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election 2024
Author of DNC Autopsy Found Gaza Policy Hurt Harris in 2024—But Never Submitted Finding to Party Leadership
"This is all strange in ways that either suggest dishonesty or stupidity," said one critic.
Aug 07, 2026
When the Democratic National Committee at long last released its "autopsy" report on former Vice President Kamala Harris' loss in the 2024 election in May, one of the most puzzling aspects was the lack of any conclusions related to her and former President Joe Biden's support for Israel's genocide in Gaza.
Holly Otterbein of Axios reported on Thursday that the document's author, Paul Rivera, did indeed look into the issue of Gaza and found it had a role in Harris’ loss. But he did not submit the findings to the DNC for inclusion in the report. Axios did not include an explanation for that decision.
Rivera confirmed Axios’ reporting from back in February that the conclusions had been shared with the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project, a pro-Palestinian think tank, which told the DNC that Harris’ failure to break from Biden’s policy on Israel's US-backed assault on Gaza proved a liability with progressive voters, especially in Michigan.
This news led to speculation that DNC chair Ken Martin, who had resisted calls to release the autopsy in full, was doing so to avoid publicizing findings that portrayed Israel as an albatross around the party's neck.
Rivera alleged earlier this week that Martin and top DNC brass withheld other portions of his report from public view, including a chapter criticizing the party's overreliance on “self-enriching” consultants and party operatives out of touch with voters. Rivera claims to have handed Martin a three-ring binder containing the report, but Martin denies that this occurred.
Rivera, who was fired from his advisory role at the DNC following widespread public backlash to the release of the autopsy, has since published his own 564-page report on the 2024 election, which includes several pages examining the role of Gaza.
As of Election Day 2024, more than 43,000 Palestinians had been killed, including at least 13,300 identified children, according to figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health, and protests had swept the nation demanding that Biden cut off military aid to Israel.
While Rivera's report does not conclude that Gaza alone cost Harris the election, it found that it had a clear role in alienating voters who would have otherwise supported Harris.
It found that in Michigan, one of the key swing states that handed victory to Trump, the losses in heavily Arab and Middle Eastern communities like West Bloomfield, Sterling Heights, Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, and Hamtramck, were significant.
In these communities, Harris received 30,850 fewer votes in 2024 than Biden did in 2020, while Trump gained 14,874, a swing accounting for nearly 20% of the 234,291-vote shift that handed President Donald Trump the state.
Rivera noted that the Uncommitted Movement, which garnered more than 700,000 votes nationally in the 2024 primary, originated in Dearborn, where Harris lost nearly a third of the support Biden had received in 2020. In nearby Hamtramck, her support tanked by 39% from Biden's in 2020.
Notably, many of these voters did not flock to Trump, but to Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who received more than 12,000 votes across Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, and Hamtramck.
"The political analysis is simple," Rivera wrote. "The electoral results and voting shifts in Michigan and elsewhere demonstrate the impact the crisis had on the Harris campaign."
He concluded that the issue could not simply be boiled down to "messaging" but to concrete policy.
“For many voters whose family members were displaced, subject to violence, or killed, the inability of the administration to effectively intervene was unacceptable,” he wrote. “In 2024, absent a real end to military action and restoration of civilian control in Gaza, many voters in Michigan and elsewhere would not be satisfied.”
Asked by Common Dreams to elaborate on why he did not provide these findings to the DNC, Rivera did not immediately respond to a request sent through his website’s press contact.
Zeeshan Aleem, a political columnist at MSNOW was puzzled by the decision by Rivera not to provide the Gaza findings to the DNC.
"This is all strange in ways that either suggest dishonesty or stupidity," he said. "The author of the DNC report said he did conclude that Gaza hurt Kamala, but didn’t include that finding in the report he submitted to the DNC. Why?"
The opacity and conflicting narratives surrounding the autopsy's release continue to befuddle critics and onlookers.
Dave Weigel, a political reporter at Semafor, described the idea that Gaza cost Harris votes as "a water-is-wet finding guarded like the Ark of the Covenant."
"Martin could have just admitted that, yes, this issue that got Harris protested everywhere and helped Trump win Michigan hurt the campaign," he said. "Instead, it became a secret that Holly pried loose and generated an extra year of negative stories."
The exclusion of Gaza from the official report released in May became ammunition for some commentators seeking to downplay the idea that Democrats' support for Israel is an electoral liability or to accuse the IMEU Policy Project of spinning a false narrative.
Responding to the release of Rivera's report, media critic Adam Johnson mocked those who framed it as a "conspiracy theory."
"What’s so important to understand is that anyone denying Gaza harmed Harris’ chances is a rank propagandist. Nobody believes this in good faith," he said. "Obviously it did. We can debate the degree of harm it had, but clearly it was significant and had many downstream deflating effects."
