“It doesn’t meet my standards, it won’t meet your standards, but I’m doing it because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word,” Martin said. “After Democrats’ massive victories last November, I didn’t want to create a distraction, but by not releasing the report, I ended up creating an even greater distraction. For that, I deeply apologize.”
“Calling the report a disgrace would be an understatement,” RootsAction, the progressive advocacy group that led the push for the autopsy to be made public, said Thursday.
“The report focuses extensively on advertising spending and fundraising, without discussing the Democratic platform, policy positions, or the political context of the 2024 elections,” the group noted. “The word ‘affordability,’ arguably the most important issue in the 2024 election, appears twice in the 129-page report.”
“Martin and the Democratic National Committee are trying to wash their hands of the report and its contents,” RootsAction continued. “In a hasty, almost amateurish move, the Democratic National Committee has gone out of its way to poke holes in the legitimacy of the very report it requested…And while Martin may feel that this absolves him of the responsibility to respond to this pathetic document, the scrutiny of his leadership of the Democratic National Committee should only intensify.”
Speculation has abounded that the report contains damning findings about the electoral damage caused by the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel as it wages a genocidal war in Gaza and expands its illegal occupation, colonization, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
Opposition to the administration’s complicity in the massacre, as well as the refusal of Biden and Harris to acknowledge the genocide or seek a ceasefire, was embodied by the Noncommittal Movement and its 30 delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
There is not a single mention of Gaza, Palestine, Israel, genocide, or non-conformists in the autopsy.
“We needed a serious autopsy of the DNC. This so-called autopsy is almost worthless,” Jeff Cohen, co-founder of RootsAction — which led the fight for the Democratic National Committee to release the report — told Common Dreams on Thursday.
Cohen continued: “There is no mention of the Israeli policy followed by the Biden/Harris administration that incited the Gaza massacre.” “It cost votes, and helped Trump win. Previous leaks indicate that the Democratic National Committee’s autopsy will discuss Gaza’s influence on voters.”
The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) noted that “polls and reports leading up to and after the 2024 elections showed that Biden and Harris’ support for providing weapons to Israel was deeply unpopular with their voters and constituted an electoral liability.”
“Ken Martin should release the information that the author of the autopsy told us clearly and unequivocally, which is that DNC officials’ review of their own data found that Biden’s support for Israel would be a complete negative for Democrats in 2024,” Margaret Derrius, executive director of the IMEU Policy Project, said Thursday.
While Autopsy mentions inflation 18 times, it does so in the context of adjusting fundraising numbers for inflation and not for the affordability crisis – which was arguably the first issue Trump focused on in his campaign, before the crisis worsened through trade wars and actual wars once he returned to office.
A Democratic National Committee autopsy claims that Democrats have steadily lost the trust of working-class, non-college voters since former President Barack Obama’s historic win in 2008.
“The Democratic Party has always tried to be seen as the party of the people, the party of labor, fair play, and civil discourse,” the report said. “The party’s relationships with working Americans and their families have been shaped by decades of organizing and engagement, the development of a vibrant and inclusive party infrastructure, and a connected agenda that has helped us connect in homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods across the country.”
However, the report says the party has defined itself as anti-Trump while failing to define what Harris and Democrats stand for, while underinvesting in state and local organizing and failing to build and maintain relationships with voters outside its coastal and urban strongholds.
“Harris wrote off rural America, assuming the urban/suburban margins would compensate,” the post notes. “The Harris campaign appears to have relied on Trump being unacceptable rather than building a positive case for Harris.”
The autopsy concluded that so-called “identity politics” do not resonate with white male voters. The report pointed to the success of Trump’s attack ads, especially anti-transgender sites that say: “Kamala is for them/them, President Trump is for you.”
“If the Vice President does not change her position — and she has not — there will be nothing that would amount to a response,” the report asserts.
Some observers expressed concern that the Democratic National Committee was proposing to throw trans people under the bus in pursuit of electoral gain. Worryingly, the only time the post mentions trans people, it uses an outdated term that is offensive to many trans people.
Amid continued Republican attacks on transgender people The broader LGBTQ+ communityAnd reproductive freedom and voting rights — especially for Black Americans — immigrants and others. The Democratic National Committee’s autopsy encourages future Democratic candidates to “focus less on abstract issues and identity politics, and connect with voters on the issues they say are most important, including the economy, disaster relief, and addressing housing affordability.”
The autopsy’s assertion that “the problem is not Democratic policy or party branding” drew incredible ridicule from observers including gun control activist and former co-vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee David Hogg:
Taking aim at the autopsy’s many failures, RootsAction asserted that the Democratic National Committee has “a responsibility to deliver a report that truly grapples with the mistakes of the past so that the Democratic Party can learn from those mistakes and emerge stronger in its fight against Trumpism,” but that in the end, “the Democratic National Committee has completely failed in this regard.”
“The only serious autopsy so far is One published by RootsAction“, said the group.
The RootsAction 2024 autopsy, written by San Francisco journalist Christopher Cook, covers some of the same issues as the DNC autopsy. However, she says Democrats lost in 2024 due to voter disillusionment, Biden’s decision to run for re-election, Democrats abandoning their working-class base, loss of young voters, and the “Gaza effect.”
While the Democratic National Committee’s autopsy did not mention Biden’s fateful decision, the RootsAction report notes that “the main factor holding back Harris’ chances in 2024 was the short timeline she had to execute her campaign — just 107 days.”
“Her nomination was secured not through the traditional Democratic primary, but through some succession processes within the administration, exacerbating this difficult chronology,” the post adds. “This was of course due to President Biden’s betrayal of his 2020 promise to be a ‘bridge’ president, and his tragic decision to continue running for re-election despite cognitive decline and declining approval ratings.”
Cohen lamented these omissions in the Democratic National Committee report.
“There is no criticism of Biden for insisting on seeking re-election, or for not having any kind of open process for selecting a Biden replacement,” he told Common Dreams. “There is no analysis of Harris’ lack of principles, which has led to media platforms avoiding access to millions of potential voters.”
Criticism of the Democratic National Committee report mounted throughout the day Thursday as more and more people read it.
“What’s important is what they’re missing, and what they’re not releasing,” said former Harris communications director Ashley Etienne He said POLITICO. “It seems like what the Democratic National Committee is doing is choosing which parts it actually wants to release [are] “Less problematic for the party in the future.”
Zenith Research co-founder Adam Carlson Named The newspaper is “absolute chaos in every sense of the word” and added that “anyone who uses its results as justification to pursue their ideological preferences for the future of the party should be laughing in every room they enter.”
Hafez Rasheed, writer for The New Republic, He said that “Martin seems right about the report’s flaws.”
He added: “But hiding it and not commissioning a new one – or at least not editing it to an acceptable level – is a scandal in itself.” “At a time when Republicans are voting Historical lowsDemocrats need to take advantage and present a better vision for the country. That’s not it.”
Here’s the DNC document, as published by CNN:
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