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    Democrats’ 2024 Autopsy Is Described as Avoiding the Likeliest Cause of Death

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    An audit being conducted by the D.N.C. is not looking at Joe Biden’s decision to run or key decisions by Kamala Harris’s team, according to six people briefed on the report.The Democratic National Committee’s examination of what went wrong in the 2024 election is expected to mostly steer clear of the decisions made by the Biden-turned-Harris campaign and will focus more heavily instead on actions taken by allied groups, according to interviews with six people briefed on the report’s progress.The audit, which the committee is calling an “after-action review,” is expected to avoid the questions of whether former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. should have run for re-election in the first place, whether he should have exited the race earlier than he did and whether former Vice President Kamala Harris was the right choice to replace him, according to the people briefed on the process so far.Nor is the review expected to revisit key decisions by the Harris campaign — like framing the election as a choice between democracy and fascism, and refraining from hitting back after an ad by Donald J. Trump memorably attacked Ms. Harris on transgender rights by suggesting that she was for “they/them” while Mr. Trump was “for you” — that have roiled Democrats in the months since Mr. Trump took back the White House.Party officials described the draft document as focusing on the 2024 election as a whole, but not on the presidential campaign — which is something like eating at a steakhouse and then reviewing the salad.Producing a tough-minded public review of a national electoral defeat would be a politically delicate exercise under any circumstance, given the need to find fault with the work and judgment of important party leaders and strategists. It is particularly fraught for the new D.N.C. chairman, Ken Martin, who promised a post-election review from his first day on the job but whose first few months in the role have been plagued by infighting and financial strains.“We are not interested in second-guessing campaign tactics or decisions of campaign operatives,” said Jane Kleeb, the Nebraska Democratic chairwoman, who heads the association of Democratic state chairs and is a close ally of Mr. Martin. “We are interested in what voters turned out for Republicans and Democrats, and how we can fix this moving forward.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Democrats Are Workshopping New Tactics After Losses of 2024

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      Among the ideas being promoted: knocking on every single door in a House district and awarding cash prizes for the most effective new ways to reach voters.If there is one point of consensus in the deeply fractured Democratic Party, it’s that the old ways of doing business just aren’t cutting it.And so, many of the party’s most analytically minded strategists have begun focusing their energies on dissecting the tactical and technical decisions that led to last year’s devastating defeats, and dreaming up proposals to overhaul the machinery of progressive politics.This work is not about the big picture of what the party stands for. It is about the nuts and bolts of how to get candidates elected: which potential voters to target; whose doors to knock on, and whether door-knocking is still effective in a digital age; and when and where to advertise, whether online, on television or by mail.There is also a concern that too many of those decisions have been made by party officials on high, relying too heavily on polling to guide their choices on policy positions, messaging and advertising, and ignoring other important signals that could help influence voters.“We need to rethink things,” said Danielle Butterfield, executive director of Priorities USA, which was once the party’s premiere super PAC and spent $45 million, including its nonprofit arms, in the 2024 election. “The same elitism that is abundant in our party exists in the way we make decisions.”Priorities USA is spending $8 million on three pilot programs this year to explore some of the surprise findings from 2024. One such finding was that some of the Democratic group’s most effective ads turned out to be those that ran on YouTube channels favored by Republican voters who were seen as unpersuadable.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Trump’s Bill, Democrats See a Path to Win Back Voters

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      Top party officials consider the president’s sweeping domestic policy bill to be cruel and fiscally ruinous — and they’re betting the American public will, too.Demoralized Democrats who have denounced President Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill have landed on a silver lining. It is so unpopular with voters, they say, that it could win them back one, if not both, chambers of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.Top officials in the party, who see the bill as cruel, fiscally ruinous and the single biggest wealth transfer in American history, expect that they can blame Republicans who voted for the loss of health care coverage, nursing home care and food security for millions of Americans in order to extend the 2017 tax cuts that favor the wealthy.And they have plenty of quotes from Republicans like Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska denouncing their own bill that, Democrats say, will make the argument that much more potent.“There’s going to be some powerful ads,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the chamber’s Democratic leader, before rattling off potential scripts for advertisements that are set to begin airing as early as next week. “‘My daughter had cancer. She was doing fine. Well, all of a sudden, her health care was blown up.’ ‘I worked at this rural hospital for 30 years. I put my heart into it because I wanted to help people. I was fired.’ Stuff like that is going to really matter.”It may take a while for people to feel the full effects of the bill because Republicans front-loaded some temporary tax cuts for working people, like no taxes on tips, that were engineered to appeal to working-class voters. The cuts to Medicaid are not set to be implemented until after the midterm elections.Still, there were some immediate effects. A clinic in southwest Nebraska announced this week that it was closing, blaming anticipated cuts to Medicaid. And Democrats said they expected millions of people to feel the impact from the bill’s allowing credits from the Affordable Care Act to expire. It will be up to Democrats over the next year to drive home the argument that these policies are the fault of Republican lawmakers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Cuomo and Mamdani Push to Raise Turnout in ‘Jump Ball’ Mayor’s Race

