Rep. Ro Khanna went on national television Sunday and delivered one of the bluntest indictments of his own party's leadership in recent memory, telling NBC's Kristen Welker that Democrats have repeatedly run "status quo establishment candidates" who refuse to challenge an economic system that has left working Americans behind.
The California Democrat's appearance on "Meet the Press" came as the Democratic National Committee grapples with a newly released autopsy report examining the party's 2024 election losses. That report, delayed for months amid internal disagreements over its findings, concluded that Democrats have spent too much energy "winning arguments" while Republicans focused on winning elections.
Khanna did not sugarcoat the diagnosis. And the timing, with DNC Chair Ken Martin already facing calls to resign from members of his own caucus, suggests the party's internal reckoning is far from over.
The core of Khanna's critique centered on economics. As he told Welker on "Meet the Press":
"We do need to recognize that the status quo has failed. This is a system that has created massive inequality. That the economy is lopsided and unfair, and it's not working for many working-class and middle-class Americans. And too often we've run status quo establishment candidates who have been unwilling to call out an economic and political system that has failed."
That is a sitting Democratic congressman saying, on camera, that his party's own nominees have been part of the problem, not just bystanders to it. He went further, calling for a message that speaks directly to the people Democrats claim to represent.
"We need to have an economic message that actually is talking to the working-class folks who have been shafted, and that's taking on a system that has been rigged."
The word "shafted" is worth pausing on. It is not the language of a party that believes its policies are working. It is an admission, from inside the tent, that the people Democrats say they fight for have been getting the short end under Democratic leadership.
Khanna also offered a pointed retrospective on former Vice President Kamala Harris's 2024 campaign. He suggested she made a strategic mistake by failing to plant herself in the states that mattered most, and by not taking ownership of the Biden administration's economic record.
"In retrospect, had she been in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio talking about the economy and been the lead for the president's economic policies, the Inflation Reduction Act, the American Rescue Plan, the CHIPS Act, perhaps we would have done better."
It is a revealing comment on multiple levels. Khanna named three specific swing states where Harris apparently did not spend enough time or deliver a clear enough pitch. He also implied that Harris distanced herself from the very legislative accomplishments that were supposed to be the administration's calling card.
The DNC's own autopsy reportedly reached a related conclusion: the White House did not do enough over several years to improve Harris's standing before Democrats switched nominees. That finding, buried inside a report the party fought over for months before releasing, amounts to an institutional admission that the party's standard-bearer was set up to fail.
The pattern of prominent Democrats breaking with their party's leadership keeps growing. Former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa recently broke with California Democrats on several major issues, and the fractures extend well beyond the West Coast.
The DNC autopsy report itself has become its own story. Commissioned after the 2024 losses, the document was delayed for months as internal disagreements festered over what it should say and who it should blame. When it finally emerged, its central finding, that Democrats prioritized "winning arguments" over "winning elections", read less like a revelation and more like a confession of something voters had been saying for years.
Welker pressed Khanna on whether DNC Chair Ken Martin should step down. His answer was "no," but his defense was hardly ringing. Khanna called Martin a "Paul Wellstone Democrat" and said he agreed with two of Martin's positions: opposing super PAC involvement in Democratic primaries and criticizing superdelegates selecting party nominees.
Then came the caveat. "Could he have handled this autopsy better? Absolutely," Khanna said. "Should he be working more with state parties to make sure they're funded into '26 and '28? Absolutely."
That is the sound of a man defending a colleague while conceding the colleague has fumbled the job. Democratic lawmakers have already demanded Martin's resignation over the handling of the autopsy, and the pressure shows no signs of easing.
Martin's position has grown increasingly precarious. After months of resisting the report's release, he reversed course, but the damage was done. The mounting calls for his departure reflect a party whose members cannot agree on what went wrong, let alone how to fix it.
Khanna tried to strike a hopeful note, insisting that Democrats do not need to abandon reason. "I think more Americans probably want reason debate in this country," he said. But the substance of his own critique undercuts the optimism. If the party has been running establishment candidates who won't challenge a rigged system, his words, not ours, then the problem is not messaging. It is the messengers.
And the gap between Democratic institutions and the voters they claim to serve keeps widening. Consider the labor movement. A recent report alleged that a major transportation union spent millions on Democratic politics and casinos while its own members backed Trump. That is not a messaging failure. That is a trust failure.
Khanna's prescription, stronger economic messaging aimed at working-class voters heading into future elections, assumes the party's leadership class is willing to change. Nothing in the DNC autopsy, the months of infighting over its release, or the party's track record of nominating safe establishment figures suggests that willingness exists.
The congressman is hardly alone in his frustration. Sen. John Fetterman has made a series of announcements that infuriated fellow Democrats, and the list of party figures willing to say publicly what many say privately continues to grow.
Strip away the political jargon, and the DNC autopsy tells a straightforward story. Democrats lost in 2024 because they did not give working-class voters a reason to show up. The White House failed to build up its own vice president. The party's candidates refused to challenge the economic status quo. And the national committee spent months arguing about whether to admit any of it.
Khanna deserves some credit for saying it plainly. But saying it on television is not the same as doing something about it. The Democratic Party's problem is not that nobody inside the building can diagnose the disease. The problem is that the people who run the building are the disease.
When your own congressman says working-class voters got "shafted," and your own autopsy says you cared more about winning arguments than winning elections, the verdict is already in. The only question is whether anyone with power in the party is listening, or whether they will run the same playbook again and expect a different result.
