Democrats Should Release Their 2024 Election Autopsy – and Stop the Gaza Denial
DNC officials told us their own data had clearly shown that the party's policy on Israel-Palestine was a 'net-negative' in the election. But the DNC refuses to share those results with the public.
Last summer, the organization I run, the IMEU Policy Project, met with officials conducting the Democratic National Committee’s “After Action” report – commonly referred to as an autopsy – about our experience engaging the Biden and Harris campaigns, and to share our research into how President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza had affected voter behavior in the 2024 election. The meeting invitation was extended to us after we led a letter to the DNC regarding leaks that the Harris campaign had refused to track responses to its email and text communications from voters concerned about Gaza, which were reportedly marked internally as a “no response.”
The failure to even track and log voter dissent in this way – an almost unthinkable decision for any serious electoral campaign – signaled to us just how comfortable the Democratic Party had become with ignoring its own base, especially on the issue of Palestinian rights. Our letter demanded that the DNC announce changes to this protocol as a bare minimum to show future campaigns would prioritize winning votes over hiding from the truth.
There is perhaps no issue with a greater gap between Democratic voters and the leadership of the Democratic Party than continued American military and political support for the genocide in Gaza. The evidence that supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza was an electoral liability for Biden and subsequently Vice President Kamala Harris is overwhelming and undeniable. It was evident in the nearly 1 million voters who cast a ballot for “Uncommitted” throughout the 2024 Democratic primaries to voice their dissent, in the masses of Americans who took to the streets and their campuses to reject American complicity in genocide, and most of all in a long trail of polls, voter data, and comments made by those within the White House themselves before and since.
We are grateful to the DNC for inviting us to engage in the discussions for the autopsy report – a level of engagement that has too long been denied to advocates for Palestinian rights – and especially for the seriousness with which the officials we spoke to were conducting their work. It was clear to us that the research going into the After Action report was thorough and objective, and the right questions were being asked to discover the truth about where the party had failed its voters and to find solutions going forward.
In that meeting, we shared analyses of our August 2024 surveys of Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, first reported in Zeteo, which showed Democratic and independent voters would be more supportive of Harris if a ceasefire was secured and if she called for restricting weapons to Israel. We had attempted to share this information with the campaign ahead of the election, but did not receive a response, and those policies were, of course, never adopted by the campaign. We also dug into a post-election poll, which found just how staggering the cost of those choices ended up being. That poll found ending Israel’s violence in Gaza was the top-cited issue – even above the economy – for voters who cast a ballot for Biden in 2020 but cast a ballot for someone besides Harris. It also found that a majority of Biden 2020 voters who didn’t vote for Harris, including nonvoters, thought Biden and Harris were too supportive of Israel, and believed that Israel was committing genocide.
DNC officials told us in that meeting that their own data had clearly shown that Biden’s policy was a “net-negative” in the election. The meeting was professional, cordial, and frankly refreshing. After months of hearing denials online and in the media about what our research had clearly shown, it was validating to hear that people tasked with truly uncovering the truth had come to our same conclusion. Unfortunately, that report and all the important work that was put into it have never been made public, and likely never will be unless leadership changes its decision last year to bury it.
Axios independently verified that Democratic officials conducting the autopsy believed Biden’s Gaza policy harmed the party’s standing with some voters.
That conclusion should not surprise anyone. Tom Nides, Biden’s ambassador to Israel from 2021 to 2023, said in January that Biden supported Israel “at enormous political cost.” Jack Lew, Biden’s ambassador to Israel from 2023 to 2025, said last year that Biden’s support for Israel “contributed to making his challenge for reelection insurmountable.” The irony should not be lost that they both said this to Israeli newspapers as a defense of Biden’s record to the Israeli public – with seemingly no introspection that they were admitting to paving an easier path for Donald Trump’s reascendance to the White House.
We also know that the White House knew this issue was a liability early on, and failed to budge in any meaningful way. As early as March 2024, a Quinnipiac University poll had shown that 60% of Biden 2020 voters who weren’t committed to voting for him again thought he was too supportive of Israel. Politico reported in May 2024 that Biden campaign aides were seeing their “poll numbers slip in Michigan… and begun to think about stitching together a new coalition.”
Despite these early warnings, the decision was still made to make no change in policy and to not even allow a Palestinian-American elected Democrat to endorse Harris from the DNC convention stage. Israeli officials, for their part, have said that Biden never put serious pressure on them to agree to a ceasefire. Just a month before the election, President Biden took the podium to gloat that “no administration has helped Israel more than I have” – even as the Trump campaign’s data was showing “up-for-grabs voters were about six times as likely as other battleground-state voters” to be motivated by their views about Gaza. Progressive organizers were airing warnings that the issue of Gaza was demotivating base turnout, and a post-election survey found 36% of Harris voters said they knew someone who didn’t vote for her because of the issue.
DNC chair Ken Martin, to his great credit, early on in his candidacy, said the DNC convention decision was a mistake. His willingness to pursue an autopsy – something his predecessors failed to do after the 2016 loss – showed a refreshing desire to learn the truth about what went wrong. While we had a concern that the DNC’s decision to conceal the report might have been motivated by its findings about support for Israel, we take their denial of this to Axios seriously and believe it to be sincere.
We encourage the DNC to release these findings publicly, but if they do not, we hope they are taking necessary steps to inform other party committees and candidates about what their research showed. It was political malpractice for Democratic leadership to choose funding a genocide over stopping Donald Trump. But more than that, it will end up being a historic stain on our country that generations of people will look back on and wonder how the United States of America found itself funding the destruction of homes in Gaza instead of building homes here. It is not lost on any of us who do this work every day that the rapid shift in American public opinion that has made support for Israel an electoral liability was brought about by the brave Palestinians, both professional and citizen journalists, who reported on their own annihilation, refusing to die silently. Democrats have a duty – not just in pursuit of winning elections, but to their own most deeply held beliefs about human rights for all people - to not repeat this same mistake, ever again.
Margaret DeReus is the executive director of the IMEU Policy Project.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to more precisely describe Axios’s reporting.
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they should , but they wont..sadly their prefer the cold hard cash of pro-israel lobby groups to actually serving the american people :(
DemocRats continue to put AIPAC and affiliate ahead of their American members and their own relevancy in the politics. They lost my vote and support and I am not sure they will ever get it back as their support for the genocidal Israel is far stronger than their support for people like me.