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Unpublished DNC Autopsy Chapter Criticized 'Self-Enriching' Party Operatives
"There are too many people who have become generationally wealthy off politics and drive too much of the decision-making within the ecosystem."
Aug 03, 2026
The New York Times on Monday published what it described as a "missing chapter" of the Democratic National Committee's widely criticized "autopsy" of the 2024 presidential election.
The chapter, titled "What Happened in 2024" and provided to the Times by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, offers criticisms of party consultants who are "self-enriching" and out of touch with the concerns of ordinary voters.
Specifically, the chapter questions whether Democratic politicians and operatives have a grasp on the economic realities facing most Americans, while calling for "a fundamental re-evaluation" of whether Democrats "really understand the wants and needs of voters."
"An emerging critique of Democratic decision-making," the chapter states, "is there are too many people who have become generationally wealthy off politics and drive too much of the decision-making within the ecosystem. This is deeply frustrating to many... who want to try a different set of politics but keep banging their heads up against a system proven to be inflexible and self-enriching."
The chapter adds that "many of the people who worked at the highest levels of the party" are "financially secure," and thus potentially insulated "from the realities many Americans were encountering in their lives."
In an interview with the Times, Rivera claimed that he personally handed the missing chapter to DNC Chair Ken Martin in a three-ring binder earlier this year.
Rivera said he had no specific insight into why the chapter was not included with the report that the DNC released in May.
"Whether that was a conscious decision on their part to bury the section for the purposes of hiding a paragraph, I don’t know," the Democratic strategist told the Times. "That's a them question. What I can tell you is they had it, and they made a decision not to release it."
Martin, however, flatly denied that Rivera had ever personally handed him the chapter.
“This alleged report section was not in any binder I reviewed," said Martin in a written statement given to the Times. "If we had this in May, we would have released it with the rest of the report."
Martin also called it ridiculous to suggest that he would have suppressed a section of the final DNC report to avoid offending the party's consultant class.
"If I or the DNC had report materials that went after self-enriching consultants, we absolutely would have included them," Martin insisted, noting his own past promises "to hold the consultant-industrial complex accountable and ensure the party only pays for work that actually helps us win."
The Times report noted that the DNC's autopsy featured a section titled "What Happened" that was listed as "pending" on the grounds that it "was not provided by author."
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Why Biden Debate Disaster Still Matters for the Future
Looking ahead, a great need will be to overcome the ongoing culture of conformity that so badly damaged the Democratic Party in 2024 and helped Trump get back into the White House.
Jun 25, 2026
The saying “that’s history” is usually meant to be dismissive, but in politics the past casts a long shadow over the future. Now, two years after President Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump, the patterns that dominate the Democratic Party are damaging its prospects for the elections to come.
When Biden left CNN’s debate studio after an often-incoherent performance on the night of June 27, 2024, his re-election goose was cooked. With voting for president set to begin within three months, time was of the essence to replace Biden as the party’s presidential candidate. But excessive loyalty and outright denial kicked in immediately among top Democrats.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom was on MSNBC telling viewers that they didn’t see and hear what they’d just seen and heard. “I was very very proud that he was able to articulate the work that he has done,” Newsom said. He voiced transactional gratitude: “We have the opportunity to universally have the back of this president, who’s had our back. You don’t turn your back, you go home with the one that brought you to the dance.”
Such tap dancing was common among party operatives who stayed publicly stoic. “Joe Biden has always had our back,” Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison said, “and we’re gonna have his.” Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina intoned, “Let’s just stay the course.”
Biden loyalist Heather Cox Richardson tried to reassure her several million readers via Substack, writing: “Biden needed to demonstrate that his mental capacity is strong in order to push back on the Republicans’ insistence that he is incapable of being president. That, he did, thoroughly. Biden began with a weak start but hit his stride as the evening wore on. Indeed, he covered his bases too thoroughly, listing the many accomplishments of his administration in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand.”
Not all of the usual Biden boosters were disingenuous after the debate. Quite a few high-profile commentators were quick to say that Biden should drop out of the race. Among them, within hours, was the New York Times editorial board.
But five days passed before the first Democrat in Congress called for Biden to step aside. Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas was alone among his colleagues when he said that Biden should “make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times belatedly reported: “In the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations.”
Thirteen days passed after the debate before a single Democratic senator urged Biden to step aside. At that point, only 4 percent of congressional Democrats had publicly said that Biden should exit the ticket.
By July 19, a full three weeks after the debate, only 10 percent of the Democrats in Congress had called for Biden to withdraw. Three days later, at last, Biden announced that he would not run.
