Uncommitted delegates protest in a sit-in outside during the third day of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) at the United Center in Chicago, August 21, 2024.Joel Angel Juarez/The Washington Post/Getty
Among the more than 50,000 words in the DNC’s 192-page autopsy of why it lost the 2024 presidential election, here are a few that do not appear even once: Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Jewish, Muslim, foreign policy, protest, genocide.
The report—which was released today, and simultaneously disavowed by DNC Chair Ken Martin—is already generating its fair share of controversy for its typo-ridden, unfinished nature.
“For full transparency,” Ken Martin said in a note released alongside the report, “I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged. 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.”
It is understandable that an unedited and unendorsed draft would include numerical and grammatical errors, as well as notes saying things like “No sourcing provided for this claim” and “Methodology appears internally inconsistent.” Paul Rivera, the Democratic strategy consultant hired to write the autopsy, arguably can’t be blamed for his spelling errors—that’s what first drafts are for. But there are also more substantial omissions to consider: the report appears to neglect any of the actual policy reasons some Democrats might have chosen not to vote for Harris.
During the 2024 election cycle, tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military, often using US-supplied bombs. At every turn, when confronted by protesters asking her to do more to stop the slaughter, the party’s nominee, Kamala Harris, demurred. When Democrats outraged by the war asked that a single Palestinian speaker be allowed to speak onstage at the DNC—and endorse Harris in doing so—they were snubbed.
In February, Axios reported that some of the strategists conducting the autopsy report believed that Gaza cost Harris votes. That did not make it into the now-published version. As horrifying testimonies of violence emerged from Gaza, and sources from the United Nations to the Israeli human rights group B’tselem agreed this was a US-aided genocide, Harris did not promise to stop the flow of arms to Israel. In key swing states like Michigan—where thousands of voters cast “Uncommitted” ballots—that made a difference.
Hamid Bendaas, a spokesperson for the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, told Axios in February that his organization met with DNC officials. “The DNC shared with us that their own data also found that policy was, in their words, a ‘net-negative’ in the 2024 election,” Bendaas said at the time.
According to polling by the IMEU, 29 percent of former Biden voters who did not choose Harris—equivalent to roughly 122,380 votes across six swing states—were influenced by Gaza. There were of course other factors: broad economic dissatisfaction, as well as a late-game candidate switch, among them—but to omit mention of Gaza is avoidant at best and dishonest at worst.
The release of the autopsy raises as many questions as it answers. Why is there no discussion of Palestine or Israel? Was Rivera told not to include them, or did he leave them out of his own accord? Neither option is flattering to Democrats. In the former, they are still in denial—trying to paper this over won’t make it go away. In the latter, they still can’t pick the right person for the job at hand.