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FiveThirtyEight founder and prominent pollster Nate Silver revealed that he was surprised by how a large swath of Democrats appears to act as though the party did nothing wrong in the 2024 election.
“I’ve been surprised, to some extent, by the unwillingness of a certain Democratic faction to admit they f—– up last year,” Silver said in an interview with Semafor on Sunday. “If you look, for example, at the recent Way to Win postmortem, it’s quite literally claiming that Democrats did nothing wrong except failing to fight hard enough for progressive ideas. There’s no mention of [Joe] Biden’s debate with Trump, for example.”
Silver pointed to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) recently canceling the release of its party “autopsy” on the 2024 election as well as progressive California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s rise in prominence as evidence that the party is refusing to switch gears.
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“You’d think after last year that Democrats would be phobic of nominating another prominent elected official from California with a tired mix of vaguely progressive ideas,” Silver said. “The proverbial definition of insanity is trying the same thing again and expecting a different result.”
Despite his criticism, Silver suggested that Newsom or even former Vice President Kamala Harris could stand a chance in a hypothetical 2028 race against Vice President JD Vance because of President Donald Trump’s unpopularity. However, he warned that the “#Resistance” faction was quickly becoming a “a self-contained epistemic bubble.”
Fox News Digital reached out to the DNC for comment.
DNC Chair Ken Martin defended his decision not to make the “autopsy” public, despite previously calling for the report earlier this year, saying it would be a “distraction” ahead of the upcoming 2026 midterm elections.
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“We completed a comprehensive review of what happened in 2024 and are already putting our learnings into motion,” Martin wrote in a statement. “And we’re winning again — even in places that haven’t gone blue in decades. 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.”
“Here’s our North Star: does this help us win? If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission,” he emphasized.
The “autopsy” had already drawn criticism after reports suggested it would ignore key election questions, such as whether then-President Joe Biden should have stayed in the race or dropped out sooner, and if then-Vice President Kamala Harris was the best person to run in his place.
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Silver’s interview with Semafor was part of a larger project with members of the media reflecting on where their predictions failed in 2025. While Silver focused largely on the Democratic Party, other media figures interviewed by Semafor spent more time criticizing industries and government officials for capitulating to the Trump administration.
“I was wrong about how the high and mighty would respond to rank gangsterism from the Trump White House. I didn’t expect the most powerful people in American society — the white-shoe lawyers, the media executives, the tech czars, the Hollywood moguls — to fold so quickly and so shamelessly. They’ll regret it,” Vanity Fair global editorial director Mark Guiducci said.
MS NOW anchor Joe Scarborough called out the Supreme Court, saying, “I assumed that the third branch of government would be more of a check than the first branch on Trump’s efforts to undermine Madison’s checks and balances. I was wrong.”
“I somehow underestimated the depth of moral depravity among America’s elites and business leaders. Time and again, cowering weakness has defined the actions of people in power, whether it’s white-shoe law firms cutting corrupt deals with the government or tech titans feting Mohammed bin Salman,” HuffPost editor-in-chief Whitney Snyder commented.
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