The Democrats who did openly urge Biden to leave the race were a mix across the party’s ideological spectrum. Two renowned progressives were among the most outspoken advocates of the president soldiering on: Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Sanders encouraged the illusion that Biden had the capacity to be an effective candidate. Reporting that Sanders “does not want Biden to step aside,” the Associated Press quoted the senator as saying: “A presidential election is not a Grammy Award contest for the best singer or entertainer. It’s about who has the best policies that impact our lives.”
While that statement was true as a generality, it notably failed to meet the moment.
Sanders, who enjoyed a warm friendship with Biden, had his ear at that pivotal time. Ten days after the debate, Sanders said on the CBS program Face the Nation that Biden “has spoken to me in recent days.”
Eleven days after the debate, Ocasio-Cortez told reporters: “I have spoken to the president over the weekend. I have spoken with him extensively. He made clear then and he has made clear since that he is in this race. The matter is closed.”
More than a week after the debate, a prominent progressive writer oddly blamed “the pundit class” for “suggesting Biden is unfit” and wanting him “to get lost.” Such undue allegiance to Biden was similar to what had enabled and bolstered his disastrous choice to run for re-election in the first place.
Consciously or not, too many self-described liberals and progressives took their cues from Democratic leaders who were routinely deceptive on behalf of the president. In a typical episode of dissembling, the party’s Senate leader Chuck Schumer said from a podium on Capitol Hill in mid-February 2024: “I talk to President Biden regularly, sometimes several times in a week, or usually several times in a week. His mental acuity is great, it’s fine, it’s as good as it’s been over the years…. He’s fine. All this right-wing propaganda that his mental acuity has declined is wrong.”
We should remember that the Biden who insisted on running for re-election – despite the repeatedly polled wishes of most registered Democrats – was the same Biden who insisted on shipping billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Israel while it proceeded with genocide in Gaza, despite the repeatedly polled wishes of most registered Democrats.
Looking ahead, a great need will be to overcome the ongoing culture of conformity that so badly damaged the Democratic Party in 2024 and helped Trump get back into the White House.
The necessary leadership will not come from the governing body of the party, the Democratic National Committee; its 450 members have remained overwhelmingly deferential to the hidebound dictates of the DNC chair. Nor will the needed leadership come from Democrats in Congress, who couldn’t bring themselves to call for Biden to stop running for re-election during the crucial first weeks after his debate disaster.
The vital leadership must come from grassroots activists.
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Yes, Trump Did Promise No New Wars
His failing war in Iran and his campaign pledge not to start any wars should be held against Republicans in the House and Senate. They’re partly responsible.
Jun 13, 2026
Sometimes I provide you with information that I hope you’ll find helpful in making arguments with others. I don’t expect that what I share with you will change the minds of committed Trumpers, but the facts and the evidence may have some sway with Republicans and independents who are wavering about whom to support in the midterms.
One of the main reasons President Donald Trump was elected was his pledge to keep the United States out of wars, especially the kind of “endless” wars America has fought in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Afghanistan.
Obviously, he broke that pledge. We’re now well into the fourth month of a war he said would be four or five weeks at most.
In addition, the war he initiated in Iran was a war of choice—Iran did not attack the United States, and most specialists in foreign policy say Iran was not close to devising a nuclear weapon at that time. (It’s likely to be closer now, or at least more committed to making one.)
In reality, of course, Trump has been one of the most bellicose presidents in modern American history.
Yet in a lengthy interview with Kristen Welker, the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” which aired Sunday, Trump was once again trying to rewrite his own history, He claimed:
I didn’t guarantee no war. So when you say I promised, I didn’t promise anything. I don’t like these endless wars. This is not an endless war. We’ve been doing this for three months.
In fact, Trump repeatedly and unequivocally promised during the 2024 election campaign that the US would not have any wars during his second presidency.
Herewith, some examples.
In a June 2024 social media post, Trump described the election as “a choice between STRENGTH or WEAKNESS, COMPETENCE or INCOMPETENCE, peace and prosperity or war and no war.”
In one of the highest-profile speeches of his campaign—his July 2024 address to the Republican National Convention—he said: “With our victory in November, the years of war, weakness, and chaos will be over. I don’t have wars.”
He made the promise again and even more directly during an August 2024 rally in the swing state of Pennsylvania, saying, “Under Trump, we will have no more wars, no more disruptions, and we will have prosperity and peace for all.”
Trump reprised the same pledge in an August 2024 interview with Adin Ross, an online personality. After saying there were no wars during his first administration, he promised, “And we won’t have wars again.”
At another rally that month in the hotly contested state of North Carolina, Trump approvingly cited Viktor Orbán, then the prime minister of Hungary, as supposedly having said, “Make sure that Trump gets reelected president, and you’re not going to have any more wars.” Trump reiterated moments later: “No more wars. No more disruptions. We will have prosperity, and we will have peace.”
