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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13526 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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Following up on an earlier post of mine, the Democratic National Convention has released their long-awaited "autopsy" report. Critics of the party will get some immediate schadenfreude upon opening the document: the default font, the hastily-added red addenda by a higher power, the missing sections and absent formatting. The sick pleasure continues upon the realization that neither Biden's senility nor the Israel-Gaza conflict (nor the associated hysteria) ever appear in the 100+ pages.

Digging deeper, CNN reports that the autopsy was compiled by "Democratic consultant Paul Rivera," a veteran of the Clinton administration and friend of DNC chair Ken Martin. Rivera's minuscule effort and misguided conclusions result in a paper with few citations, ignorant assessments, and a half-assed attempt at shielding the DNC from the worst of it.

Well, that's certainly backfired now. The DNC hasn't looked this incompetent at its highest levels of power since the scandals of 2016 (say, was anyone ever held accountable there?) and the oft-panicked-about "competence crisis" appears to have reached a high point.

There needs to be an autopsy on the autopsy report. I am 100% serious. Figuring out all the things that went wrong to allow this to happen would solve half of the party's problems. Reinterview witnesses. Reconstruct lines of thought and inquiry. Find the points of failure and conduct root-cause analysis.

The report is poorly written, unprofessional, and incomplete yes, but above all it is vapid. It doesn't even ask the questions that matter. The overwhelming majority of effort is focused on ad targeting and campaign spending.

"The pollsters were involved in discussions around the Trump attack ads – in particular the attack ad focused on the Vice President’s prior statements on transgendered Americans. They all recognized the attack as very effective, and felt the campaign was boxed – the ad was a video of her saying what she said, and it was framed as an attack on her economic priorities.

If the Vice President would not change her position – and she did not – then there was nothing which would have worked as a response. The pollsters generally concurred with the opinions shared by campaign leadership - given the stakes and timing, the focus needed to be on attacking Trump."

Okay, what was the mistake then? What should be done differently next time around? Should the Vice President have changed her position or not? In fact, there is almost no discussion of issues in the report at all. A model of why anyone would want to vote for one party or the other is conspicuously absent.

I listened to the Pod Save America episode in which a few Harris campaign staffers were interviewed. They said that they tried to counter that ad, but the counter ads polled poorly with test groups. They were better off with generic ads about the economy.

Supposedly the "she's for they/them, Donald Trump is for you" ad is the mightiest ad in modern history. Around a 2% shift in voter sentiment; arguably election flipping if somehow that was very well targeted to likely voters in swing states.

I think an accurate autopsy would say to not stake out the most extreme and unpopular positions on culture war issues on camera. But they can't plainly state that so we get this report instead.

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