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'Rotting Fish Around Our Necks': Harris Operative Gives Inside View of Gaza's Impact on 2024 Loss
Democratic insider Rob Flaherty revealed what he told the DNC for its still-unreleased autopsy of the 2024 election.
May 14, 2026
With the Democratic National Committee rejecting demands to release its autopsy of the 2024 presidential election, one Democratic Party insider has gone public with his own take on what went wrong.
In a lengthy analysis published by The Bulwark on Thursday, Rob Flaherty, former deputy campaign manager for Kamala Harris' 2024 presidential campaign, revealed what he told DNC officials when they interviewed him for their post-election report.
Flaherty identified multiple problems with the Democrats' 2024 effort, one of them being President Joe Biden's support for Israel's assault on Gaza that has killed at least 72,000 Palestinians.
While Flaherty didn't say Gaza single-handedly cost Harris the election, he said it cast a dark shadow over the entire campaign.
"For many voters watching the horrific, painful footage out of Gaza, it became a moral question—one we didn’t have a good answer for," Flaherty said. "In ways that may not be reflected in a poll, it meaningfully reduced enthusiasm."
The Democratic insider then quoted another campaign official who told him that Biden's Gaza policy was "a giant, rotting fish around our necks" throughout the entire election.
Flaherty put the blame for this squarely on Biden, whom he said "misread the nation’s support for Israel as an endless, fixed object, and missed how much the ongoing visuals were seeping into the public consciousness."
He also predicted that Israeli brutality in the Gaza assault would permanently change the Democratic Party's stance toward Israel, even among traditionally pro-Israel Democrats.
"Senators who would never have considered it in years past are now signing on to the [Sen. Bernie] Sanders (I-Vt.) resolution to block offensive military aid to Israel," Flaherty noted. "Rahm Emanuel of all people is raising doubts about funding the Iron Dome. But we were seeing this emerge on the ground during the campaign. My hot take is that the eventual Democratic nominee in 2028 will support conditions on aid to Israel in one way or another."
While Gaza certainly cost Democrats in 2024, Flaherty argued an even bigger issue was the party's economic message, as voters simply did not believe that Harris would deliver meaningful change from the status quo overseen by Biden.
"In a country fervently pissed off at the status quo and with Biden’s numbers being what they were," he contended, "anyone from the Biden administration would have lost."
In contrast, Flaherty said, "Trump’s message was much clearer: 'The economy feels bad and Harris says it’s good,'" which he noted was "tough to argue with."
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Kamala Harris Reportedly Not Opposed to Releasing DNC's Secret 2024 Autopsy
"Saying so privately to some big donors is very different than publicly calling for transparency from the DNC, which is badly needed," said Norman Solomon of RootsAction, which has led calls for the release.
May 07, 2026
Even former Vice President Kamala Harris reportedly "has no problem with a public airing" of the Democratic National Committee's internal "autopsy" report on her 2024 loss to Republican President Donald Trump—which the DNC has continued to conceal, despite mounting demands for transparency.
Harris' position was reported Thursday by NBC News, which noted that "while she indicated to donors that she had no issue with releasing it, Harris has not discussed the postmortem with DNC Chairman Ken Martin and did not know about his decision to keep it under wraps until it happened."
NBC cited "a person who has heard the conversations," one of multiple sources journalists Jonathan Allen and Natasha Korecki spoke with for their broader report exploring "turmoil over the Democratic Party’s future" and Harris' consideration of a 2028 run.
For months, Martin has resisted pressure to release the autopsy—which, as Axios revealed in February, found that the Biden administration's support for Israel's genocidal assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip contributed to Harris' defeat.
Citing a "person close to Harris," NBC also reported Thursday that the former VP "is signaling privately that she has more to say about the Middle East now that she is freed from the Biden White House policy," and "she is likely to do so after the midterm elections," either "from the perspective of a party elder or from the perspective of a candidate seeking votes."
While touring the country for the book she wrote after her loss, Harris has publicly acknowledged that she is weighing another White House run. Though the 2028 election is two and a half years away, she has led early polling. However, the party's potential primary field is incredibly crowded, featuring dozens of current or former governors and members of Congress.
Potential contenders include governors from the Trump 2.0 era—such as Gavin Newsom of California, JB Pritzker of Illinois, Andy Beshear of Kentucky, and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan—as well as leading progressive voices in Congress, such as Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
Norman Solomon, national director of RootsAction, which has spearheaded calls for publishing the full postmortem, wrote in a recent opinion piece for Common Dreams that "Martin's concealment of the autopsy report puts a thumb on the scale for one candidate: Kamala Harris."
Solomon highlighted the DNC's reported conclusion about the role of the Gaza genocide in the election result, and suggested that "renewed attention to the Harris 2024 finances would also be unwelcome."
In response to Harris' reported remarks to donors, Solomon said Thursday that "more than four months have passed since Martin announced he was reneging on his promise to release the autopsy.