Trump told versions of the Orbán story at numerous other events. For example, in the swing state of Wisconsin in October 2024, he said, “Viktor Orbán said: ‘If Trump comes back, you won’t have any wars. You won’t have any wars.’ And he’s about as tough as they get, and he said it loud and clear and he said why. But you won’t have any wars.”
Finally, in his victory address in November 2024, Trump made a clear promise that he would not start a war—even when he no longer had to persuade voters to elect him. He said in that high-profile speech: “Four years, we had no wars, except we defeated ISIS… They said, ‘He will start a war.’ I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars.”
In reality, of course, Trump has been one of the most bellicose presidents in modern American history.
His failing war in Iran and his campaign pledge not to start any wars should be held against Republicans in the House and Senate. They’re partly responsible. They have repeatedly refused to stop his wars. They have repeatedly enabled his aggression.
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Electile Dysfunction—Why Can’t the Dems Get Their Polls Up?
The Democratic Party cannot afford to attend to the material needs of its traditional popular base because it is terrified of offending its donor class.
May 27, 2026
“The Republicans go for the jugular; the Democrats go for the capillaries,”—Kevin Phillips
With the recent release of the long-withheld, but little anticipated Democratic National Committee “autopsy” of the 2024 presidential electoral loss, we’re back to the perennial questions of which issues should receive priority; how should messaging and narrative around those issues be crafted; which wing(s) of the party should be amputated before their rot infects the entire organism, suburban soccer moms or inner city youth; and on and on. All good questions, but ultimately, in present circumstances, unanswerable except in the most platitudinous, hand-waving ways. The most fundamental dilemma resides in the Faustian bargain the party entered beginning in the 1970s, and the result of that bargain is neatly captured in Sheldon Wolin’s 2010 coinage “the inauthentic opposition”:
While the transformed Republican Party reveals what a “party of government” might look like under inverted totalitarianism, the Democrats reveal the fate of opposition politics under inverted totalitarianism. The Democrats’ politics might be described as inauthentic opposition in the era of Superpower [i.e., the US after the fall of the Soviet Union]. Having fended off its reformist elements and disclaimed the label of liberal, it is trapped by new rules of the game which dictate that a party exists to win elections rather than to promote a vision of the good society… Accordingly, the party competes for an apolitical segment of the electorate, “the undecided,” and puzzles how best to woo religious zealots. Should Democrats somehow be elected, corporate sponsors make it politically impossible for the new officeholders to alter significantly the direction of society. [This point is exquisitely exemplified by the first couple of years of the Obama administration, when they held the federal trifecta and still managed to privilege the kleptocratic banksters of the housing crisis and the war criminal gangsters of the W. Bush regime.] The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that, for the poor, minorities, the working class, anticorporatists, pro-environmentalists, and anti-imperialists, there is no opposition party working actively on their behalf.
The origins of this current malaise date back to the mid 1970s, and followed the actions taken by business class elites responding to the exhortations contained in the now-famous Powell Memorandum. This was a secret 1971 memo from then-corporate lawyer Lewis Powell to the Secretary of the US Chamber of Commerce. The memo wasn’t revealed to the public until well after Powell had been appointed to the Supreme Court, where he continued to wage his ideological battle in defense of capitalism and corporate power (including, of course, free speech rights articulated in cash). In the memo Powell argued that:
The US Chamber of Commerce should lead an assault upon the major institutions, universities, schools, the media, publishing, the courts, in order to change how individuals think about the corporation, the law, culture, and the individual.
US businesses, Powell suggested, did not lack the resources for such an effort, particularly if they were pooled. That is, if people started to think together as a class rather than as individual firms and corporations. The US Chamber of Commerce took up this challenge in a very dramatic way. It expanded its base from around 60,000 firms in 1972 to about a quarter of a million just a decade later. Other elite organizational forms also began to coalesce around this core following the advice of the memo. These included think tanks (e.g., the Heritage Foundation, established 1973 by Adolph Coors), as well as corporate money pumps to operationalize the memo’s chief objectives.
One of the most prominent of these organizations was the Business Roundtable, founded in 1972, and comprising CEOs whose corporations at the time accounted for about half of the US gross national product. During this period, through political action committees, the Roundtable was spending about $900 million annually on political matters, a very significant sum at the time. These newly emerging entities provided a mechanism for corporations to contribute substantial funds to political campaigns and candidates, authorized in large measure through a number of Supreme Court rulings, several written by Powell himself.
