The Democratic Party conducted a confidential post-election analysis of why Kamala Harris lost in 2024. Senior party officials concluded that the Biden administration’s approach to the Gaza war significantly damaged her campaign. And then they buried the report.
According to an Axios investigation, the internal Democratic National Committee “autopsy” found that Biden’s Gaza policy was a “net-negative” for Harris — a finding so politically sensitive that the DNC has refused to release the document publicly. The analysis was conducted after Harris’s defeat to Donald Trump, and has been shared only in closed-door party meetings.
The findings match what organizers, Muslim and Arab American community leaders, and uncommitted voters warned repeatedly throughout the campaign: that unconditional support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, combined with Harris’s reluctance to break clearly from Biden’s position, was costing the campaign votes it could not afford to lose in key states. Those warnings were dismissed at the time. The DNC’s own analysis now confirms they were right.
Harris herself has since reflected publicly that the administration “should have done more” to criticize Israeli conduct during the war. The IMEU Policy Project, a pro-Palestinian advocacy organization, said the DNC acknowledged the Gaza factor in closed-door meetings while continuing to resist any public reckoning with it.
Harris attempted throughout the campaign to thread an impossible needle — expressing support for Israel’s right to defend itself while calling for a ceasefire — and satisfied neither the party’s progressive base nor the swing voters who had grown deeply uncomfortable with the scale of Palestinian civilian deaths. The report’s conclusion that this posture was a net negative is not a surprise to anyone who watched the campaign. What is notable is that the Democratic Party conducted the analysis, confirmed the finding, and then decided the American public didn’t need to know.
More than 72,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. The party that lost the White House partly because of its position on that killing has yet to change that position in any meaningful way.
The DNC’s Own Secret Report Says Gaza Cost Harris the Election. They’ve Been Hiding It.
The Democratic Party conducted a confidential post-election analysis of why Kamala Harris lost in 2024. Senior party officials concluded that the Biden administration’s approach to the Gaza war significantly damaged her campaign. And then they buried the report.
According to an Axios investigation, the internal Democratic National Committee “autopsy” found that Biden’s Gaza policy was a “net-negative” for Harris — a finding so politically sensitive that the DNC has refused to release the document publicly. The analysis was conducted after Harris’s defeat to Donald Trump, and has been shared only in closed-door party meetings.
The findings match what organizers, Muslim and Arab American community leaders, and uncommitted voters warned repeatedly throughout the campaign: that unconditional support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, combined with Harris’s reluctance to break clearly from Biden’s position, was costing the campaign votes it could not afford to lose in key states. Those warnings were dismissed at the time. The DNC’s own analysis now confirms they were right.
Harris herself has since reflected publicly that the administration “should have done more” to criticize Israeli conduct during the war. The IMEU Policy Project, a pro-Palestinian advocacy organization, said the DNC acknowledged the Gaza factor in closed-door meetings while continuing to resist any public reckoning with it.
Harris attempted throughout the campaign to thread an impossible needle — expressing support for Israel’s right to defend itself while calling for a ceasefire — and satisfied neither the party’s progressive base nor the swing voters who had grown deeply uncomfortable with the scale of Palestinian civilian deaths. The report’s conclusion that this posture was a net negative is not a surprise to anyone who watched the campaign. What is notable is that the Democratic Party conducted the analysis, confirmed the finding, and then decided the American public didn’t need to know.
More than 72,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. The party that lost the White House partly because of its position on that killing has yet to change that position in any meaningful way.