The US Democratic Party has released a long-awaited report examining why former Vice President Kamala Harris did not beat Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
But the so-called autopsy documents released Thursday were incomplete and inconclusive, full of factual errors and annotations that cast doubt on the claims.
Recommended stories
list of 3 itemsend of list
Policy recommendations were also neglected, with several sections missing.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has been under increasing pressure from activists for months to release the report.
DNC Chairman Ken Martin acknowledged the report’s flaws Thursday, but said continuing to withhold its release would cause more disruption than releasing it as is.
“I am not proud of this product. This product did not meet my standards, and it will not meet yours. I do not support the content of this report or anything that leaked from it. I could not in good faith put the DNC stamp of approval on this product,” Martin said in a statement.
“But transparency is paramount, so today I am publishing the report exactly as I received it, unedited or summarized, with annotations about the claims I could not verify.”
Al Jazeera considers key takeaways from the report.
Zero mention of Gaza
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza was one of the most contentious issues for Democrats and Harris heading into the 2024 vote.
Then-President Joe Biden gave Israel about $18 billion to fund a brutal attack that reduced the Palestinian territories to rubble, killed tens of thousands of people and caused famine in the enclaves.
The Biden-Harris administration also vetoed several UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Her uncompromising pro-Israel policies caused some in the Democratic base to turn against Harris.
The vice president at the time continued to emphasize diplomatic efforts to end the war, but vowed to continue arming Israel. Her campaign also refused to allocate speaking slots to Palestinian American delegates at the Democratic National Convention in August 2024.
Some polls suggest that Gaza policy was one of the main reasons Harris lost the election.
Gaza was the top issue for people who voted for Biden in 2020 but did not support Harris four years later, according to a 2025 IMEU Policy Project study.
However, on page 192 of the autopsy report, there is no mention of Gaza or Israel.
Rob Flaherty, Harris’ deputy campaign manager, recently highlighted the impact of Gaza policy on the election.
“For many voters watching the horrifying and harrowing footage from Gaza, it became a moral question, and we didn’t have a good answer,” Flaherty wrote in Substack’s Bulwark publication.
“It may not show up in the polls, but this election has significantly reduced enthusiasm. As one campaign official told me, ‘We went through the campaign with a giant rotten fish around our necks.'”
Missing sections, mistakes, and notes
The DNC released the report in its raw form, and it wasn’t pretty.
Some sections were completely missing, such as the summary and conclusion. Instead, I saw the word “Pending” and a note that said “This section is not provided by the author.”
The document also contains a number of questionably false claims, with annotations such as “Claims are inconsistent with public reporting,” “Data appears to be inaccurate and inconsistent with public reporting,” and “Analysis not supported by publicly available data.”
This document had several basic facts wrong. For example, the Democratic Party is expected to win two wins in the 2024 gubernatorial election. They actually won three.
He also said the Midwestern states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin “consistently and reliably voted for Democratic candidates” when all three voted for Trump in 2016.
Multiple US media outlets reported that Martin had named Democratic strategist Paul Rivera as the author of the audit. However, the author’s name does not appear in the document.
The report was withheld for several months, but Martin claimed it was virtually unfixable.
“What I wanted were practical lessons for the future. I wanted real, deep, concrete recommendations for improving the allocation of resources, technology, data, organization, media strategy, and more. I selected someone who I thought could produce this type of report,” the DNC chairman said Thursday.
“When we received this report late last year, it wasn’t ready for prime time. It wasn’t even close to it. And fixing it would mean starting over from scratch with every conversation, every interview, every data set, because the source material wasn’t provided.”
Biden didn’t support Harris enough.
According to the report, the DNC conducted a poll ahead of the 2022 midterm elections to see how then-first lady Jill Biden would support her husband, but no similar poll was conducted for Vice President Harris.
The document also appeared to blame the White House. Assigned immigration responsibilities to Harris without proper training. political issues.
The vice president was leading the charge not on immigration enforcement, but on addressing the root causes of migration from Latin America. Still, Republicans quickly labeled her a “border czar.”
“The White House’s approach to elevating the vice president by outlining controversial issues without leveraging research to understand how taxpayers and voters respond to emissaries from Democratic administrations was a major missed opportunity,” the audit said.
He added that both parties would have benefited if Biden had “considered ways to utilize Kamala Harris early in his administration.”
“The idea that a well-prepared and supported vice president has been unable to help the president over the past three and a half years is a grave lack of imagination,” the report said.
The “not Trump” approach has failed
The audit outlined familiar criticisms of the Harris campaign, namely that it failed to promote the Democratic candidate’s own vision and instead focused on the importance of defeating Trump.
“Harris struggled to define anything beyond ‘not Trump’ and ‘prosecutor versus felon.’ “The shortened campaign period did not help, but the campaign did not immediately resolve how to tag Trump and define Harris,” the report said.
But amid the price crisis gripping the country under a Democratic administration, “the stark contrast with President Trump was not enough of a motivator for voters,” the document said.
He also argued that when the Harris campaign took a negative turn against Trump, it did not effectively highlight the shortcomings of Republican leaders.
“While Mr. Trump’s approval ratings were retrospectively high, his campaign and allies failed to remind voters of Mr. Trump’s incompetence,” the document said. “The idea that President Trump’s negatives are ‘baked in’ is a huge failure of analysis and reality.”
The report provides no specific examples to support its claims.
Transgender advertising “in a box” Harris campaign
The report said one of the most memorable commercials of the campaign season, in which Harris said she supported access to gender reassignment surgery for “all transgender inmates” in prison, was effective.
The commercial plays a video of Harris making the remarks, ending with a narrator saying, “Kamala is for them. President Trump is for you.”
The pollster said: “Everyone found the attack highly effective and felt the campaign was boxed in. The ad was a video of her speaking and was framed as an attack on her economic priorities,” the report said.
“If the vice president hadn’t changed his position, and she hadn’t done that, there would have been nothing that would have worked as a response,” he added.
“Pollsters largely agreed with the sentiment shared by campaign leaders: Given the stakes and timing, the focus should be on attacking Mr. Trump.”
