When the Democratic National Committee finally released its autopsy on the 2024 election disaster, not even the DNC chair could defend it. “I don’t endorse what’s in this report,” Ken Martin conceded as the autopsy went public on Thursday. After several months of withholding the autopsy on the grounds of not wanting it to be a distraction, Martin fessed up at last: “When I received the report late last year, it wasn’t ready for primetime. Not even close. And because no source material was provided, fixing it would have meant starting over, from the beginning.”
In response, a former Obama speechwriter, Jon Favreau, summed up eight stages of Martin’s tortuous process that has spanned more than a year: “Promise to release autopsy; put incompetent friend in charge; incompetent friend produces incoherent product; announce you’re not releasing the autopsy; lie about why; gaslight people who ask, saying they’re the problem; face internal revolt; release autopsy.”
Now released, the draft report is floating in a weird zone of being and not being the DNC’s autopsy at the same time. A disclaimer in red at the top of every page declares that “this document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC,” and the DNC “cannot independently verify the claims presented”. What’s more, most pages include red boxed insertions taking issue with claims in the autopsy (“No sourcing provided for several claims in this section” on one page is followed by “Appears to conflate family and sick leave” on the next), with the DNC in the strange role of a schoolteacher critically marking up an assigned term paper.
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The report has set off a barrage of harsh critiques from mainstream quarters. The New York Times reported that the autopsy “is disorganized and leaves empty entire sections” while “often veering into political clichés and hard-to-follow explanations”. A CNN analysis pointed out that the autopsy “contains lots of errors and curious inclusions – even some that are puzzling to have in a draft”.
Meanwhile, the report evades discussing a pair of key political decisions, which enabled Joe Biden to run for re-election until it was too late – and then coronated Kamala Harris as the party’s nominee without any process involving Democratic voters.
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Instead, the autopsy focuses much attention on matters like ad buys and fundraising, without coming to terms with why so many voters in 2024 were uninspired by the Democratic ticket and what it stood for. The emphasis is on the mechanics of the party as an electoral vehicle, without substantively addressing why so many millions of disaffected voters – particularly the young – turned away and refused to turn out because they wanted the party to move in a very different direction.
But the most extreme evasion in the autopsy is the dodging of the crucial importance of the Gaza genocide. In this way, the autopsy is in keeping with how the DNC has continued to function. As the governing body of the Democratic party, the DNC has twisted itself into untenable knots while excluding concerns about Gaza and Palestinians from any serious internal debate. Martin, like the party’s congressional leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, has continued to pretend that the US government has not been arming Israel’s genocide.
In an autopsy of close to 50,000 words, not one of them is “Gaza”, or “Palestinians” or “Israel” or “genocide”. Yet credible accounts tell of meetings where the autopsy’s author, the Democratic consultant Paul Rivera, privately acknowledged that Harris’s stance on Gaza hurt her election chances. The executive director of the Institute for Middle East Understanding, Margaret DeReus, said in a statement on Thursday that “Ken Martin should release the information that the author of the autopsy told us clearly and unambiguously, which is that DNC officials’ review of their own data found Biden’s support for Israel to be a net-negative for Democrats in 2024.”
A wide detour around clear polling data was necessary to keep out of the autopsy the reality of measurable damage that Harris’s support for arming Israel did to her campaign. In August 2024, an IMEU/YouGov poll in three swing states found that for every vote Harris might lose by supporting an arms embargo on Israel, she stood to gain five votes. The mindset that chose to block such facts from getting into the autopsy was consistent with the way that the DNC has automatically functioned.
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It’s a type of corruption to exclude such information from the autopsy – concealing the political implications of what happened in 2024 and what might happen in the future. Three-quarters of Democrats agree that “Israel is committing genocide,” and the Pew Research Center recently reported that 80% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents “currently have an unfavorable view of Israel”. The autopsy is in sync with the routine evasions that have been perpetuating the DNC’s failure to reflect the majority views of registered Democrats who oppose military aid to Israel.
Last summer, while a Gallup poll was showing that just 8% of Democrats approved of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, Martin said at a meeting of DNC delegates from across the country that “there’s a divide in our party on this issue.” He has held to the outdated claim that Democrats are “divided” on the subject, while the gaping division is actually between top-ranking Democrats and the party’s base.
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The DNC’s new autopsy embodies that disconnect rather than addressing the need to end it. Ironically, the autopsy itself is a case in point of what it should have spotlighted and critiqued about the 2024 Harris campaign – refusal to accede to the compelling moral and political reasons to reject Biden’s Israel policy. (A coherent alternative to the DNC’s autopsy is the one that my RootsAction colleagues released several months ago, “Autopsy: How Democrats Lost the White House”.)
The crisis of Democratic leadership is undermining the party’s potential to do what is imperative – roll back Republican power in the midterms and then win the race for the presidency in 2028.
