Democrats’ 2024 Election Autopsy: Key Findings and Omissions

A sweeping internal review of the Democrats’ 2024 election losses runs nearly 200 pages. The autopsy report, released Thursday after months of speculation and delay, was intended to capture why and how the party lost the White House and collapsed electorally nationwide.

The report contains damning findings on spending patterns, media strategy, voter contact, and organizing failures across the ballot, describing a party that has lost ground at every level of government for nearly two decades.

But the report also avoids almost every question the party’s voters are actually asking about the consequential decisions of the cycle.

The decision by President Joe Biden and the party apparatus around him to seek re-election despite evident cognitive decline and alarm over his age, and the months in which donors, elected officials, and senior Democrats privately acknowledged concerns they refused to raise publicly, goes entirely unexamined.

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee without a single primary vote cast in her favor.

While switching to Harris was credited in the report with boosting down-ballot Democrats, her anointment is treated as an event that happened to the party rather than a crisis the party created and then managed badly.

In the nearly 200 pages of reporting, the words “Gaza” and “Israel” do not appear.

During the Michigan primary in 2024, the “uncommitted” protest movement drew more than 100,000 votes in a state Biden had won by about 154,000 in 2020, and Harris would lose by about 100,000.

After the election loss, a YouGov/IMEU Policy Project poll found the top concern nationally for 2020 Biden voters who did not vote for Harris in 2024 was “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza.” Another post-election poll by Data for Progress said more than a third of Harris voters said they knew someone who did not vote for her because of Gaza.

The report analyzes the male voter gap, the suburban voter gap, the rural voter gap, and the Latino voter shift in considerable detail.

It never once examines whether Harris’s race and gender shaped media coverage, voter perception, or the specific lines of attack deployed against her, even as it implicitly acknowledges that she faced a uniquely difficult environment as a candidate.

While the report devotes considerable space to the Democrats’ failure to reach young men on digital platforms, their over-reliance on legacy broadcast media, and the need to meet voters “where they are,” Trump’s appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast—one of the most-watched political interviews of the year, reaching millions of exactly the kind of voters Democrats lost—is not mentioned.

The decision not to accept a similar invitation, reportedly declined by the Harris campaign, is not mentioned once.

The report states that “campaign leadership estimated around $150m was invested on voter contact,” then notes that this “is simply too small a piece of the pie.”

In comparison, the campaign invested “$1.04bn in media expenditures.” Under the party’s own traditional budget frameworks, voter contact spending should have been closer to $300m.

The gap, the report suggests, reflected an outdated “strategy of scarcity” that no longer made sense given the amount of money available.

Perhaps the most damning line in the document: “An incumbent vice-president. With no research to share once she became the nominee.”

The report reveals that when Harris entered the race, her own team discovered “there was no self-research on the vice-president to guide the development of the research instruments.” The White House, it concludes, “did not position or prepare the vice-president,” calling it “a massive missed opportunity.”

In a remarkable admission, the report reveals that the Harris campaign’s internal polling team did not see advertisements before they aired. They learned about them, in some cases, by reading the press.

One notable feature of the report is that it is filled with annotations about the claims contained in the document.

At the top of each page, a red disclaimer reads: “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.”

Elsewhere, under the subhead “WHAT HAPPENED (ELECTORAL REVIEW)” on page 21, an annotation reads “no evidence for many claims in this section.”

Other sections include annotations that state “public reporting and data contradict several underlying assumptions,” “claim contradicts public reporting,” “methodology appears internally inconsistent,” and “numbers appear inaccurate based on public data.”

Other annotations note that some sections, such as the “conclusion” section, were “not provided by the author.”

In a lengthy statement Thursday alongside the release, DNC Chair Ken Martin said he released the report as he received it “in its entirety, unedited unabridged – with annotations for claims that couldn’t be verified.”

North Carolina Governor Josh Stein won 51% of male voters in the same election in which Harris won just 40%. The report acknowledges this gap directly, suggesting the national campaign’s approach to male voters—particularly young men of color—was a strategic choice that failed, not an inevitable demographic shift.

Anna Betts contributed reporting from New York.