Election autopsy says national Democrats should learn from NC Gov. Josh Stein

Josh Stein’s 2024 campaign for North Carolina governor should serve as a template for national Democratic Party politicians in future elections, according to an internal party report made public Thursday.

The Democratic National Committee commissioned the report following the 2024 election, in which its presidential nominee, former Vice President Kamala Harris, lost every swing state to Republican President Donald Trump.

The report has been kept secret, until now. On Thursday DNC Chairman Ken Martin said he had decided to release the report even as he slammed it for being poorly sourced and, in places, making basic factual errors. The version he released shows not just the report but also DNC-backed annotations throughout, calling into question various statements or assumptions.

“For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged,” Martin told CNN. “It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”

The report is critical of the DNC and national Democrats’ messaging to voters.

“We must admit and accept some hard truths about our party,” the report says. “Since the high point of the 2008 Obama landslide, when he received nearly 10 million more votes than John McCain, the Democratic Party has vacillated between stagnation and retrogression. In doing so, we have lost the confidence we once received from everyday Americans — and election results show it. In the sixteen tumultuous years since that historic election, Democrats have lost ground at every level of government.”

It pointed to North Carolina as a good model for how Democrats could change their messaging, using Stein — who won the 2024 gubernatorial race with the largest margin of victory in decades — as an example.

A spokesman for the North Carolina Republican Party didn’t respond to a request for comment Thursday. A spokeswoman for Stein declined to comment.

Stein’s Republican opponent, then-Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, faced numerous scandals — from comments appearing to doubt the Holocaust, to an allegation that he used racial slurs and called himself a “Black Nazi” in the comments section of a pornographic website.

But those weren’t the only reasons Stein did so much better in North Carolina than Harris did, the report concluded.

It said Stein was smart to “focus less on abstract issues and identity politics, and connect with voters on the issues they say matter most, including the economy, disaster relief, and addressing housing affordability.”

Morgan Jackson, a longtime Democratic strategist in North Carolina who worked on Stein’s 2024 campaign, said they knew Republicans would make crime and immigration big pieces of that campaign and were ready to counter that messaging.

One of Stein’s first campaign ads in 2024 said that “fentanyl must be stopped at the Mexican border” and featured two local sheriffs endorsing him.

Jackson said that Republicans across the country have done “a masterful job” of getting voters to associate Democratic politicians with far-left positions, particularly on crime and public safety, regardless of whether it’s true. But Stein’s background as attorney general, and his record of working with law enforcement on issues such as the opioid epidemic, helped blunt those messages and reassure voters.

“We live in a state where you win or lose in the margins, so you have to be clear-eyed about your message,” Jackson said. 

Looming in the near future is the 2030 Census, which could bring more bad news for the Democratic Party.

Reliably liberal states including New York, Illinois and California are all projected to lose seats in the U.S. House — and therefore in the Electoral College used to elect the president — due to shifts in the national population. Most of the expected growth is in the South. North Carolina, Florida and Texas are expected to gain more political power after the 2030 Census, as are Arizona, Utah and Idaho.

“The writing is on the wall, and the call is coming from inside the house,” the report says. “We either adapt to the changing conditions of the arena, or history will leave us behind.”

Jackson said that while he does share some of the same criticisms of the after-action report that the DNC had, he agrees with the conclusion that Democrats need to get better at appealing to rural and Southern voters. They should start working on that now, he said, to be ready for the 2032 presidential election in six years.

“By 2032, if Democrats can’t win in North Carolina and Georgia, there’s not going to be a path to the White House,” he said. “Traditional Democratic strongholds are losing votes, and places like Texas are gaining them.”