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The Democratic Party in the United States has released a long-awaited report investigating why the former vice president Kamala Harris failed to beat Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
But the so-called autopsy documentmade public on Thursday, it was incomplete and inaccurate – riddled with factual errors and comments questioning its claims.
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It was also light on policy instructions and lacking other components.
For months, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) faced mounting calls from activists to release the report.
DNC Chairman Ken Martin acknowledged the report’s flaws Thursday, but said continuing to withhold it would be a bigger distraction than releasing it as is.
“I’m not proud of this product; it doesn’t meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards. I don’t approve of the content of this report, or what’s left of it. I couldn’t in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on it,” Martin said in a statement.
“But transparency is important. So, today I’m releasing the report as I receive it — in full, unedited and unabridged — with an explanation of what has not been verified.”
Al Jazeera looks at the main takeaways from the report.
Zero mentions Gaza
Beyond the 2024 vote, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza was one of the worst. and dividers The Democrats’ problem with Harris.
Then President Joe Biden betrayed Israel about $18bn to finance the atrocities that turned Palestine into a wasteland, killed thousands of people and caused famine in the region.
The Biden-Harris administration also vetoed several United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
His unwavering pro-Israel policy led to some Democratic constituencies turning against Harris.
As the then vice president emphasized diplomatic efforts to end the war, he vowed to continue to support Israel. His campaign also refused to grant a Palestinian American representative a chance to speak at the conference Democratic National Convention in August 2024.
Some research has shown that the policy of Gaza is one of the main reasons why Harris lost the election.
The 2025 IMEU Policy Project study showed that Gaza it was a big deal for people who voted for Biden in 2020, but Harris didn’t come back four years later.
However, there is no mention of Gaza and Israel in the 192 pages of the autopsy report.
Rob Flaherty, Harris’ former deputy campaign manager, recently emphasized the impact of the Gaza policy on the election.
“For many voters, they see the negative, painful images from Gaza, it became a good question – one that we didn’t have a good answer to,” Flaherty wrote in The Bulwark’s blog on Substack.
In ways that cannot be seen in this study, it reduced interest significantly.
Missing sections, errors and explanations
The DNC released the report in its usual fashion, and it wasn’t pretty.
Several sections – including the summary of the finalists and finalists – were missing. The words “pending” with the words “this section has not been submitted by the author” appeared in their place.
The document also makes many dubious and false claims, leading to comments such as “claims contradict public reports”, “data appears to be incorrect and contradict public reports” and “reviews not supported by public opinion”.
The document contained some incorrect information. For example, it said Democrats won two gubernatorial races in 2024; he actually won three.
It also said that the Midwestern states in MichiganPennsylvania and Wisconsin “voted for Democratic candidates” consistently and reliably while the three states voted for Trump in 2016.
Several US media reported that Martin had chosen Democratic analyst Paul Rivera to conduct the investigation. But the names of the authors are not found in the document.
The report was kept under wraps for months, but Martin said it would never change.
“What I asked for was the ability to take action in the future. I wanted real, deep, real ideas to improve our distribution of resources, technology, data, planning, media channels and more. I chose someone who I thought could make this kind of report,” said the DNC leader on Thursday.
“When I received the report late last year, it wasn’t ready to be used. It’s not even close. And because no source material was provided, processing it would mean starting over, from scratch – every conversation, every interview, every data.”
Biden did not support Harris enough
According to the report, the DNC held elections ahead of 2022 midterm elections to investigate ways in which First Lady Jill Biden can support her husband, but no similar investigation was conducted for Harris – the vice president.
The document also appeared to criticize the White House for extraditing Harris immigration status without teaching him enough to deal with the issue politically.
The vice president took the lead in addressing the causes of migration from Central and South America, not immigration enforcement. However, the Republicans did not hesitate to call him “border king”.
“The White House’s process for promoting the Vice President is an issue that was too complicated without the use of research to understand how taxpayers and voters will react to the messengers of democracy and the rare opportunity,” he said.
It added that if Mr Biden had “explored ways to help Kamala Harris earlier”, it would have benefited both of them.
“The idea that a prepared and supported Vice President could not support the President over the past three and a half years is a major failure,” the report read.
The ‘Not Trump’ strategy has failed
The survey revealed a common criticism of the Harris campaign – that it failed to advance the Democratic presidential candidate’s vision and focused on the need to defeat Trump instead.
“Harris struggled with meaning beyond ‘not Trump’ and ‘prosecution against. The limited campaign timeline didn’t help, but the campaign didn’t quickly resolve how to name Trump and define Harris,” the report read.
But amid a crisis that could devastate the country under Democratic rule, “clear differences with Trump were not encouraging” to voters, the document said.
It said that while Harris’ campaign had been negative against Trump, it did not reflect the Republican president’s shortcomings.
“Trump’s job approval rating was extremely high and the campaign and allies failed to remind voters of its inadequacy,” the document read. “The idea (that) Trump’s negatives were ‘cooked up’ is a serious failure of analysis and reality.”
The report did not provide concrete examples to back up its claims.
Transgender ad ‘boxed’ Harris campaign
The report said one of the most memorable ads of the campaign season — an ad in which Harris says he supports access to sex-reassignment surgery for “every transgender inmate” in prison — worked.
The video played a clip of Harris saying this and ended with the narrator saying, “Kamala is theirs/them”; President Trump is yours.
The researchers “all realized that the attack was very effective, and they saw that the campaign was closed – the ad was a video that said what they said, and it was organized as an attack on their financial priorities”, the report said.
“If the Vice President hadn’t changed his appearance – and he didn’t – then nothing would have helped,” it added.
“Electors generally agree with the view that the leadership of the campaign – in terms of complexity and timing, was aimed at attacking Trump.”
