Since their defeat last year, Democrats have faced an unrelenting wave of postmortems. But one perspective that has been conspicuously missing so far is from the Democratic Party itself.

Typically, after a party endures a brutal election loss it will take a hard look at its own missteps and grapple with them in public documents, often referred to as “autopsies”. One of the more memorable recent autopsies came from the Republicans in 2012, on the heels of a second consecutive loss to Barack Obama. Even if future candidates ignore the findings, these exercises make clear what the losing party thinks went wrong and offer insight into the steps it believes it must take to rebound.

Over the weekend, the New York Times hinted that the Democratic National Committee’s autopsy may finally be coming out soon, and the details of the paper’s reporting suggest that the party’s effort at self-examination is slated to fall well short. The biggest takeaway was that the report is expected to avoid any reflection on the role played by Joe Biden’s decision to run, his refusal to drop out sooner, and the party’s choice to replace him with Kamala Harris. There is also little indication that Democrats plan to reckon with strategic decisions the Harris campaign made, including framing the election as a choice between democracy and fascism.

While looking forward is of course an important part of this process, it’s hard to see how a party can do this in an informed manner if it refuses to address what were obviously consequential decisions. The prudence of asking tough questions, even of beloved figures in the party, is to learn from mistakes and avoid repeating them in the future — a consideration that would seem to be a relevant part of “looking forward”. For instance, it’s important to understand what went into Biden’s decision to run for re-election and remain in the race until late July, and why so many in the party remained deferential to him until the 11th hour. Long before his disastrous debate with Trump, polling had made abundantly clear that the vast majority of Democratic voters did not support his bid for a second term. Biden’s defiance of his own party’s voters likely contributed to their dismal approval rating of the Democrats today.

Of course, it is harder to entertain the counterfactual in which the party doesn’t immediately coalesce behind Harris and instead, say, hosts a mini primary election. No one knows how that would have turned out, and it’s probably not worth speculating. Still, Harris’s vulnerabilities were clear at the time, and post-election polling has reaffirmed that those vulnerabilities were likely pivotal to her loss.

Democrats are understandably eager to move on from the election and focus on opposing Trump, whom they believe is taking a battering ram to the American project. It’s also true that looking inward after suffering an election loss can be a painful process, and few people are likely to emerge without bruises. But refusing to holistically examine their loss or grapple with hard questions may lead them to learn the wrong lessons, something Democrats have had a habit of doing in recent elections.

The DNC review’s lead author, Paul Rivera, has stressed that the draft of this autopsy is not yet complete. If that’s true, he and his partners would be wise to recognise something important: the short-term pain of shining a light on high-profile party figures — even their most recent president — is likely to pay off. It would lead to a better understanding of the party’s failures, and help identify a clearer path forward, rather than simply papering over the cracks.

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Michael Baharaeen is chief political analyst at The Liberal Patriot substack.

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