'Almost Worthless': Progressives Rip 2024 Autopsy the DNC Didn’t Want You To See

Critics on Thursday slammed the controversial—and until now secret—Democratic National Committee autopsy of the 2024 election, which completely omitted some of the biggest issues affecting the contest, including President Joe Biden's decision to seek reelection, the manner in which Vice President Kamala Harris replaced him atop the ticket, and the Gaza genocide.

The 2024 postmortem—which was written by strategist Paul Rivera and ostensibly examines why and how Democrats lost the White House to President Donald Trump and control of Congress to Republicans—was published online Thursday after it was obtained CNN. DNC Chair Ken Martin told CNN that he was "releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged,” for the sake of "full transparency."

“It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word," Martin said. “After last November’s massive Democratic wins, I didn’t want to create a distraction, but by not putting the report out, I ended up creating an even bigger distraction. For that, I sincerely apologize."

RootsAction, the progressive advocacy group that led the push to release the autopsy, said Thursday that "to call the report a disgrace would be an understatement."

"The report focuses extensively on ad spending and fundraising, without discussing the Democratic platform, policy positions, or political context of the 2024 election," the group noted. "The word 'affordability,' arguably the most important issue in the 2024 election, appears twice in the 129-page report."

"Martin and the DNC are trying to wash their hands of the report and its contents," RootsAction continued. "In a hasty, almost amateurish markup, the DNC has gone out of its way to poke holes in the legitimacy of the very report it commissioned... While Martin may feel that this absolves him of the responsibility to answer for this pitiful document, it should only intensify scrutiny of his leadership of the DNC."

Speculation abounded that the report contained damning findings about the electoral harm caused by the Biden-Harris administration's support for Israel as it waged both a genocidal war in Gaza and expanded its illegal occupation, colonization, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

Opposition to the administration's complicity in the slaughter, as well as Biden and Harris' refusal to acknowledge the genocide or seek a ceasefire, was embodied by the Uncommitted movement and its 30 Democratic National Convention delegates.

There isn't a single mention of Gaza, Palestine, Israel, genocide, or Uncommitted in the autopsy.

"We needed a serious DNC autopsy. This alleged autopsy is almost worthless," Jeff Cohen, co-founder of RootsAction—which led the battle for the DNC to release the report—told Common Dreams on Thursday.

"There's no mention of the Biden/Harris administration's Israel policy that abetted the Gaza massacre," Cohen continued. "That cost votes, and helped Trump win. Earlier leaks suggested that the DNC autopsy would discuss Gaza's impact on voters."

The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) noted that "polls and reporting leading up to and after the 2024 election showed Biden and Harris’s support for providing weapons to Israel was deeply unpopular with their own voters and an electoral liability."

“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," IMEU policy project executive director Margaret DeReus said Thursday.

While the autopsy mentions inflation 18 times, it does so within the context of adjusting fundraising figures for inflation and not the affordability crisis—arguably the number one issue Trump campaigned on, before exacerbating the crisis via trade wars and actual wars once back in office.

The DNC postmortem argues that Democrats have steadily lost the trust of working-class and non-college voters since the high-water mark of former President Barack Obama's historic 2008 victory.

"The Democratic Party has always tried to be seen as the party of the people, the party of workers, fair play, and civil discourse," the report states. "The party’s connections with working Americans and their families were forged through decades of organizing and engagement, the development of a vibrant and inclusive party infrastructure, and a relatable agenda which helped us connect in homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods across the country."

However, the report argues that the party defined itself as anti-Trump while failing to define what Harris and Democrats stood for, while underinvesting in state and local organizing and failing to build and maintain relationships with voters outside its coastal and urban strongholds.

"Harris wrote off rural America, assuming urban/suburban margins would compensate," the publication notes. "The Harris campaign appears to have relied on Trump being unacceptable rather than building an affirmative case for Harris.”

The autopsy concluded that so-called "identity politics" don't resonate with white male voters. The report noted the success of Trump's attack ads, particularly the anti-trans spots with the kicker, "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you."

"If the vice president would not change her position—and she did not—then there was nothing which would have worked as a response," the report asserts.

Some observers worried that the DNC was suggesting throwing trans people under the bus in pursuit of electoral gains. Worryingly, the only time the publication mentions transgender people, it uses an antiquated term that is offensive to many trans folk.

Amid relentless Republican attacks on transgender people and the wider LGBTQ+ community, reproductive freedom, voting rights—especially for Black Americans—immigrants, and others, the DNC postmortem encourages future Democratic candidates to "focus less on abstract issues and identity politics, and connect with voters on the issues they say matter most, including the economy, disaster relief, and addressing housing affordability."

The autopsy's assertion that "the problem wasn't Democratic policy or party brand" drew incredulous derision from observers including gun control activist and former DNC co-vice chair David Hogg:

Taking aim at the autopsy's many failures, RootsAction asserted that the DNC had "a responsibility to turn in a report that truly grapples with the mistakes of the past so that the Democratic Party can learn from those mistakes and emerge stronger in its fight against Trumpism," but ultimately, "the DNC has utterly failed in that respect."

"The only serious autopsy so far remains the one that RootsAction published," the group said.

The RootsAction 2024 postmortem, authored by San Francisco journalist Christopher Cook, covers some of the same issues as the DNC autopsy. However, it argues that Democrats lost in 2024 because of voter disenchantment, Biden's decision to run for reelection, Democrats' abandonment of their working-class base, loss of younger voters, and "the Gaza effect."

While the DNC autopsy makes no mention of Biden's fateful decision, RootsAction's report states that "a key factor hobbling Harris’s chances in 2024 was the short timeline she had to execute her campaign—just 107 days."

"That her nomination was secured not via the traditional Democratic Party primary, but through some process of intra-administration succession, exacerbated this challenging chronology," the publication adds. "This was, of course, due to President Biden’s betrayal of his 2020 promise to be a 'bridge' president, and his tragic decision to continue running for reelection despite cognitive decline and plunging approval ratings."

Cohen lamented these omissions from the DNC report.

"There's no criticism of Biden for his insistence on seeking reelection, or the lack of any kind of open process to choose Biden's replacement," he told Common Dreams. "No analysis of Harris for her lack of principles—leading to her avoiding media platforms reaching millions of potential voters."

Criticism of the DNC report mounted throughout the day Thursday as more and more people read it.

“What’s important is what’s missing, what they’re not releasing,” former Harris communications director Ashley Etienne told Politico. "It feels like what the DNC is doing is cherry-picking the parts of it that it wants to actually release, that [are] less problematic for the party going forward."

Zenith Research founding partner Adam Carlson called the paper "an absolute mess in every sense of the word" and added that "anyone that is using its findings as justification to follow their ideological preferences for the future of the party should be laughed out of every room they go into."

Hafiz Rashid, a writer at The New Republic, said that "Martin seems to be right about the report’s flaws."

"But hiding it and not commissioning a new one—or at least not editing this one to a passable standard—is a scandal in itself," he added. "At a time when Republicans are polling at historic lows, Democrats need to capitalize and offer a better vision for the country. This isn’t it."

Here is the DNC document, as posted by CNN: