Five key takeaways from Democrats’ autopsy report on Kamala Harris’s loss

The Democratic Party in the United States has released its long-awaited report examining why former Vice President Kamala Harris failed to beat Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

But the so-called autopsy document, made public on Thursday, was incomplete and inconclusive – riddled with factual mistakes and annotations questioning its assertions.
It was also light on policy recommendations and missing some sections.

For months, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had been facing growing calls from activists to release the report.

DNC Chair Ken Martin acknowledged the report’s shortcomings on Thursday, but he said continuing to withhold it would have been a bigger distraction than releasing it in its current state.

“I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards. I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it. I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on it,” Martin said in a statement.

“But transparency is paramount. So, today I am releasing the report as I received it – in its entirety, unedited and unabridged – with annotations for claims that couldn’t be verified.”

Al Jazeera looks at the key takeaways from the report.

Zero mentions of Gaza
Leading up to the 2024 vote, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza was one of the most contentious and divisive issues for the Democrats and Harris.

Then-President Joe Biden had handed Israel nearly $18bn to fund its brutal assault that turned the Palestinian territory into rubble, killed tens of thousands of people and sparked famine in the enclave.
While the then-vice president kept emphasising diplomatic efforts to end the war, she vowed to continue arming Israel. Her campaign also refused to allocate a speaking slot for a Palestinian American representative at the Democratic National Convention in August 2024.

Some polls have suggested that the Gaza policy was one of the main reasons Harris lost the election.

A 2025 IMEU Policy Project survey showed that Gaza was a top issue for people who voted for Biden in 2020, but did not back Harris four years later.

Yet, there are zero mentions of Gaza and Israel in the 192 pages of the autopsy report.

Rob Flaherty, who served as Harris’s deputy campaign manager, recently underscored the effects of Gaza policy on the election.

“For many voters watching the horrific, painful footage out of Gaza, it became a moral question – one we didn’t have a good answer for,” Flaherty wrote in The Bulwark publications on Substack.

“In ways that may not be reflected in a poll, it meaningfully reduced enthusiasm. As one person from the campaign told me: ‘We spent the entire election with a giant, rotting fish around our necks’.”

Missing sections, mistakes and annotations
The DNC released the report in its unvarnished format, and it was not pretty.

Several sections – including the executive summary and conclusion – were entirely missing. The word “pending” with the annotation “this section was not provided by author” appeared in their place.

The document also makes numerous questionable and false assertions, leading to annotations such as “claim contradicts public reporting”, “data appears to be inaccurate and contradicts public reporting” and “analysis not supported by publicly available data”.

The document had some basic facts wrong. For example, it said Democrats won two gubernatorial races in 2024; they actually won three.

It also said that the Midwestern states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin “had consistently and reliably voted for Democratic candidates” when all three states voted for Trump in 2016.

Several US media outlets have reported that Martin had selected Democratic strategist Paul Rivera to produce the audit. But the names of the authors do not appear in the document.