DNC Secrecy Over 2024 Election Autopsy Sparks Internal Conflict

After months of internal debate over whether the Democratic National Committee should release its autopsy of the 2024 election, the dispute has intensified. DNC Chair Ken Martin has faced sharp criticism and ridicule during recent media appearances while offering what critics call illogical explanations for keeping the report secret.

The controversy carries high stakes for Kamala Harris, the party’s most recent presidential nominee, who appears to be laying groundwork for another run and leads in early 2028 primary polls. An open autopsy could expose failures in her campaign, prompting an observation from George Orwell: “who controls the past controls the future” and “who controls the present controls the past.”

Martin has stuck to his December announcement that he would not fulfill a promise to release the autopsy, a decision that initially benefited Harris. But the escalating uproar this spring has given her reason to distance herself from it.

NBC News reported last week that Harris was “signaling that she has no problem with a public airing of what went wrong last time – telling donors she believes the Democratic National Committee should release its buried autopsy of her failed 2024 campaign, according to a person who has heard the conversations.”

Harris has not made any public statement calling for the autopsy’s release. Her “signaling” appears aimed at separating herself from Martin’s unpopular decision without openly opposing it, the article noted.

While declining to apply direct pressure, Harris moved to counter the assumption she wants the report hidden. Axios reported in February: “Top Democratic officials who worked on the party’s still-secret autopsy of the 2024 election concluded that Kamala Harris lost significant support because of the Biden administration’s approach to the war in Gaza.”

Any honest autopsy would include polling data showing that Harris’s support for Biden’s Israel policy damaged her campaign. Polls during the campaign and after the election found that her stance was both political malpractice and a moral failure.

Under Martin, the DNC has continued to avoid addressing U.S. military support for Israel, widening the gap between the party’s leadership and the views of rank-and-file Democrats it ostensibly serves.

By last summer, a Gallup poll showed that only 8% of Democrats approved of Israel’s military actions in Gaza. More recent surveys reflect similar sentiments: Three-quarters of Democrats agree that “Israel is committing genocide,” and they sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis by a 4-to-1 margin. The Pew Research Center reported last month that 80% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents “currently have an unfavorable view of Israel.”

Martin suggests that only top DNC officials need to see the 200-page autopsy, relying on the assumption that historical records should not be of great public concern. “Instead of navel-gazing and looking backwards and trying to relitigate 2024,” Martin said during a late April interview, what was needed was recognition that “the only thing we can do is actually change what happens in the future.”

That approach echoes Barack Obama’s assertion after winning the presidency in 2008 that there was no need to prosecute officials who authorized torture during the George W. Bush administration. “Look forward instead of looking backward,” Obama said. Martin has similarly ensured that the DNC remains silent about the genocide in Gaza, enabled by the Biden administration’s massive arms shipments to Israel.

For Kamala Harris, history will not be easy to escape. Last fall, during the book tour for her campaign memoir “107 Days,” she faced chants such as “Your legacy is genocide! Your legacy will always be genocide!” The book shows no remorse for her steadfast support of arming the Gaza genocide during the final 15 months of the Biden-Harris administration.

The ghost of Hubert Humphrey haunts a potential Harris 2028 campaign.

After losing to Richard Nixon as the Democratic nominee in 1968, Humphrey sought the nomination again in 1972. He hoped his record of supporting the Vietnam War as Lyndon Johnson’s vice president would not be an obstacle, but he could not outrun history.

Humphrey, like Harris five decades later, sounded morally obtuse about his support for an unpopular war as he geared up for another run. National polls initially put him in first place in 1971. But when his hopes crashed, New York Times columnist James Reston “wrote that the 1972 nomination was really lost at the 1968 convention when Humphrey showed greater loyalty to Johnson than to his deeper Vietnam War beliefs,” biographer Arnold Offner recounts.

Instead of acknowledging that most polled Democrats believe Israel has committed genocide and support halting weapons shipments, Martin has blocked every resolution to align the DNC with voter opinions. A modest debate on Israel policy at the DNC’s semiannual meeting last month earned some undeserved praise, but the discussion was minimal while the party remained aloof from its voters’ views.

Nine months ago, with media fanfare, Martin announced a DNC taskforce known as the Middle East Working Group. Supporters of Palestinian rights are a minority on the panel, which has done little. The group has served as a rationale for deflecting resolutions critical of Israel, with the claim that it is weighing such issues.

The DNC continues to reject all initiatives like those that the president of Democratic Majority for Israel last month condemned as “a set of divisive, anti-Israel resolutions.” Nothing from the DNC reflects the opinions on Israel held by large majorities of the Democratic electorate.

Across the country, Democrats are far ahead of the DNC. With top party leaders stuck in the past yet refusing to assess its lessons openly, real leadership must come from the grassroots, the article argues.

Norman Solomon, director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, authored this piece. His latest book is “The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy.”