What the DNC’s 2024 post-election review reveals about a communications mistake every organization is capable of making
When the Democratic National Committee released its 2024 post-election review, the communications industry should have paid close attention—not to the politics, but to the technique. What the DNC produced was a textbook example of a document engineered to appear transparent while systematically avoiding the specific institutional accountability that transparency actually requires.
As a strategic communications professional, I read it as a case study. Here’s the diagnosis.
What the document accomplished
- Created a news cycle
- Gave surrogates something to point to
- Preemptively neutralized the “they learned nothing” critique with a document that has “lessons” in its framing
What the document failed to do
- Name specific communications failures
- Identify decision-authority chains
- Produce corrective actions with owners and deadlines
- Cost anyone inside the organization anything
The Communications Error Inside the Error
The most significant problem with the DNC’s AAR isn’t what it omitted. It’s that the omissions are now the story. This is the fundamental law of crisis communications: the cover-up creates a second crisis worse than the first. A document released to manage perception becomes, itself, a reputational liability when audiences recognize that it was engineered rather than honest.
The party’s credibility problem did not begin with the election result. It deepened with the response to the election result. And the response to the response has compounded it further.
Three Questions Every Organization Should Ask Before Releasing an After-Action Report
- Does this document name what actually failed, or does it describe difficulty in general terms? General acknowledgment of challenge creates no institutional learning and produces no behavioral change. Specificity is the mechanism.
- Does this document identify who held decision authority at each critical juncture? Not to assign blame, but because accountability without structural clarity is performance. If no individual or function is connected to a decision, no individual or function can improve.
- What does this document cost us to release? If the answer is nothing, it is not an after-action report. It is a positioning document wearing one’s clothing. Credibility is built by releasing the document that costs something, not the one that manages everything.
The Lesson for Organizational Leaders
Your stakeholders—whether they are voters, employees, clients, or boards—are sophisticated. They have seen institutional accountability theater before. They recognize when a document is constructed to protect rather than to examine. And they remember.
The short-term protection that a managed AAR provides is consistently outweighed by the long-term trust deficit it creates. Organizations that choose genuine institutional honesty, even when painful, build the kind of credibility that survives future crises. Organizations that choose perception management build the kind of fragility that the next crisis will expose.
Survival is not the same as institutional health. The communications choices made in the aftermath of a failure determine which one you build.
BRComm provides senior-level strategic communications, crisis counsel, and message architecture for organizations and public figures navigating high-stakes moments. If your organization is facing a communications challenge, contact us at portal.brcomm.co.
BRComm is led by Brandi Richard Thompson, Former Federal Emergency Management Official and Crisis Strategist with 20+ years of federal crisis response leadership.
Brandi Richard Thompson
Former Federal Emergency Management Official and Crisis Strategist with 20+ years leading crisis response at FEMA and DHS across hurricanes, wildfires, civil unrest, and public health emergencies affecting more than 50 million people. Founder of BRComm, a strategic communications and crisis PR firm, and the author of Operation Growth: An Extraordinary Journey of Maturity, Motherhood, and Black Girl Magic. Subscribe to Courage & Crisis on Substack. Contact BRComm at brcomm.co.
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