The DNC Covered Up Its 2024 Election Autopsy, And Now We Know Why

After the 2024 presidential election, the Democratic National Committee conducted an autopsy of the party’s defeat and intended to release it.

It pledged an honest accounting of how Donald Trump reclaimed the White House. It assured its own officials, strategists, and donor class that a thorough post-mortem was coming.

However, after the autopsy was complete, the DNC clammed up and kept it under wraps.

There was something in the report they didn’t want the public to see, and Democrats weren’t happy about it.

The official explanation for suppressing the report is that releasing it would distract from the party’s focus on winning back Congress in 2026 and not be distracted by the past.

That explanation doesn’t hold up.

Several Democrats, including advisers to potential 2028 presidential hopefuls, have argued that burying this report conveniently shields Harris from accountability runs again, while also protecting the consultant class whose strategic decisions contributed to the loss.

“I suspect the reasons why this isn’t being released are precisely the reasons why it should be released,” Lis Smith, a longtime adviser to Pete Buttigieg, said in a post on X last year.

“The DNC’s actual position is that if the public knew more about what Democrats got wrong in the last election, it would hurt the party’s chances in the next election,” former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau wrote.

Favreau was more right than he realized. Because we know now what the DNC didn’t want the public to know.

According to a report from Axios, DNC staff members working on the report held a private meeting with the IMEU Policy Project, a pro-Palestinian advocacy organization, specifically to discuss the electoral impact of U.S. policy toward Israel.

Hamid Bendaas, a representative for the group, said the DNC acknowledged in that meeting that “their own data also indicated that this policy was, in their assessment, a ‘negative’ for the 2024 election.” 

Two additional senior IMEU Policy Project members independently confirmed that the DNC reached the same conclusion.

Axios separately verified that Democratic officials involved in the analysis found the Gaza issue hurt the party’s appeal with certain voter blocs.

Harris spent much of 2024 trying to navigate Israel-Gaza without alienating either side. She expressed firm support for Israel while also calling for a ceasefire and voicing empathy for Palestinian civilians.

It was a strategy that failed to satisfy the pro-Palestinian wing of the party, which is largely made up of younger voters and older progressives who had already grown skeptical of the administration’s backing of Israel, and proved particularly difficult to retain.

The autopsy appears to suggest that the party’s ability to succeed in the future requires it to be unequivocally anti-Israel.

DNC spokesperson Kendall Witmer denied the claim that findings related to Israel are driving the suppression of the report; however, even Kamala Harris seems to have confirmed the autopsy report’s findings.

During an event for her 107 Days book tour, Harris said the administration “should have done more” and “should have spoken publicly” about its criticism of Netanyahu’s handling of the war.

In the memoir, she wrote that Biden’s “perceived blank check” to Israel hurt her 2024 campaign and revealed she had privately urged him to show greater empathy for Gazan civilians even as she refused to break with him publicly. 

Democrats are now staring at an uncomfortable reality: their internal diagnosis is pushing them further down an explicitly anti-Israel path, and now everyone knows it.