The long awaited Democratic Party “autopsy” of the 2024 election failure has finally been released, and it’s riddled with errors.
Facining mounting pressure to release the report, Democratic National Convention chairman Ken Martin finally relented, sharing an “unfinished’ draft with CNN.
Though Martin caveated to CNN that the report wasn’t ready for public consumption — despite having two years to prepare it — the DNC chair figured the spectacle he created by delaying its release is now more embarrassing than the spectacle that would’ve been created had the party just shared the thing in the first place, as promised way back in 2024.
Indeed, it’s pretty rough-hewn. It’s short on citations and chock full of errors, many of which fit the profile of hallucinations from a large language model like ChatGPT. While a few incongruities are to be expected with any rough draft, some of them are beyond the pale, drawing into question why they would have been included in the document to begin with.
In the postmortem’s analysis of the North Carolina gubernatorial election, for example, CNN points out that the document incorrectly lists Republican candidate Mark Robinson as having won both 45 percent and 42.7 percent of the vote. Neither figure is actually correct: in reality, he won 40.1 percent in his 2024 loss to Democratic candidate Josh Stein.
Numerous names are misspelled, like that of former Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin, listed as Matt “Brevin,” and former New Jersey Governor “John” Corzine, whose name is really spelled without the “h.”
There’s also some inconsistent analysis in the document, like in the case of Washington-state Democratic candidate Bob Ferguson. Some portions of the autopsy heap praise on Ferguson, lauding him for running “on a platform of housing affordability, reducing costs for families throughout the state, and improving public safety.”
Later on in the document, however, it chastises Ferguson for underperforming presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Though Ferguson won his election and Harris lost, the document nonetheless makes it clear that “Ferguson underperformed Harris in Democratic strongholds,” demonstrating that “anti-Trump sentiment alone was insufficient to motivate voters.”
That would be a perfectly reasonable criticism of Harris, but it directly counters the earlier claim that Ferguson won his election by choosing a platform based on affordability and public safety.
Whether any of this was AI isn’t clear. LLMs are notoriously horrid at consistently citing correct numbers. They likewise struggle to maintain cohesive narratives when generating long-form text, which could easily explain the inconsistent messaging around Ferguson’s electoral campaign.
The DNC has not responded to Futurism’s request for comment on the use of AI in the document. Given how long it took them to release the postmortem in the first place, there’s no telling if we’ll ever get our answer — or if Democratic functionaries will learn any lessons from the bloodbath that was 2024.
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