These PACs, which were just beginning to have a political presence (there were 89 PACs in 1974, and around 1,500 by 1982) gave to both parties largely in equal measure in the 70s, but began leaning heavily toward the Republicans, who had little difficulty aligning their platforms with capital corporate interests. This was also the moment that the traditional political base of the Republican Party began to merge with the Christian Right and with white working classes, who were persuaded that they had been left behind by affirmative action and other “illegitimate” policies (now, of course, cloaked as DEI and “wokeness”).
The problem for anyone struggling to get by, as this alliance portrayed it, was not capitalism and the neoliberalization of the society and economy. The real problem was liberals, who had used excessive state power to provide for special groups. The prevalent narrative, more pertinent now than ever, was the idea of unworthy “others” cutting in line ahead of worthy citizens: “You've worked hard. You've played by the rules. You're not getting ahead. Well, it's not that the system is stacked against you. It's that these people, who are undeserving, are getting more advantages than you get.” The Republican political base (and now most particularly MAGAnites) could be energized through positive mobilizations of things like religion and cultural nationalism, but it could also be turned out through very negative, though coded, though I would say increasingly less coded if not blatant, racism (e.g., President Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy”), xenophobia, homophobia, and anti-feminism.
Democrats, seemingly, were more conflicted, at least at that time, between support for their base and the need to pursue big money. That ambivalence, at least within the ranks of the Democratic Party establishment in its current manifestation, has now all but disappeared and constitutes the irreconcilable contradiction that plagues the party now. To return for a moment to Wolin:
By ignoring dissent and by assuming that the dissenters have no alternative, the party serves an important, if ironical, stabilizing function and in effect marginalizes any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.
According to critical geographer David Harvey, the structure that emerged out of this political realignment was as simple as it was predictable and durable. The Republican Party could, and still can, marshal massive financial resources and mobilize its popular base to vote against its own material interests on cultural or religious grounds, while simultaneously advancing the capital accumulation policies (ongoing war and arms sales, lowered taxation, massive deregulation, privatization of public goods and services) of their elite masters.
The Democratic Party, conversely, could not, and still cannot, afford to attend to the material needs (e.g., a national healthcare system, affordable housing, environmental and consumer protection, financial and anti-trust regulation, a peace dividend) of its traditional popular base because it was and is terrified of offending its donor class. Given the asymmetry, the political hegemony of the Republican Party became more sure over this period, and has relegated the Democrats, even when in power, to their current position of inauthenticity. If and until this most fundamental contradiction can be resolved, the policies and messaging will remain flaccid, impotent, and unsatisfying. Under these circumstances we can aptly paraphrase Phillips, to wit: So now the Democrats also go for the jugular. Unfortunately, it’s too often their own.
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The 'Autopsy' Written by a Corpse
Stay as far away as you can from this DNC report. Trust me.
May 24, 2026
After an extended pressure campaign, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin finally agreed to release the DNC’s “autopsy report” on the 2024 election. It’s the first document I’ve ever read that would have been better if it had been written by AI. Martin himself said the report “does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards.” That’s for damn sure. As we’ll see, however, that doesn’t let Martin off the hook.
I downloaded the document before reviewing my news feed, where I quickly learned that many like-minded people began exactly as I did: by searching for the word “Gaza.” Result? “Not found.” I then tried “Palestine.” Result? “Not found.” How about “Israel”? “Not found.”
These omissions are particularly striking since one activist group was told by report author Paul Rivera that DNC data showed that the administration’s support for the Gaza genocide was, “in their words, a ‘net-negative’ in the 2024 election.” Axios, which reported on that exchange, added that it “independently verified that Democratic officials conducting the autopsy believed the issue harmed the party’s standing with some voters.”
RootsAction was one of the groups pressing for the autopsy’s release, and co-founder Jeff Cohen called the document “almost worthless.” Cohen condemned the failure to mention “the Biden/Harris administration’s Israel policy that abetted the Gaza massacre,” Biden’s initial decision to run for re-election, and what he called Kamala Harris’ “lack of principles.”
Other words that can’t be found in the autopsy include “war,” “military,” “defense” (in the military sense), “peace,” “Medicare,” and “Social Security.” The report fails to address either the US’ runaway military spending or the ongoing attempts to undermine the country’s social contract.
The report’s only conceivable value will be for future anthropologists, who will find it provides considerable insight into the culture and folkways of the professional Democratic class. Its introduction reads like the kind of word salad a teenager might come up with when asked to write a 1200-word essay on a topic they forgot to study. There’s a lot of meandering, some restatements of the assignment, and a hastily looked-up quotation. Don’t read it unless you’re prepared to wade through prose like this:
... the voters decide which choice is most resonant. One party declares itself the winner, and the other party declares that the fight is far from finished.
Effective parties, understanding history rarely repeats itself, it does often rhyme, make it a point to study electoral outcomes after each cycle to identify potential improvements to every aspect of their campaigns. John Adams argued ‘"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right…and a desire to know."
