Pressure is mounting on the Democratic National Committee to disclose its 2024 election postmortem, with even former Vice President Kamala Harris urging the party to do so despite the risk of embarrassment.
Shortly after taking over, DNC Chairman Ken Martin ordered an autopsy into his party’s 2024 drubbing, but opted to keep that report secret for months, prompting many Democrats to cry foul.
Keeping the report buried was widely seen as a way to aid Harris if she were to throw her hat into the 2028 arena, given that it might be politically mortifying for her.
But even the ex-veep has privately told donors she feels it should be public, though she hasn’t discussed the issue with Martin, The Post has confirmed. NBC News first reported Harris’ private push for the autopsy’s release.
Harris is currently the leading Democrat for 2028, should she run, according to the latest RealClearPolitics polling aggregate, with a 9.3 percentage point edge over California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D).
“Yeah, release the autopsy,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, making clear he doesn’t want Democrats to dwell on the past. “This is six months before an election. We need to be mobilizing and organizing in this election.”
“Fine, DNC, release it. They should do that. But the most important thing is for people to get out and vote in record numbers.”
Political autopsies are frequently done by the losing party after presidential elections. The Republican National Committee famously did one after Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012.
Many observers noted how President Trump seemingly ignored many of its core conclusions, such as a call for a softer tone on immigration policy, when he won the presidency in 2016.
Regardless of how useful the autopsy may be, many top Democrats still want it to be made public for the sake of transparency.
There have been mixed rumors and reporting about whether the autopsy explored the impact of the Biden administration’s position on the Israel-Hamas war on progressive voters.
Axios reported that it briefly referenced those concerns. CrookedMedia reporter Matt Berg reported that the report didn’t do a deep dive on the political fallout from the Israel-Hamas war, citing a source that described its contents on the matter as “gobbledygook.”
There have also been rumors that the DNC didn’t fully finish the postmortem.
Regardless, prominent Democrats are publicly pushing the DNC to let the public see it.
The Post contacted the DNC for comment.
“We are all adults,” Rahm Emanuel recently groused. “If we can’t handle an after-action report on how we spent 4 billion and lost, then we are all third-grade soccer players and get a medal for effort. God help us.”
“We need to deal with the hard truths about how our failure to stop the genocide in Gaza cost us support,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) declared in February. “Only when we have a new moral direction in this party will we win back the country’s trust.”
