Democrats belatedly publish election defeat report after backlash

The Democratic party has belatedly published a postmortem on its disastrous 2024 election defeat, after an initial decision to withhold the document triggered an angry backlash.

Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), released the report – which fails to mention Gaza or Joe Biden’s age – accompanied by an apology to party members angered by his initial decision to keep the analysis of Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump and defeat in both houses of Congress under wraps.

Martin had initially declined to publish the report, authored by a veteran Democratic strategist, Paul Rivera. He cited a need to focus on this year’s midterm elections and avoid re-opening old wounds.

The decision backfired, leading to a crisis of confidence in Martin’s leadership among senior Democrats and accusations that he was keeping the findings secret.

The report focuses on key demographics that Harris lost – including Latinos, men and rural voters in many states – and compares her performance to other Democrats in key state races, such as North Carolina governor Josh Stein.

“Harris wrote off rural America, assuming urban/suburban margins would compensate,” the report says. “The math doesn’t work.” The autopsy concludes that Stein’s success in the state that Harris lost provided a clear lesson for Democrats: focus less on “abstract issues and identity politics”.

It also takes an in-depth look at campaign spending and advertising, and highlights the need to involve new voters in campaign messaging rather than just pushing out messages.

Notably, the autopsy does not delve deeply into Joe Biden’s decision to run for re-election at age 81, or his decision to effectively hand over his campaign to Harris after he dropped out. The report makes no mention of the role that the US’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza played in the wider Democratic defeat, despite widespread polling about the impact of those issues, nor does it engage with the criticism that racism and sexism were a factor in Harris’s loss.

Martin acknowledged the lack of comprehensive findings, saying that he was “not proud” of the report and cautioned that it would not “meet your standards”. But he added its release was dictated by the public’s need “to trust the Democratic party”.

“When I received the report late last year, it wasn’t ready for primetime. Not even close,” the embattled party chair said in a statement released after the report’s publication. “And because no source material was provided, fixing it would have meant starting over, from the beginning – every conversation, every interview, every dataset.”

He pointed to Democrats’ successive off-year election wins, in which the party prevailed or improved its margins in nearly every major race across the country, and argued that “dwelling on 2024 or looking backwards so late in the game” was an unhelpful exercise that could blunt their momentum.

“In December, I announced we would shelve this report, and I meant what I said at the time,” he said, adding: “I didn’t want to create a distraction. Ironically, in doing so, I ended up creating an even bigger distraction. And for that, I sincerely apologize.”

Misgivings about the quality and contents of the 192-page document are stated graphically at the beginning and at the top of each page in the form of a disclaimer marked in red, stating: “This document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC. The DNC was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented.”

Sections thereafter are punctuated with multiple qualifiers questioning sourcing, data accuracy or a perceived lack of evidence.

One qualifier undermines the author’s version of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters bent on overturning the 2020 presidential election result, which he states led to the deaths of five people. An interposed remark reads: “Claim contradicts public reporting.” In fact, five people died within 36 hours of the attack. A further four police officers who responded to the insurrection died by suicide in the following seven months.

In a statement, the pro-Palestinian IMEU Policy Project called on the DNC to “release the information that the author of the autopsy told us clearly and unambiguously, which is that DNC officials’ review of their own data found Biden’s support for Israel to be a net-negative for Democrats in 2024”.

Devastated and locked out of power in Washington, Democrats remain locked in a contentious debate over the future and direction of their party. Those tensions have flared in primary contests across the country, where rank and file Democrats from Maine to California are demanding political and generational change in their leadership.