Believe me, it doesn’t get any better from there.
The document is 192 pages long, but many of those pages are blank. The page called “Leadership Message”: blank. (Any comment about that would be like shooting fish in a barrel.) “Executive Summary”: blank. And so on.
The section entitled “Electoral Landscape” includes sentences like this: “We must organize everywhere to Win Anywhere”—which doesn’t make any sense. You don’t have to organize everywhere to win anywhere. And Democrats already win somewhere! Those “somewheres” are called “Blue States.” The problem is they have to win more “somewheres,” and you can’t win somewhere if you’re “everywhere”! You have to be there to win there!
The next sentence begins, “Winning Anywhere means providing for a renewed focus on the voters of Middle America and the South ...” Wait. One sentence ago we were everywhere. Now we’re in Middle America and the South, which happen to be two readily-identifiable somewheres.
That’s what consultant-speak will do to the human mind.
The document, perhaps unsurprisingly, praises the centrist Democratic orientation of the late 1980s and 1990s. But the same pro-corporate orientation contributed heavily to the party’s 2024 losses. That’s what you get what you call on a party to emulate the centrists’ “future-focused directive”—by adopting a 40-year-old strategy.
The report also states that “the DNC and ASDC (Association of State Democratic Parties) have conducted more than 1200 interviews to assess the health of our 57 state parties—in every state, district, or territory.” Where are those interviews?
Martin reportedly told DNC members that Rivera no longer “is with or advises the DNC in any capacity.” But the buck stops with the boss, not the consultant.
I get it; Martin has a tough job. But he campaigned for his position by promising an autopsy. When Rivera’s proved to be unusable, Martin was obliged to have it re-done. By failing to do so, he reneged on his campaign promise. In the meantime, a little transparency would have gone a long way toward avoiding the mess he now faces.
Don’t read the DNC document unless you’re a masochist or a journalist (provided there’s a difference between the two). Read this one instead. Stay far away from the DNC report. Trust me, you’ll “win somewhere” by being anywhere else.Keep ReadingShow Less
'Not Up to the Task': Calls Mount for Ken Martin to Resign Over 2024 DNC Autopsy Debacle
"The DNC should select a new leader who demonstrates competence, creativity, moral clarity, and a relentless commitment to actually changing the broken Democratic Party brand.”
May 22, 2026
The disastrous release of the Democratic National Committee's 2024 election "autopsy" report on Thursday has brought about a reckoning for the committee's chair, Ken Martin, who is facing calls to resign from legislators and other influential figures in the party.
The 192-page report, written by strategist Paul Rivera in the wake of former Vice President Kamala Harris' loss to President Donald Trump, was panned as amateurish and incomplete, even more than 18 months after the election. Rivera was reportedly fired on Friday.
Aside from being filled with glaring spelling and factual errors and containing several unfinished sections and self-contradicting annotations, it neglected key issues widely believed to have contributed to the Democratic nominee's defeat: Most acutely, her continued backing of Israel as it perpetrated a genocide in Gaza, her inability to address working- and middle-class voters' concerns about affordability, and the shambolic attempt by former President Joe Biden to run for a second term despite his old age and his earlier indications he would serve for only four years.
Many Democrats now see it as a damning indictment of Martin, who was elected as DNC chair last year in part on promises to conduct a thorough and transparent review of the party's defeat. Not helping was his sudden pivot in late 2025 to attempt to bury the report he once championed, only releasing it this week after it leaked to CNN despite mounting pressure from party members.
On Friday morning, Axios quoted an ideological mix of Democratic legislators describing the report's release as the final straw for Martin.
"He should resign," Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) told Axios, citing "his lack of leadership" and saying it is "utterly nuts it took us this long to release the autopsy."
In a radio interview Thursday, Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said in response to a caller who argued Martin should be replaced: "I agree... Having what we have right now is not doing it."
Rep. Marc Veasey (D-Texas) told Semafor that "there doesn't seem to be a plan to turn things around and the clock is ticking... I believe it's time for him to move on."
Despite a push by Martin's allies to arm state party chairs with talking points expressing that they are "fully confident in his leadership," NOTUS reported that inside private DNC group chats and one-on-one conversations, dissension is brewing, and there is even talk of forcing a vote of no confidence to oust the chairman.
"People feel gaslit" by Martin's flip-flopping, one unnamed DNC member told the outlet. "You kept telling people it was coming, then when you didn’t release it, you didn’t even tell everyone the real reason why.”
“While I don’t believe that there are enough votes to pass a vote of no confidence yet, I think there’s more of a permission structure now to have a more open conversation about it,” said another member who NOTUS described as an ally of Martin's. “If they think this is going to make things go away, no, this is only going to ramp up now.”
