and nobody wants it, so we have to disguise it. 

And then it could say, look what Joe Biden did. He got elected, and he turned out to be the most far-left president since FDR. 

Now, how did we do that? We did that—forget about the balloting and elections and changing the voting laws and all the things that Molly Ball bragged about in her Time essays of cabals and conspiracies. 

They did it because Joe Biden served as a waxen effigy. Old Joe Biden from Scranton, the good guy, the union guy, the lunch-bucket guy. It was all a myth. And then the Obama team came in and used him as sort of a puppet, pulled the strings, and then rushed through this agenda. And it took four years for people to catch on to what was happening. 

This guy was non compos mentis, and they couldn’t believe it that he was president, but it served a purpose. And a lot of candidates saw that. [Abigail] Spanberger in Virginia saw that. And it looks like some of the Democrats running for the mayorship and the governorship in California see that. 

In other words, they feign like they’re moderates. They suggest they are moderates during the campaign, and then when they’re elected, they have the socialist redistributionist agenda.  

So, in conclusion, if the autopsy wanted to be accurate, it would have done this. We lost the 2024 campaign because we had a radical agenda that reflects the Jacobin neo-socialism of the new party. 

For us to get elected on a national basis, we have to hide that agenda. We have to hide that agenda, lie to the people, act like we’re moderates, say we’re for fracking, close the border, say we are not objecting to deportation, tough on crime, don’t defund the police—all of that Kamala Harris was not able to do. 

She may have tried here and there, but she did not modify or hide or mask or disguise that agenda with a veneer of moderation. 

Second of all, she should have never been nominated. She was completely unqualified to be a presidential candidate. She had run in 2020. She was the weakest of eight or 10 candidates. 

She dropped out before the Iowa and New Hampshire caucuses, and she didn’t get a single delegate. That should have told them something.  

And number three, Joe Biden had a terrible record. Terrible record. And the Democrats did everything they could to demonize Donald Trump, to make the campaign about Donald Trump, to keep Kamala Harris out of reach, to hide her so people wouldn’t find out how crazy and inept she was. 

That was not enough.  

And so, all they had to do was say we can’t change our message; it’s toxic; let’s hide it. We can’t get good candidates, and we anoint them, and that was another problem. So we need a better candidate that can better mask and disguise this radical socialist agenda that we have until he or she is elected president. 

That would have been honest.  

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.