Month: December 2025

The Democratic National Committee is refusing to release its autopsy of the party’s major 2024 losses it announced on Wednesday, breaking Chair Ken Martin’s public pledge to do so. The decision underscores the party’s challenges in grappling with its electoral setbacks as it heads into what is expected to be a stronger midterm year.

The DNC’s completed post-election review of the party’s melodramatic and botched campaign cycle is based on hundreds of interviews with operatives in all 50 states. During that process, some Democrats raised concerns about releasing the findings, according to a DNC official granted anonymity to describe the sensitive process.

The DNC wanted to avoid another public debate over how the party lost the White House to Donald Trump, and instead, turn its focus on its recent successes, according to this official. Democrats have overperformed in special elections across the country this year, and won handily in New Jersey and Virginia last month. The committee previewed some initial findings from the autopsy to top donors and other Democratic stakeholders in October.

Former President Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection, despite his advanced age — and his disastrous debate performance — were not mentioned in the some excerpts of the report’s findings, which were shared with POLITICO. Democrats are still divided over what contributed to Kamala Harris’ loss.

In a statement, Martin said the committee had “completed a comprehensive review of what happened in 2024” and they are “putting our learnings into motion,” noting the party’s off-year victories.

“In our conversations with stakeholders from across the Democratic ecosystem, we are aligned on what’s important, and that’s learning from the past and winning the future,” Martin continued. “Here’s our North Star: does this help us win? If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.”

The decision marks an about-face for a coalition that’s at odds over what went wrong last year, and still registering record-low approval ratings even among its own voters. Several outside groups, from the progressive Way to Win to the center-left Welcome nonprofit, released their own in-depth audits of the party’s missteps with differing diagnoses for how to fix its problems. Just last week, some DNC members called on the committee to provide more answers.

The DNC official described some examples of the report’s findings, including the party’s organizing strategies, necessary technological upgrades and its youth voter problem — though the details shared with POLITICO were sparse and incomplete. Excerpts from the review broadly described Democrats as defensive on immigration and public safety — issues that generally favor Republicans — but didn’t name-check a campaign, candidate or entity for its role in this posture, at least not publicly.

On the party’s organizing efforts, the DNC’s review urged campaigns to incentivize engaging conversations with voters over just the number of doors knocked and phones called. It called for investing more into relational organizing and year-round field infrastructure, efforts Martin championed during his chair’s race last year. Of the party’s data infrastructure, the DNC’s report issued warnings that it was out-of-date and overwhelmed at key moments during the campaign and called for it to be modernized.

It described the party’s much-reported losses among young voters, citing Republicans’ advantages in communicating through the influencer ecosystem and pressing Democrats to do engage with non-traditional media sources. Back in February, Democrats conceded the GOP was “running circles” around them online, but in describing its findings, the DNC doesn’t go much further in clarifying its own public recommendations.

This fall, the DNC held briefings with donors and other Democratic stakeholders on its initial findings. At the time, one Democrat who attended an October donor event confirmed that Biden’s initial decision to run in spite of his advanced age was not mentioned by DNC officials as a part of the review. It’s not clear whether his decision to run for reelection is discussed in the private review.

Biden’s age was not mentioned in the excerpts of the review shared with POLITICO on Thursday, nor was it raised in other briefings on the report’s initial findings. Most Democrats cite the last-minute candidate switch as a core reason for the party’s sweeping losses.

Martin’s decision to withhold the report doubles back on a pledge he made just hours after he was elected to be the DNC’s chair in February. In comments to reporters, Martin committed to the public release of the 2024 report.

At the time, he also questioned why the DNC hadn’t released its 2016 autopsy, when he questioned, “what happened with that … was there any utility in doing that?”

“Of course it will be released,” Martin said in February, referring to a future review on the 2024 election. “There has to be some lessons that we glean on that so we can operationalize it, not just here in DC, but through all of the 57 state parties, and, of course, the county parties, so people have a sense of what we need to do.”

​Politics

RALEIGH, N.C. — Four-term North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt, a towering figure in North Carolina politics in the late 20th century who helped the Democratic Party focus nationally upon public education reform, died Thursday at the age of 88, his daughter Lt. Gov. Rachel Hunt announced.

Hunt, whose career provided a prototype for the modern “education governor,” served an unprecedented 16 years as governor as the state received the rewards and stings of shifting from textiles and tobacco to a high-tech economy.

Rachel Hunt’s office said that her father died peacefully Thursday at his Wilson County home.

“He devoted his life to serving the people of North Carolina, guided by a belief that public service should expand opportunity, strengthen communities, and always put people first,” Rachel Hunt said in a news release that also referenced “my beloved daddy and hero.”

