In December, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin decided at the last second to block the publication of a long-promised autopsy of the Democrats’ losses in the 2024 elections. Martin said publishing the postmortem would only be a “distraction.” Now new reporting is providing some insight into what kinds of accountability — and possible battles within the party — the DNC chair might have been trying to dodge.
The Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, a pro-Palestinian activist group, told Axios that during a closed-door meeting with DNC aides preparing the party’s analysis of its 2024 loss, those aides made a striking confession about the political effects of the Biden administration’s support for Israel. According to Axios, Hamid Bendaas, a spokesperson for the IMEU Policy Project, said that during that meeting, “the DNC shared with us that their own data also found that [Biden’s Israel] policy was, in their words, a ‘net-negative’ in the 2024 election.” The IMEU Policy Project has since accused the DNC of withholding its postmortem to avoid having to publicize that conclusion about Israel policy. (The DNC confirmed to Axios the meeting took place, but didn’t provide details of it, and denied that findings about Israel are why the 2024 autopsy was withheld.)
Harris’ reluctance to appear boldly progressive was a liability for the Democrats.
It matters that the DNC allegedly found that Biden’s Israel policy hurt Kamala Harris’ 2024 bid. It strengthens the argument that Harris’ reluctance to diverge from the Democrats’ unwavering support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza was an electoral liability. More broadly, it suggests that Harris’ reluctance to appear boldly progressive was a liability for the Democrats at a time when the party needed to mobilize young people and progressives in large numbers. It should be part of how we understand what went wrong in 2024.
But the DNC’s findings, whatever they are, aren’t just important for the historical record — they’re important for the future. In December, I wrote that the DNC’s suppression of its postmortem would shield party leaders from accountability, allow them to avoid self-reflection and incentivize them to keep pushing bad status quo policies. If the IMEU Policy Project’s characterization of its meeting DNC aides is accurate, then without the postmortem, the Democratic Party can more easily avoid a debate about its continued support of Israel — even if the policy is a vote dampener for significant swaths of the base.
You might be asking, why would Democrats continue to hold a position that’s an electoral loser? It’s complex, but reasons include the Democratic establishment’s ideological sympathy toward Israel; the Democratic Party’s geopolitical commitment to Israel as a strategic beachhead in the Middle East; a pathological fear of looking too bold in upsetting long-standing norms; and concern about potentially losing hawkish donors who support Israel and a more aggressive posture against Iran. But it’s increasingly clear that, in addition to being the morally right thing to do, the party dropping its unwavering support of Israel’s brutalization of Palestinians would also be strategically savvy — especially as the midterms approach, and as Trump is pushing his “Board of Peace” farce.
The day after the Axios report, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., called on the DNC to release the full 2024 autopsy. “We need to deal with the hard truths about how our failure to stop the genocide in Gaza cost us support,” Khanna said. “Only when we have a new moral direction in this party will we win back the country’s trust.” Khanna is right. It is long, long overdue for the party to reckon with its indefensible complicity in the destruction of Gaza, and for it to chart a new course that involves actually standing up for human rights consistently.
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