The Democratic National Committee has released its autopsy of the 2024 election, after pressure on its chair, Ken Martin. Although Martin ordered the report in early 2025, by December 2025, Martin announced that it would not be released. This fueled speculation that the report contained unpleasant truths that the party wanted to suppress.
What they have released is simply a draft that was never finished, riddled with factual errors and unaddressed comments, and little substance. A disclaimer on every page states that the document does not reflect the views of the DNC.
The Democratic Party is a large and well-funded organization. Surely it had the resources to see this project through to completion, if it wanted to.
The autopsy report says nothing about the Biden administration’s support for Israel and its genocide in Gaza, even though a January 2025 poll showed that it and Harris’s refusal to change it cost the Democrats votes. The Democratic Party’s support for Israel despite popular opposition is based on its support for U.S. imperialism, since Israel is an essential military arm of U.S. domination of the Middle East.
The report does briefly mention the Democrats’ weakness on economic issues, by saying that they did not emphasize enough that Trump would be worse (page 62). The Democratic Party did not have anything to offer, other than not being Trump, which evidently is not a sufficiently inspiring argument.
As a capitalist party, the Democrats work for the preservation of U.S. capitalism, even as economic crises that are a natural consequence of the system hurt the population. They cannot champion policies that would help people—or even stop providing support for a genocide—because doing so would require them to go against the basic capitalist drive for more profits. They did not complete their election autopsy because they are afraid that it would reveal that they serve billionaires and other capitalists over working-class people, as do the Republicans.
