The Democratic National Committee will not publicly release its autopsy of the 2024 presidential campaign, party officials said, a reversal intended to avoid a contentious reckoning over the party’s failure.
Operatives involved in drafting the autopsy worried that revisiting Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump would reignite the fiery internal debates that consumed the party in the wake of the 2024 loss at a time when Democrats are eager to celebrate a string of wins in 2025 and focus on the 2026 midterms, the officials said.
But by declining to make the report public, the party is also keeping the lessons learned from its 2024 failures limited to a small group of insiders and dodging a public accounting that many Democrats believe is necessary to avoid repeating past mistakes.
There remain sharp internal debates, for example, over the party’s stance on transgender rights, its handling of generational change and whether Harris’s selection as President Joe Biden’s replacement on the ticket was properly conducted.
“We completed a comprehensive review of what happened in 2024 and are already putting our learnings into motion,” Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement that did not directly address the committee’s decision to shield the report. “In our conversations with stakeholders from across the Democratic ecosystem, we are aligned on what’s important, and that’s learning from the past and winning the future. Here’s our North Star: does this help us win? If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.”
Democratic officials briefed on the report’s contents said the autopsy chastises the party for failing to adequately listen to voters in 2024. The report describes a feeble response to concerns about public safety and immigration in particular, allowing Republicans to dominate the issues, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private findings. That amplified the Democrats’ credibility problem on the election’s central issue: the economy.
Another key takeaway, officials said, was that the party took young voters for granted, neglecting a group that normally supports its candidates in overwhelming numbers. As a result, they swung toward Trump, with the president winning a majority of first-time voters and increasing his share of youth voters by double digits. The report faults a party wedded to traditional media that often bypasses these voters. It calls for greater engagement with nontraditional media, something that vexed the Harris campaign.
The report, generated based on hundreds of interviews with Democrats in all 50 states, also highlights missteps in how Democrats contact voters, the officials said, noting that while the party reached more voters than ever last year, the outreach was ineffective, led to poor-quality conversations with swing voters, and came too late in pivotal states. The changes suggested by the party, the officials said, include measuring the success of an outreach program by the impact of the conversations, not the number of attempted calls, while also investing in more long-term party building so voter contact does not begin weeks before Election Day.
Democratic officials have struggled to craft and discuss the report for much of the year amid internal debates over the party’s direction and leadership.
They were in the final stages of preparing it in October and began briefing top operatives and donors on its contents. But the expected public release was delayed until after off-year elections in November, with the party hoping to keep the focus on races they eventually swept in New York, New Jersey and Virginia.
Those preliminary briefings did not include any reflection on the handling of Biden’s late withdrawal from the race, his perceived infirmity and the lack of a competitive process used to select Harris as his replacement, which many Democrats have said was central to their party’s defeat. Members of the Democratic committee, including Martin, argued that little could be learned from those reflections, given that it is unlikely the party will face a similar situation again. Still, the lack of any reflection on Biden or Harris led some party insiders to criticize the report as intentionally avoiding what many saw as the most decisive issue in the 2024 loss.
The delays in releasing the report have spurred internal Democratic grumbling, and the committee’s decision to keep it private was already stirring up Democratic anger.
“A handful of wins is not the same as the rehabilitation of the Democratic brand, which is required to build real governing majorities and a national coalition,” said Alyssa Cass, a Democratic operative in New York. “Achieving that requires real soul-searching and new ideas, and it would be nice for candidates and campaigns to know they had a partner in that hard work, instead of an institutional structure buried in the sand.”
Other Democrats echoed Cass, casting the decision as the Democratic National Committee looking to obscure its own failings in 2024.
But some Democratic operatives, especially those close to the committee, praised the decision as prudent. “Democrats don’t need to engage in a hand-wringing exercise about last year’s elections when we’re winning this year’s elections,” said Xochitl Hinojosa, a former top spokesperson for the DNC.
How the party handles learning from the 2024 loss could prove critical for years to come. Democratic officials and campaign operatives from winning campaigns this year have already said they used lessons from the 2024 campaign to strengthen their operations. And some of the party’s most high-profile members, including Harris, have begun to break from the policies that defined the Biden administration.
In a speech Friday night at the Democratic National Committee meeting in Los Angeles, Harris argued that both Democrats and Republicans have failed to address Americans’ deep financial anxieties and lack of confidence in government.
“Both parties have failed to hold the public’s trust. Government is viewed as fundamentally unable to meet the needs of its people,” Harris said in an implicit condemnation of the Biden administration, which she served in for four years as his vice president and defended throughout her unsuccessful presidential campaign.
Trump “is not the only source of our problems,” Harris said, arguing that the rise of his political movement is “a symptom of a failed system that is the result of years of outsourcing and offshoring, financial deregulation, growing income inequality, a broken campaign finance system and endless partisan gridlock.”
Maeve Reston contributed to this report.
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