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      A new poll shows the New York City mayor’s race tightening in its final days. Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani are scrambling for every last vote.In the final hours before Primary Day, the Democratic race for mayor of New York City appeared to be razor-tight, leaving the two leading candidates — Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani — in scramble mode to boost turnout on Tuesday.A new poll released on Monday by Emerson College suggested the race was too close to call, with Mr. Cuomo drawing the most first-place votes but falling short of the 50 percent threshold required to be declared the winner under the city’s relatively new ranked-choice voting system.The poll shows Mr. Mamdani pulling ahead in the eighth round, topping Mr. Cuomo by 3.6 percentage points — matching the poll’s margin of error. It is the first major survey that shows Mr. Mamdani winning, seemingly reflecting his momentum, especially among younger voters.“It is essential that we turn out in record numbers in order to turn the page on Andrew Cuomo, his billionaire donors, and the politics of big money and small ideas,” Mr. Mamdani, a state assemblyman and democratic socialist, said on Monday.Mr. Cuomo, the former governor who resigned in 2021 following a series of sexual harassment allegations that he denies, has led in polls for months, including one also released on Monday by Fix the City, a super PAC tied to Mr. Cuomo’s interests. His campaign called the Emerson poll an “outlier.”“We will continue to fight for every vote like he will fight for every New Yorker as mayor,” Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Canadians Confront News Void on Facebook and Instagram as Election Nears

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      After Meta blocked news from its platforms in Canada, hyperpartisan and misleading content from popular right-wing Facebook pages such as Canada Proud has filled the gap.Mark Carney was just days away from announcing his bid to lead Canada’s Liberal Party in January when his face popped up on a viral right-wing Facebook page.Two photographs showed Mr. Carney, who became prime minister last month, at a garden party beside Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex trafficker and former confidante of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. There was no evidence that Mr. Carney and Ms. Maxwell were close friends, and his team dismissed the pictures as a fleeting social interaction from more than a decade ago.But they were perfect fodder for Canada Proud, a right-wing Facebook page with more than 620,000 followers. For days, Canada Proud posted about the images, including in paid ads that repeatedly said Mr. Carney had been “hanging out with sex traffickers.” More

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      in Elections

      Meet the 23-Year-Old Student Who Raised $25 Million in Democratic Losses

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      A law student in Florida has a lucrative side gig: fund-raising consultant. His firm earns a 25 percent cut of “profit” from donations, and critics have begun to pile up after two special elections.After the Democratic candidates in Florida’s special elections burned through millions and millions of dollars on the way to double-digit losses this week, some Democrats are asking where that money deluge came from — and where it all went.The answer to both questions is, in part, a 23-year-old law student and dungeon master — in Dungeons & Dragons — with a lucrative side gig.In between classes and fantasy play, Jackson McMillan is also the chief executive of Key Lime Strategies, a small fund-raising firm in Florida that scored big when it landed as clients the two Democratic nominees in the Florida congressional elections, Josh Weil and Gay Valimont. Mr. McMillan said they had combined to raise $25 million.“We’ve built a juggernaut,” he said in an interview.Along the way, Mr. McMillan has piled up critics far beyond his years. Much of the focus is on his unusual fee structure, which one top party official excoriated in a cease-and-desist letter as “exorbitant.” His firm received a 25 percent cut of “true profits” — the proceeds after fund-raising expenses — for both special elections.Mr. McMillan is unapologetic.“A lot of the people who are critiquing me online are mad that it wasn’t them,” he said of raising so much money, which he said put a scare into Republicans and injected real money into long-neglected corners of a rightward-drifting state.One secret ingredient to his firm’s success, Mr. McMillan explained, is Dungeons & Dragons.“All the senior fund-raising strategists at my firm — myself, Ryan — we’re dungeon masters,” he said of his college friend and the firm’s chief operating officer, Ryan Eliason. “We run Dungeons & Dragons games. So we weave narratives and tales. It’s like our biggest hobby. We basically tell a really compelling story. And that’s what sets us apart from — that and a lot of technical analysis — is what sets us apart from some of our competitors.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      In Crucial Judicial Race in Wisconsin, G.O.P. Now Has a Financial Edge

