If you’ve read anything about the Democrats’ “autopsy” of its 2024 election loss, which was released Thursday after being suppressed for months, it probably highlighted what the report doesn’t include: any mention of Gaza, the Biden administration’s refusal to curb Israel’s genocidal war, or Kamala Harris’s mealymouthed efforts to triangulate a position after becoming the nominee in July. “There are 50,000 Words in the DNC Autopsy. ‘Gaza’ Isn’t One,” Mother Jones announced. The Intercept struck a similar note: “DNC Autopsy Doesn’t Mention Gaza or Israel At All.” On the other side of the aisle, National Review crowed about the omission: “DNC Autopsy Exposes the Left’s ‘Gaza’ Excuse as Nonsense.”“When it arrived in my inbox, I immediately clicked on it, used the search function, and searched for Gaza. Came up as zero,” Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told Politico. “Israel came up as zero, Jews came up as zero. I was surprised. It looks like there’s a huge omission.”Well, yes. The omission of Gaza, which played an important role in Harris’s disappointing showing with young voters, is appalling and suggests a party leadership still unwilling to reckon with the cost of the Biden administration’s support for Israel—or even to acknowledge just how far Democratic attitudes toward Israel have shifted in recent years. But the overriding focus on this one omission misses a more important point. The problem with the DNC autopsy isn’t just that it doesn’t mention Gaza. It’s that it ignores policy and, for that matter, politics—how policies are messaged, and what role they play in coalition building—altogether. It is a profoundly weird document that’s almost entirely concerned with fundraising and spending while devoting almost no space to issues, including the two most consequential ones: inflation and President Biden’s age and fitness. Those issues, though less morally stark than Gaza, were clearly decisive. And the autopsy ignores them. “The report’s so stupid, it’s hard to make sense why something’s in there and why it’s not,” one senior Democratic operative told Politico. It’s obvious why the DNC shelved the autopsy. It’s long yet incomplete, and utterly useless for its intended purpose: to show Democrats what they did wrong, so they don’t make the same mistakes in 2028. In a way, it’s actually worse than useless because the DNC’s clumsy attempt to suppress it became an unnecessary intraparty scandal in itself, making it seem to journalists and Democratic voters alike that some forbidden truth was being suppressed. In reality, the scandal is that this is the best the DNC could do to explain the party’s catastrophic loss in 2024, which set the country on a path of unimaginable corruption and authoritarian thuggery. There is a disclaimer early in the autopsy noting that “this document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC.” The first question should be obvious: If this isn’t the DNC’s view of what went wrong in 2024, then just what are we doing here? The second question is just as straightforward: Just who is the author? It’s Paul Rivera, a longtime Democratic strategist and friend of DNC Chair Ken Martin. He is also, as many people have noted, a fixture of New York’s notoriously corrupt and incompetent Democratic Party and worked as an aide for state Senator John Sampson, who was convicted on charges of obstruction of justice and lying to federal agents in 2015. (Rivera resigned shortly before Sampson’s arrest.) It’s not clear why Rivera was tapped for this important job, aside from the fact that he was available and seemingly willing to work for free. He hadn’t worked on a presidential campaign since John Kerry’s in 2004. Rivera clearly wasn’t up for the task, but the autopsy contains some critiques—mostly vague or incoherent—over voter targeting. It suggests that Trump’s anti-trans ad, “Kamala is for they/them, I am for you,” was especially effective, and observed that the Harris campaign didn’t do enough to try to capture rural voters. Mostly, though, it consists of platitudes, such as: “At times, it seems Democrats are trying to win arguments while Republicans are focused on winning elections. Democrats operate in an ecosystem defined by reason even in cycles when the electorate is defined by rage.”The right, the report claims, is “always on,” but Democrats are not. What does that mean? Here’s the report’s explanation: “The difference is right-wing interests take a longer-term approach and amplify polarizing messaging and candidates within the Democratic family with the intention of ‘othering’ all Democrats. Without aggressive pushback and tactics, it works.” You can look at aspects of the right-wing machine—Fox News certainly, and parts of the Koch machine—and nod along. This analysis isn’t wrong, exactly, but it’s outdated—the kind of thing every Democrat was wailing about during the George W. Bush presidency and early Obama years.