Considered a business-oriented progressive, Hunt was a giant in state government and influential in the national education reform movement of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He was first elected governor in 1976 and, after a constitutional change, became the first North Carolina governor elected to successive four-year terms.

Following an epic U.S. Senate campaign loss to Republican icon Jesse Helms in 1984, Hunt’s political career resumed eight years later with a third term at the Executive Mansion, followed by reelection in 1996.

Hunt remained active in Democratic politics after leaving office in 2001, particularly as he watched protégés such as former Gov. Roy Cooper and the late U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan achieve higher office. He campaigned for President Barack Obama in 2012 and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Cooper in 2016.

“I can think of no one who shaped North Carolina’s recent successes as much as Governor Jim Hunt,” current Democratic Gov. Josh Stein said Thursday. And Cooper called Hunt the “greatest Governor in North Carolina history.”

Even entering his 80s, Hunt urged Republicans in charge of the legislature to fund “big things” for public education, rather than pass more income tax cuts.

“I’m proud of what we’ve done together,” Hunt said in a May 2017 interview. “But I’m far from satisfied about where we are and determined to keep doing my little bit, I guess, to help us keep changing things and improving things in North Carolina. And I know you do it mainly through education.”

Relentless on building up public schools

Hunt concentrated relentlessly on public schools, talking about the connection between education achievement and competing in the world economy. In the 1970s, while lieutenant governor, he worked with Republican Gov. Jim Holshouser to make North Carolina the first state with full-day kindergarten.

In the 1980s, he helped create the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and pressed for standardized testing for public school students nationwide so that states could compare themselves.

Returning as governor in the 1990s, he championed the Smart Start early childhood initiative, viewed as a national model to prepare children for school, and higher teacher pay. And after the end of his career in office, the Durham-based Hunt Institute trained up and coming political stars nationwide about public education policy.

“If there is one person that is responsible for remaking and reforming education in the nation, particularly in the Southeast and starting with North Carolina, it is Jim Hunt,” former Democratic Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes said in a 2009 interview. “We will feel the effect of Jim Hunt’s leadership for generations to come.”

Hunt was an unabashed lobbyist for his programs and initiatives, often making late-night phone calls to lawmakers to persuade them. If that failed, he would enlist key constituents in a legislator’s district to bombard with them calls all weekend.

“He really had a way of pushing you to do things you never thought you could do,” said Gary Pearce, a longtime Hunt staffer and later biographer. “He made you feel like that you were genuinely making the world a better place.”

Quick rise in North Carolina politics

James Baxter Hunt Jr. was born May 16, 1937, in Greensboro, North Carolina. He grew up on the family’s tobacco and dairy farm in Wilson County. After law school graduation, Hunt, his wife, Carolyn, and their young children lived in Nepal for two years while working for the Ford Foundation.

Hunt rose quickly in Democratic politics, serving as president of the state’s Young Democrats in 1968 and getting elected lieutenant governor four years later.

In a controversial move during his first term as governor, Hunt commuted the sentences of nine Black men and one white woman convicted of the 1971 firebombing of a Wilmington grocery store during days of violence that included the shooting of a Black teenager by police. Key witnesses in the case had recanted their testimony. Full pardons for the “Wilmington 10” didn’t come until 2012.

After loss to Helms, a rebirth and return to governor

His second four-year term closed with his political battle with Helms, the conservative firebrand known as “Senator No” for his opposition to civil rights, gay rights, abortion and the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Hunt lost as Helms’ campaign blistered him with ads portraying Hunt as a flip-flopper on the issues.

A defeated Hunt returned to practicing law but remained in public life. His comeback to state politics in the early 1990s helped delay a growing Republican tide in North Carolina politics.

Even GOP leaders begrudgingly were impressed with Hunt’s ability to tack with changing political winds. In the mid-1990s, he called a special legislative session to get tough on crime and proposed tax cuts larger than what Republicans initially offered.

Republican U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, a former state House speaker in the 2010s, called Hunt on Thursday “one of the most consequential public servants in North Carolina’s history.”

Rachel Hunt served in the legislature and was elected lieutenant governor in 2024. Jim Hunt was on hand at the Legislative Building in early 2025 when she took as a duty of lieutenant governor the gavel as Senate president, following in her father’s footsteps 52 years later.

Memorial information for Hunt will be announced later.

​Politics

PHOENIX. Arizona — Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk has endorsed Vice President JD Vance for president, an early sign of influential support for a likely leading candidate in 2028.

Kirk, who took over leadership of Turning Point after her husband, Charlie, was killed in September, announced her decision during a speech Thursday at the organization’s America Fest conference in Phoenix.

Vance is scheduled to speak at the conference on Sunday.

