The Briefing, Vol. XIV, Issue 21
May 25, 2026
Happy Memorial Day to all our readers. In honor of our nation’s gallant dead.
This week:
- Democrats learned nothing from 2024
- Autopsy report is an embarrassment to the party
- Platner has skeletons in his porto-potty
Outlook
Democratic Autopsy: Someone leaked the so-called “autopsy” of Democrats’ 2024 election loss to CNN. Once the DNC was informed that this was about to become a news story, it voluntarily published the rest of the autopsy.
The results are, frankly, shocking.
At a surface level, the resulting report is obviously a slop-ridden embarrassment. Many had been speculating that the report was being kept hidden because of its contents — more on that in a moment. But it turns out that it was being hidden because it shows there just wasn’t any serious effort within the party to learn anything from the party’s devastating 2024 losses. They handed over to volunteers the work of producing a joke of a report that any high school sophomore could have produced using artificial intelligence.
Thay may sound unimportant, but think of the implications in the context of Democrats’ reaction to their 2024 election losses. This suggests that all the public hand-wringing after the election about how Democrats had lost touch with the electorate and needed to mend fences was entirely performative. It reveals a bit about what is not happening inside the Democratic Party: All of the consultants and operatives involved in Democratic politics want to keep the money flowing, but nobody wants to do the work of worrying about the party’s long-term ideological sustainability.
Israel: As for the report’s content, there are a couple of key considerations. The first, promoted by the Democrats’ far-left wing, is that there is a smoking gun going unidentified, and it’s exactly the one you expect. They claim that the loss should be attributed in large part to the Biden administration and the Harris-Walz ticket’s unwillingness to denounce and stop supporting Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza. They find fault with the autopsy for its failure to confront the role this issue played, implying heavily that the real problem is their party’s overreliance on pro-Israel Jewish money.
To be sure, the turn of the U.S. public against Israel appears to be quite real, based on opinion polls. However, we view this fixation on Israel as a political issue to be a delusional preoccupation and a distraction for Democrats. The harsh reality is that most Americans don’t follow or care strongly at all about foreign policy, except when it affects their own families. This may be less clear today beacuse there have been major recent counterexamples, but the axiom still holds that most people don’t vote based on foreign policy.
The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars represent prominent recent exceptions because thousands of U.S. servicemembers died — because every living American has met a war amputee or someone else who suffered serious injury in those conflicts.
Currently, the Iran War can be said to matter, too, because the U.S. is directly involved and gasoline is $4.50 per gallon, presumably because of it.
But try this thought experiment: If gas were currently at $2.00 per gallon, how would people view even the Iran air war, where the U.S. is directly involved? This conflict, in which 13 U.S. servicemembers have died so far, would surely receive far less skepticism from the public — perhaps something more like the reaction to the 1990-1991 Gulf War, which lasted seven months in all.
Gaza is even less important to Americans, since the U.S. isn’t even directly involved. For the vast majority who don’t have family living there, Israel’s war against Hamas is a pure abstraction with little traction as a political issue.
Kamala Harris: The other consideration about the Democratic autopsy’s omissions has to do with candidate quality. In a year that was already looking bad for Democrats, Former Vice President Kamala Harris was an objectively terrible candidate who turned issues that were already liabilities for her party into catastrophic liabilities.
First, her commission by President Joe Biden to handle his administration’s illegal immigration problem tied her to one of Biden’s most prominent failures as president — a failure so bad that it cost Harris counties in the Rio Grande Valley that no Republican had won in more than a century.
In addition, very few candidates had ever spelled out, in a video interview, support for something as ludicrous as taxpayer-funded sex-changes for prisoners who identify as transgender. To be sure, a shockingly large number of Democratic politicians support such nonsense — if forced to, almost all of them would mouth the nostrums of gender ideology for fear of losing bas support. But Harris actually said it on tape. Her now-infamous 2020 interview on the topic, briefly mentioned in the autopsy as something Harris’s campaign struggled to counteract, is evidence that she was not properly vetted as a candidate and that the party’s decision to crown her without a primary process was a grave error.
Why, you may wonder, is this a problem? Well, Kamala Harris is still leading most national polls for the Democratic nomination for 2028. The last thing Democrats need is an autopsy report dumping on their own frontrunner, because for all they know at this point, they might be stuck with her for another cycle.
Internal power struggle? Underlying all this is little-known wrinkle that only a few have noticed — in particular, the Republican hosts of the Ruthless Podcast have been talking about it for a few weeks now.
The Supreme Court is preparing to issue a ruling in the case NRSC v. FEC. This ruling could result in party committees being allowed to play a much more robust role in coming election cycles when it comes to coordinating with candidates. This would turn the Democratic National Committee — for years only a minor part of the Democratic Party’s infrastructure — into a much more important entity.
If the DNC is to take on an entirely new dimension of importance, the powers that be inside the party (and by that we mean Barack Obama) may not be comfortable with the current chairman, Ed Martin, running the show.
Don’t read this the wrong way: Democrats running for office have been raising lots of money, and their Senate (DSCC) and House (DCCC) campaign organs are financially healthy and raising money more or less comparable to their Republican counterparts. But under Martin, the DNC is spending more than it raises and has accumulated more debt than it has cash on hand — in fact, the Republican National Committee has about six times as much cash as the DNC. There are rumblings of discontent, and this may explain why parts of the autopsy were leaked in the first place.
Senate 2026
Kentucky: The victory by U.S. Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.) for U.S. Senate, which we anticipated, is one more notch on Trump’s belt. As we expected, he will be the overwhelming favorite to replace Mitch McConnell in a race against leftist Charles Booker (D).
Maine: As we have long anticipated, the presumptive Democratic nominee, Graham Platner (D), has a lot of problems that keep emerging. They seem increasingly likely to keep him out of the U.S. Senate, and perhaps to save the Republican Senate majority. Rather than describe his extremely gross behavior, we will simply say he has more skeletons in his porta-potty than anyone had suspected.
This will form a key part of a familiar playbook that both parties have been running for 20 years now: Define the opponent with heavy early spending and make him so toxic that voters won’t even consider backing him. Given his long history of posting on Reddit — one of the Internet’s most toxic platforms — Platner has provided enough material for months’ worth of advertising.
Texas: President Trump’s last-minute endorsement of Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) will almost certainly help him to a primary runoff victory tomorrow over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R). Either Republican will face a harder-than-expected run against state Rep. James Talarico (D) — a new poll shows either matchup on a razor’s edge. But Talarico, like Platner, has weaknesses that will become more evident. Paxton also has weaknesses, but he is still competitive even though everyone knows them already.