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      Two years ago, Democratic money carried a liberal jurist to victory and swung the state’s high court to the left. Now, Elon Musk and other wealthy donors have given Republicans a chance to swing it back.The last time Wisconsin held an election for the state’s Supreme Court, Republicans cried foul over the wave of money from out-of-state Democrats that overwhelmed their candidate.Two years later, Republicans have learned their lesson. It is Democrats who are grappling with a flood of outside money inundating Wisconsin.A super PAC funded by Elon Musk has in just the past week spent $2.3 million on text messages, digital advertisements and paid canvassers to remind Wisconsin Republicans about the April 1 election, which pits Brad Schimel, a judge in Waukesha County and a former Republican state attorney general, against Susan Crawford, a Dane County judge who represented Planned Parenthood and other liberal causes in her private practice.The spending by Mr. Musk, the tech billionaire who is leading President Trump’s project to eviscerate large segments of the federal government, comes as Judge Schimel and his Republican allies have spent more money on television ads than Judge Crawford and Democrats have — a remarkable turnaround in a state where Democrats have had a significant financial advantage in recent years.“When I was a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls, I never could have imagined that I’d be fighting the world’s richest man,” Judge Crawford told a crowd over the weekend at a campaign stop in Cambridge, Wis.As of Monday, Republicans had spent or reserved $13.9 million of television advertising time for the Wisconsin court race, compared with $10.7 million for Democrats, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm. Because a larger chunk of Republican spending comes from super PACs, which pay a higher rate for TV ads than candidates do, the amount of advertising on Wisconsin’s airwaves has remained roughly equal. But the heavy Republican spending has eliminated what was a significant advantage for Democrats in the last such contest, in 2023.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Donald Trump Is Already Starting to Fail

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      That was quick.Donald Trump is planting the seeds of his own political demise. The corrupt, incompetent and extremist men and women he’s appointing to many of the most critical posts in his cabinet are direct threats to the well-being of the country, but they’re also political threats to Trump and to his populist allies.To understand why, it’s important to remember a cardinal reality about Trump’s political career. He has now won two general elections when he was the only alternative to an unsatisfactory status quo, and he lost the one when he was the unsatisfactory status quo. If he can’t govern well, his populist partisan realignment will come apart before it can truly begin.One of the most maddening aspects of the 2024 election is the extent to which so many voters viewed Trump as a mostly normal political candidate. MAGA Republicans see Trump as a singular figure, but an immense number of voters thought the talk about Trump was overheated, in both directions.If you’re like most Americans and don’t follow the news closely, it’s easy to see why you would see Trump in more conventional terms. A Politico analysis of the Trump campaign’s ads showed that “the single most-aired ad from his campaign since the start of October is all about inflation, Medicare and Social Security — arguing that” Kamala Harris “will make seniors already struggling with high prices ‘pay more Social Security taxes,’ while unauthorized’ immigrants receive benefits.”That is a normal, conventional political message. Trump’s ads attacking Harris’s past support for taxpayer-funded transition surgery for people in prison and immigration detention were also an appeal to the mainstream, an effort to label Harris as extreme.One of the challenging realities of American politics is that while vast numbers of Americans participate in presidential elections, only small minorities of voters actually stay engaged. And the priorities of the two groups are not the same, far from it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      La victoria de Trump es un triunfo para Elon Musk y la política de los grandes capitales

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      Es difícil separar el trabajo de campaña de Musk de otras influencias que llevaron a Trump a la Casa Blanca. Su papel podría inspirar iniciativas similares y contribuir a transformar las campañas modernas.En la estridente reunión de la noche electoral del martes, Elon Musk se sentó a dos asientos de Donald Trump, dispuesto a atribuirse mucho del mérito de su decisiva victoria presidencial.“Mi comité independiente de campaña, America PAC, mejoró enormemente la campaña republicana en el terreno en los estados disputados”, dijo Musk al comentarista conservador Tucker Carlson en una entrevista en Mar-a-Lago, la residencia y club privado de Trump en Florida. Publicó un meme desí mismo en el Despacho Oval para sus 203 millones de seguidores en X, su plataforma de redes sociales.Su vuelta de celebración fue el punto culminante de un esfuerzo que comenzó hace solo seis meses y que dependía de una arriesgada apuesta: el nuevo comité independiente de campaña de Musk dirigió eficazmente la operación de captación de votos de Trump en los estados más disputados, y Trump confió una función crucial de la campaña a un neófito en política.Es difícil separar el trabajo de campaña de Musk de otras influencias que llevaron a Trump a la Casa Blanca. Pero no cabe duda de que la elección fue una victoria no solo para Musk, sino también para la política del gran capital: un donante ultra rico aprovechó el cambiante sistema de financiación de campañas de Estados Unidos para inclinar la balanza como nunca antes.Musk financió casi en solitario una campaña que costó más de 175 millones de dólares. Sus representantes tocaron cerca de 11 millones de puertas en los estados disputados desde agosto, incluidos 1,8 millones en Míchigan y 2,3 millones en Pensilvania, según personas con conocimiento del asunto. Se gastaron otros 30 millones de dólares en un gran programa de correo directo y unos 22 millones en publicidad digital, incluso en medios afines a Trump como Barstool Sports.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More