That's the hope of many in the party's grassroots, who said the entire saga demonstrated Martin's unfitness for a role with major responsibilities as Democrats head into existentially important elections in 2026 and 2028.
Dan Pfeiffer—a former Obama administration staffer whose Pod Save America podcast cohosts held Martin's feet to the fire as he fought to keep the autopsy hidden—called the release "a disaster of his own making."
"He didn’t pick a qualified person to run the autopsy. The fact that he was apparently shocked by the work product shows there was no oversight of the process," Pfeiffer said on social media. "Once he saw that the report was poorly done, he just decided to start lying to everyone about why it wasn't being released."
"In '28, the DNC will set the primary calendar, decide how delegates are awarded, sponsor the debates, and put on the convention," he said. "If no one trusts the DNC, it will be harder to unite the party around the eventual nominee."
Amanda Litman, the president of Run For Something, a group that recruits progressive candidates for office, said in a video posted to social media Thursday that putting together a report composed of "pure gibberish," without access to any of the underlying interviews or materials that buoyed its conclusions, called into question the DNC's ability to be "a fair, competent... conductor of the Democratic presidential primary."
"Ken Martin is not up to the task of being DNC chair—the most important part of which is preparing to run the presidential primary process with trust and competency—and should resign," she added on Friday.
David Hogg, who served as the DNC vice chair in 2025 before being pushed out by Martin over his efforts to support primary challengers against some entrenched party elders, said the autopsy saga was a "demoralizing joke" for the party.
In a release from his political action committee, Leaders We Deserve, Hogg said, "Martin should resign, and the DNC should select a new leader who demonstrates competence, creativity, moral clarity, and a relentless commitment to actually changing the broken Democratic Party brand."
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Establishment Democrats Still Don't Get Why They Lost in 2024
No amount of messaging acumen could have plastered over the gaping hole in Harris’ campaign: a total dearth of popular policies.
May 20, 2026
As the controversy over the Democratic National Committee’s buried autopsy report continues to rage, more Democrats from the party’s establishment wing are offering their two cents. The latest contribution is a column in The Bulwark, written by Rob Flaherty, the former deputy manager of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.
Flaherty’s piece “Here’s What I Told the DNC Autopsy” discusses his conversations with DNC operatives tasked with writing the still-unreleased report. He then continues into his own analysis of what went wrong with Harris’ 2024 campaign for president.
To his credit, Flaherty is willing to do what very few mainstream Democrats have done since Harris' 2024 loss: take a long, and public, look at the campaign’s missteps. But, as with so many other analyses from the establishment wing of the party, he believes that tweaks to the campaign’s messaging strategy and media apparatus could have won the race.
Progressives operating inside the party, meanwhile, have long argued that no amount of messaging acumen could have plastered over the gaping hole in Harris’ campaign: a total dearth of popular policies. (At RootsAction, where I’m the political director, we’ve written our own post-2024 autopsy that focuses exactly on this issue, and where Harris’ campaign fell out of step with popular sentiment.)
If Democrats want to present themselves as a convincing alternative to the post-MAGA Republican Party, they’re going to have to articulate what their political differences are.
Flaherty, by his account, was principally responsible for the digital dimensions of the campaign (social media, content creators, etc.) and so his analysis proceeds through that lens. He devotes a lot of time to worrying over message alignment—alignment between earned and paid media, between the campaign and independent expenditures, and so on. What's missing in that analysis, though, is what that message was.
At the tail end of Joe Biden’s presidency, the nation was embroiled in a number of crises. The recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic had been uneven, with many at the bottom of the labor ladder still struggling to find steady work and keep up with runaway inflation. Americans at all income levels, in fact, were reeling from spiking costs in basic consumer goods. And, while Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Gaza unfolded in full view of anyone with a social media account, Biden and his administration continued their unyielding support for Israel. On top of it all, the unpopular Biden broke his promise to be a “bridge” president, ignored the polls showing that most Democrats wanted a different candidate, and unwisely opted to run for a second term—dropping out only after a disastrous debate and massive pressure from inside the party.
His vice president was then thrust into the unenviable position of having just 107 days (as she often reminds us) to mount a presidential campaign that could defeat Donald Trump.This entailed massive logistical challenges, yes—but it also meant reckoning with Biden’s tenure as president. Would Harris continue to argue, as the Biden administration had, that Bidenomics had been a boon for the working class? Would she continue to support Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he laid waste to the Gaza Strip? These questions demanded answers. Harris and her campaign though, seemed loath to provide them.
Flaherty appears to understand that this was a major problem for Harris. He bemoans the campaign's vacillation on its core message, contrasting that with Trump's comms discipline: "Trump's message was much clearer: The economy feels bad and Harris says it's good. Those vibes were tough to argue with."
