The Democratic National Committee released its formal postmortem on the 2024 election defeat Thursday, but the 192-page document sparked immediate backlash from the party's progressive flank for what it conspicuously left out.
DNC chair Ken Martin published the report alongside an apology, acknowledging that his initial decision to withhold the analysis had angered party members. Martin told Democrats the document "does not meet my standards, and it won't meet your standards."
The omission that drew the sharpest criticism from progressives was the near-total silence on Gaza. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told reporters it was "pretty unbelievable that Gaza would not be mentioned once in the autopsy report," describing it as "very clearly a major dynamic and a major thread that was happening in 2024." Congressman Ro Khanna of California went further, stating flatly that "one of the reasons we lost is our blank check to Israel and Netanyahu while they committed genocide in Gaza."
The autopsy also notably avoided examining President Joe Biden's age as a factor in the campaign collapse, another subject many party insiders viewed as central to Harris's struggle.
What the report did address were the electoral demographics Harris shed. The analysis identifies Latinos, men, and rural voters across multiple states as key lost constituencies. The document bluntly states that "Harris wrote off rural America, assuming urban/suburban margins would compensate. The math doesn't work." The postmortem recommends Democrats move away from what it calls "abstract issues and identity politics."
The party had initially tried to keep the report confidential before releasing it under pressure. The decision to finally publish it, despite Martin's own reservations, suggests lingering tension within Democratic leadership over how to analyze the defeat and what lessons should guide the party forward.
Author James Rodriguez: "The DNC autopsy reads like a document written to avoid the hardest conversations Democrats need to have. Ignoring Gaza entirely when younger and progressive voters cite it as a breaking point is not a diagnosis, it's a dodge."
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