“We are going to get my husband’s friend JD Vance elected for 48 in the most resounding way possible,” Kirk said.

Vance has not yet committed to running in 2028, but as vice president he is widely expected to seek the White House. TPUSA — founded by Charlie Kirk — holds major influence for the MAGA movement, particularly among young conservatives, and the early endorsement could give an early lead among the Republican hopefuls.

“My attitude is the American people elected me to be vice president,” Vance told the New York Post in October. “I’m going to work as hard as I can to make the president successful over the next three years and three months, and if we get to a point where something else is in the offer, let’s handle it then.”

Kirk made the endorsement in front of a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom are ardent supporters of President Donald Trump — and they responded with resounding applause.

Vance and Charlie Kirk were particularly close before Kirk’s death.

​Politics

PHOENIX — Members of the MAGA faithful gathered here Thursday to kick off Turning Point USA’s America Fest, the largest meeting for the organization since its founder, Charlie Kirk, was shot to death on a Utah college campus in September.

Despite that somber backdrop, the event quickly devolved into a spectacle of MAGA infighting.

Ben Shapiro, the first speaker after widow Erika Kirk, ripped into those who would take the same stage in the coming hours and days. He called out conservative commentators, blasting Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Steve Bannon as “frauds and grifters.”

“The conservative movement is in serious danger,” Shapiro said, arguing the danger is not just on the left, but “from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.”

He called Bannon “a PR flack for Jeffrey Epstein” ahead of the imminent release of files related to the late convicted sex offender, while praising President Donald Trump and his administration’s handling of the issue. Trump pushed to stop Republicans in Congress from voting to release the files, though he signed the legislation once it was passed. Both Bannon and Trump appear in photos with Epstein that were released by House Democrats.

Shapiro particularly focused on Carlson — both for elevating Owens’ conspiracy theories about Kirk’s murder and for his recent interview with far-right influencer Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier who has repeatedly pushed antisemitic tropes. Carlson, a former Fox News host, now hosts his show on X and routinely garners millions of views.

“The people who refused to condemn Candace’s truly vicious attacks — and some of them are speaking here tonight — are guilty of cowardice,” Shapiro said, adding later: “If you host a Hitler apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes … you ought to own it.”

Both the Fuentes interview and Owens’ conspiracies have embroiled the party in recent weeks. On Wednesday, Shapiro called on the Heritage Foundation, the powerful conservative think tank whose president defended the interview, to change its tune about Carlson’s elevation of Fuentes.

Carlson responded with heat of his own from the stage Thursday.

“That guy is pompous,” Carlson said, saying he “laughed” while watching clips of Shapiro’s speech backstage. “Calls to deplatform at a Charlie Kirk event? That’s hilarious.”

Carlson went on to rail against cancel culture, and promised the crowd that he was not antisemitic. “Antisemitism is not just naughty, it’s immoral,” he said.

Erika Kirk addressed the MAGA movement’s fractures, while casting her late husband as a rare unifier and pleading with the crowd to embrace disagreement. “You won’t agree with everyone on this stage this weekend,” she said. “And that’s okay. Welcome to America.”

The event wasn’t entirely heated. Actor Russell Brand — who spoke between Shapiro and Carlson — focused on Christianity, while sprinkling attacks on vaccines and the pharmaceutical industry into his remarks. And earlier in the day, attendees danced to upbeat music, repeatedly chanted “USA” and celebrated Trump’s return to the White House at the Phoenix Convention Center, which is plastered with imagery of Charlie Kirk. More than 30,000 people gathered for the event.

Kirk’s influence on young people was particularly evident, with thousands of high school and college attendees, some of whom posed for photos in front of a tent that resembled the one Kirk was speaking in front of when he was shot during “The American Comeback Tour.”

Erika Kirk — who now serves as Turning Point’s CEO — said 80 percent of attendees had never been to America Fest before, and one-third of them were students. More than 140,000 people have submitted requests to join the organization since Kirk’s death, bringing the membership to over 1 million people across 4,000 chapters at high schools and colleges, she added.

While the group has welcomed speakers from across the conservative movement, it made clear choices about which politicians to welcome to the stage, providing a glimpse into how the organization hopes to shape the future of the GOP. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and GOP Rep. Mike Collins, both candidates for Senate, and gubernatorial hopefuls Andy Biggs of Arizona and Byron Donalds of Florida, were given slots on the main stage.

Erika Kirk also made a point of promising to elevate Vice President JD Vance — who will close the event on Sunday — to the White House in 2028. Vance leads early polls of the likely GOP field.

“We are going to get my husband’s friend JD Vance elected for 48 in the most resounding way possible,” she said.

​Politics