He is heavily focused on vibes: "The moment the [BidenHQ] account switched from Biden to Harris, the campaign channeled a vibe shift that showed up in polls. We needed to consolidate the base, make the campaign cooler, and have a campaign voice that could be more flexible and nimble than the candidate’s own."
Putting aside how a “vibe shift” appears in polls, it’s clear from the outset that Flaherty’s level of analysis is all branding, no substance. He gets into the weeds of individual social media accounts and their relative impacts with critical constituencies. Was the KamalaHQ online presence too "girls and gays" coded? Did the account turn off men? For someone who devotes a footnote to scolding the “DC crowd” for believing Biden to be broadly unpopular, Flaherty sure seems to have drunk the Beltway insider Kool-Aid when it comes to assessing the impact of an individual social media account on an election in which more than 152 million Americans cast a vote.
Vibes should not be the basis for a campaign. Yes, a sour mood in the electorate requires a particular approach, but it doesn't mean that Democrats can entirely punt on the difficult work of crafting a resonant political message. Coordination and message discipline between social media influencers, independent expenditures, surrogates, and official campaign accounts is meaningless if those voices aren’t making a compelling argument. In 2024, Democrats’ biggest political liability was that voters had no idea what four more years of a Democratic administration would entail. It was like Harris was running back Biden’s infamous campaign promise to donors in 2019: that “nothing would fundamentally change.” Such an approach couldn’t work in 2024, given all the public discontent and anxiety.
When Flaherty steps back from the arcana of digital strategy, he seems to understand this problem quite well. He points out that Democrats, in focusing on picking up comparatively well-off, suburban voters, have shed too many votes elsewhere. "The resulting [Democratic] coalition, which has involved a shrinking share of working-class voters of color, especially men, just isn't big enough to beat a motivated MAGA base." He even goes on to write that Democrats should embrace "economic populism with teeth."
Progressives in the Democratic Party would certainly agree with the last point. Poll after poll confirms that this is popular policy: Most voters support taxing the rich and a more equitable distribution of wealth. Flaherty understands enough to give lip service to this idea, but is either unwilling or unable to continue this line of thinking to its logical conclusion: Democrats should embrace this reality, codify it in their political platform, and let it ring out loudly in all their campaign messaging. Like many in the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, Flaherty shows a remarkable ability to diagnose the party’s political ailments without being able to clamor for a cure.
This trend continues. Flaherty touches briefly on the discord between Harris and pro-ceasefire activists, but he is eager to wave away the negative impact it may have had on her campaign. He writes that the Biden's administration's support for Israel's war in Gaza hurt the campaign "but not in the ways people think." He then goes on to quote another campaign worker who characterizes Biden's support for Israel (and Harris' inability to create daylight between herself and Biden) as a "giant, rotting fish around [the campaign's] neck."
This is actually exactly how progressives think that Gaza hurt the campaign. Those of us who were pro-ceasefire, and who clamored for Harris to reject the policy of unquestioning support that the Biden administration had pushed, worried that the moral stain of US complicity in Gaza would be impossible to wash out, even as the Democrats switched standard-bearers midstream. We worried that critical constituencies—young people, Arab and Muslim Americans—who had been bombarded on social media with an unending stream of carnage from Gaza would be unable to hold their noses in the ballot box when it came time to vote for the Democratic ticket, even against Trump. Harris’ campaign faltered because 6.8 million Americans who supported Biden in 2020 did not support her. With such a stark drop off in support, it makes sense to focus on an issue where the Democratic Party policy was firmly out of step with popular sentiment among the Democrats’ base. This disconnect can’t simply be brushed aside.
Flaherty admits that, by the time the Harris campaign got going, they were “playing around the edges.” That is, campaign staff were permitted only to make marginal tweaks to a campaign that was already underway; the time for grand strategy had passed. Postmortems from insiders about the 2024 election sometimes read like the accounts of survivors struck by some environmental catastrophe. But this was a tragedy of the Democrats’ own making; Flaherty himself was a deputy manager of Biden’s aborted 2024 campaign.
Donald Trump’s political career is nearing its end, but the effects of Trumpism will be felt for decades to come. If Democrats want to present themselves as a convincing alternative to the post-MAGA Republican Party, they’re going to have to articulate what their political differences are. Progressive policy is increasingly popular among Democrats and the broader American electorate: universal healthcare, debt-free public college, AI regulation, and an end to endless war all rank as attractive policy planks with majority support. Any candidate running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028 should have this policy at the core of their platform.
Otherwise, there is no amount of consulting, brand management, influencer outreach, or narrative shaping that can save a campaign with no message at its core. If Democrats can’t internalize the real lessons of Harris’ campaign, they may be doomed to repeat its failures.
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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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