Gaza war and Israel go unmentioned in Democrats’ 2024 election autopsy report

Gaza and Israel go unmentioned in the Democrats’ 190-page autopsy of Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential election loss that the Democratic National Committee released to CNN.

Critics of the Biden administration’s support for Israel during the war in Gaza that began with the Hamas-led invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, have alleged that the party was suppressing its internal findings about the election, which returned President Donald Trump to office, because it would show that Biden’s stance was deeply unpopular.

Axios reported in February that the top Democrats who worked on the report concluded that Harris “lost significant support because of the Biden administration’s approach to the war in Gaza.”

If that is the case, it’s not reflected in the document that CNN publishes. But portions of the document are not included, with notes saying that the executive summary and conclusion had not been shared by the authors.

The report points to 10 different “strategic implications” for Democrats, including that “anti-Trump sentiment has limits,” male voters “require direct engagement,” and that voter demographics are not enough to determine which candidate they’ll prefer.

CNN reports that the document was written by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera and annotated by the DNC. The DNC released the document following questions raised by CNN, the network reports.

DNC Chairman Ken Martin tells CNN that the report was not yet ready to be publicly released, but concluded that withholding it would create a larger distraction than releasing an incomplete version. “I sincerely apologize,” he says.

“For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged,” Martin says. “It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”