DNC Releases Disputed 2024 Election 'Autopsy'

The Democratic Party's official postmortem on the 2024 election has finally surfaced, but the DNC is distancing itself from its own document. Released Thursday after months of internal pressure, the draft "autopsy" of Kamala Harris' failed presidential bid, which can be seen here, is stamped with a disclaimer from the Democratic National Committee saying it "does not meet our standards" and that the party "cannot independently verify" its findings.

• Prepared by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera and based on hundreds of interviews, the report pins much of the blame on Joe Biden's White House, arguing it failed to give Kamala Harris the profile and preparation she needed before she became the nominee, the Washington Post reports.

• "The White House did not position or prepare the Vice President," it says, suggesting that earlier efforts to elevate her might have boosted Biden's numbers and left Harris better equipped to lead the ticket.
• The draft also faults what it calls "denialist" thinking inside the party—arguing that focusing on razor-thin margins instead of deeper problems blocks "real accountability." The document says Democrats lost key ground with voters in "Middle America," the South, and rural areas, who it says feel excluded from the party's agenda. It criticizes a Harris strategy that "wrote off rural America, assuming urban/suburban margins would compensate."
• The report also recounts that Trump campaign ads targeting Harris' positions on transgender issues tested as "very effective," and that pollsters concluded there was "nothing which would have worked as a response" if she didn't change her position.

• Beyond 2024, the autopsy laments that the party has "vacillated between stagnation and retrogression" since Barack Obama's 2008 win, CNN reports. Since 2008, Democrats have steadily lost power "at every level" due to "missed opportunities to invest in our states, counties, and local parties and candidates." Democratic candidates, the report says, "have proven incapable of projecting strength, unity, and leadership, and voters have drifted away."
• In a lengthy statement, DNC Chair Ken Martin said he'd held it back to avoid reopening old wounds after the 2024 loss, but conceded that the secrecy "ended up creating an even bigger distraction" and apologized.
• "I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won't meet your standards," Martin said. "I don't endorse what's in this report, or what's left out of it. I could not in good faith put the DNC's stamp of approval on it. But transparency is paramount. So, today I am releasing the report as I received it—in its entirety, unedited and unabridged—with annotations for claims that couldn't be verified."
• Martin said when he received the report last year, it "wasn't ready for primetime" and "because no source material was provided, fixing it would have meant starting over, from the beginning." The annotations also flagged numerous factual errors, noting that while it said Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin had "consistently and reliably voted for Democratic candidates" before 2024, all three of those states voted for Trump in 2016.