"But Harris still hasn't made any public statement that she believes it should be released," he added. "Saying so privately to some big donors is very different than publicly calling for transparency from the DNC, which is badly needed."
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'Why Wouldn't You Just Release It?': DNC Chair Confronted Over Buried 2024 Election Autopsy
As grassroots Democrats push national committee chair Ken Martin to release the suppressed report, a longtime party booster asked, “What’s in the report that you wouldn’t want to publicize?”
Apr 29, 2026
Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin was confronted on a podcast on Tuesday about his continued refusal to release an "autopsy" report dissecting the party's defeat in the 2024 election.
Grassroots groups have not let up on calls to release the report, which Martin said in December would not be released publicly, claiming it would "prove counterproductive" to the party's efforts going forward.
While the full report remains under lock and key, it was reported in February that the officials who crafted it believed that the Biden administration’s unwavering support of Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza cost then-Vice President Kamala Harris votes on Election Day and contributed to her loss to President Donald Trump.
When Martin appeared on Tuesday on the Pod Save America podcast, host Jon Favreau—a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama and a longtime booster of Democrats—refused to let the chairman off the hook for his excuses for not releasing what he has referred to as the “after-action review” of the election.
Favreau pointed to the fact that when Martin ran for the position after the party's gutting loss in 2024, he'd specifically criticized the party for refusing to release a similar report on Hillary Clinton's loss in 2016 and promised that "of course" a review of the party's 2024 loss "will be released" to the public.
"Why did you change your mind on that?" Favreau asked.
"What I said all along, even when I ran for this position, is that we were going to focus on the things that will help us win the upcoming election, right?" Martin said. "Making sure that we learn the right lessons that could help inform our victories. And that's what we've done."
Martin said it was more important to "keep our focus on those lessons" rather than "navel gazing and looking backwards, trying to relitigate 2024."
Favreau pointed to comments Martin made on Pod Save America in August, saying that the party was hard at work on the report “to give people who invested so much time, energy, and money a sense of what happened and why we lost.”
"What changed between August and December?" Favreau asked. "I understand there are lessons, but those are not the full report. Why not release the full report? What's in the report that you wouldn't want to publicize?"
Martin responded: "There's no smoking gun in the report, and I know that's what everyone's so eager to learn, the smoking gun... Guess what, Jon? There's no surprise in there."
Clearly unconvinced, Favreau interjected, "But if there's no smoking gun, why wouldn't you just release it then?"
Martin reiterated his previous point, that releasing the full report would be "looking backwards," and accused activist groups of being "obsessed" with the idea that there was a "smoking gun" buried within.
"Why did you spend the money going to 50 states, doing all these interviews, doing all this stuff, and doing this report in the first place if you weren't going to release the full results of it?" Favreau asked. "I don't get why just you and some of the senior [Democratic National Committee] people get to see it but not most of the DNC members who are state party chairs."
Favreau pointed to a call last week by more than a dozen DNC members to release the report, including Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) and North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton. He quoted Clayton, who asked, “Genuinely, what did you all find that we did not?”
Martin said the DNC had shared all of the "lessons" of the report with these members, but that they should stop focusing on the idea that it will contain "the one single reason that Kamala Harris lost the election or one single thing that we should have done differently that's going to help us win in the future."
The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project has reported that behind closed doors, DNC officials who worked on the autopsy report have described Biden's policy toward Gaza as a "net-negative" in 2024, according to data the committee collected. DNC officials independently corroborated these findings to Axios in February.
While the results of any election are multifaceted, a poll commissioned by the IMEU Policy Project and conducted by YouGov in January found that when Biden 2020 voters cast their votes in 2024, 29% of them said the "most important issue" in deciding their vote was "ending Israel's violence in Gaza," a higher percentage than any other issue, including the economy.
Among Biden 2020 voters in battleground states who decided not to vote for Harris, 38% of them in Arizona said ending Israel's violence in Gaza was their top issue, while 32% said the same in Michigan and Wisconsin, and 19% did in Pennsylvania—all crucial states Harris lost by thin margins.
Polls of Democratic voters find that they overwhelmingly view Israel's military campaign in Gaza, which has killed at least 75,000 Palestinians, destroyed most of the territory's essential infrastructure, and left most of the population displaced, as a "genocide" and want the US to halt military support for Israel.
Most also say they want Democratic candidates to end their associations with pro-Israel lobbying groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which poured more than $100 million into the 2024 elections, including to influence Democratic primaries. The DNC also recently killed a resolution directly condemning AIPAC's influence, even as it continues to spend big against progressive candidates in this year's congressional primaries.
Journalist Adam Johnson remarked that while defending his decision not to release the autopsy on Tuesday, Martin appeared to find about "seven different ways of saying 'pro-Israel groups and donors don’t want us to release it because it’ll make obvious what a liability Israel is to the party' without saying it."
He criticized Martin's excuse that "looking backward" at past failures would be a pointless exercise.
"By definition, lessons and history and accountability require looking backward," he said. "This is how humans assess future actions as entropy moves the arrow of time in only one direction."
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