Too many Democrats still refuse to acknowledge how gravely the party was harmed by a failure to actively oppose genocide.
A pro-Palestine protest on the third day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, on August 21, 2024.
(Jacek Boczarski / Anadolu via Getty Images)
The whole debate about whether the Democratic Party would release its autopsy report on the 2024 presidential election—as it finally did this week—always seemed silly to me. How, I wondered, could a hastily prepared report by a party insider tell us anything we hadn’t already known for a very long time?
The party’s many missteps in the 2024 election were clear before anyone cast a vote: too much time spent campaigning with Republicans like Liz Cheney and too little time spent rallying in the union halls of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania; inadequate attention to core economic issues in a moment of intense anxiety over inflation; a failure to develop a steady and coherent critique of an increasingly cultish and corrupt Republican Party; and a stark refusal to recognize the depth of opposition to the genocide in Gaza.
That the Gaza issue threatened to upend the party’s best efforts to defeat Donald Trump was evident months before the Democrats nominated Kamala Harris for the presidency in August of 2024. By April of that year, more than 500,000 people had voted “uncommitted” in primary elections across the country to send a message to Democrats to shift their Gaza policy.
In late May of 2024, prior to the dismal debate performance that destroyed Joe Biden’s reelection bid, I met with grassroots Democrats in rural southwestern Wisconsin’s Lafayette County.
Lafayette County is about as far as you can get from the urban centers and college campuses where protests developed in the spring of 2024 over the Biden administration’s failure to oppose Israel’s assault on Gaza. The county‘s biggest city is Darlington, population 2,462. The most notable political statement in that community is a reminder that the region stood on the right side of the bitterest conflict that defined America: a 56-foot high monument topped with the statue of a Union army soldier from the Civil War.” A plaque announces, “They died, the Nation lives.”
The Democratic loyalists who gathered in Darlington that day were doing their best to convince voters in Lafayette and surrounding Wisconsin counties to reelect Biden—just as they would eventually work to elect Harris. Yet they faced a challenge. One of the first people who spoke up when I visited told me that, when she knocked on doors, she kept running into voters who were upset with the administration’s failure to act decisively to save Palestinian lives in Gaza.
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That was just one of many instances during the 2024 presidential campaign where it became clear that the Democratic strategists in Washington—who imagined that the party’s election prospects would not be influenced by anger over US complicity with the Israeli assault on Gaza, which had already killed tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children—were agonizingly out of touch. US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is precisely right when she says that Gaza was “very clearly a major dynamic and a major threat that was happening in 2024, regardless of how one feels about that issue.”
Polling data would eventually confirm the harm done to Harris’s 2024 bid —which attracted 6 million fewer votes than Biden received in 2020—by the vice president’s failure to make a clear break with Biden on Gaza issues. A postelection survey conducted by the Institute of Middle East Understanding and YouGov “found that 29 percent of Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 and didn’t vote for Harris in 2024 cited ‘ending Israel’s violence in Gaza’ as their reason for withholding their vote.” The IMEU assessment of the survey argued, “Vice President Harris lost votes because of the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.” Indeed, according to the analysis, “That reason surpassed the economy, immigration, healthcare, and abortion, all of which have historically been major voter issues in past presidential elections.”
When word spread that the Democratic National Committee was preparing an autopsy report on the 2024 campaign, it seemed obvious that, to be credible, any such document would have to tackle the failure by candidates, party leaders, and strategists to grasp the seriousness of the grassroots outrage over Gaza. Yet when the autopsy was finally published Thursday by CNN, the network analysis noted, “The report is silent on some of the biggest and potentially juiciest aspects of the 2024 campaign. That includes any judgment about Biden’s decision to run again, the impact of the war in Gaza (which split Democrats) and the fact that Harris was allowed to take over the ticket without anything amounting to an electoral process for choosing a replacement.”
No mention of Gaza? Seriously?
In a statement on Thursday, DNC chair Ken Martin said he finally allowed the release of the document, which had been prepared by party consultant Paul Rivera, “for full transparency”—even though CNN reported that Martin believed that the autopsy “wasn’t close to being ready for public consumption.”
Whatever the excuses may be, an analysis of Democratic missteps in 2024 that fails to mention Gaza betrays a lack of self-awareness that is distressing, not just from a historical standard but also as a measure of the party’s ongoing refusal to recognize and learn from its own mistakes.
US Representative Ro Khanna, the California Democrat who tried in 2024 to get Harris and the party to focus on the plight of the Palestinians, said Thursday, “There is not a single mention of Gaza in the 192-page autopsy report that was just released today. As someone who campaigned in Michigan and Wisconsin, let me tell you that one of the reasons we lost is our blank check to Israel and Netanyahu while they committed genocide in Gaza. We must speak and confront hard truths if this party is to win in 2028.”
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