The US Democratic Party has released its long-awaited report examining why former Vice President Kamala Harris failed to defeat Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
But the so-called autopsy document, made public Thursday, was incomplete and inconclusive, riddled with factual errors and annotations that questioned its claims.
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It was also light on policy recommendations and was missing some sections.
For months, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had faced growing calls from activists to release the report.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin acknowledged the report's shortcomings Thursday but 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 will not meet your standards. I do not endorse what is in this report, nor what is left out of it. I could not, in good faith, put the Democratic National Committee's seal of approval on it,” Martin said in a statement.
“But transparency is paramount. That is why today I am publishing the report as I received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged, with annotations for claims that could not be verified.”
Al Jazeera analyzes the report's key findings.
Zero mentions of Gaza
Ahead of the 2024 vote, Israel's genocidal war in Gaza was one of the most contentious and divisive issues for Democrats and Harris.
Then-President Joe Biden had given Israel nearly $18 billion to finance its brutal attack that turned the Palestinian territory into rubble, killed tens of thousands of people and caused famine in the enclave.
The Biden-Harris administration also vetoed several United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
That uncompromising pro-Israel policy caused some segments of the Democratic base to turn against Harris.
While the then-vice president continued to emphasize diplomatic efforts to end the war, she promised to continue arming Israel. His campaign also refused to allocate a speaking slot to a Palestinian-American representative at the Democratic National Convention in August 2024.
Some polls have suggested that Gaza politics was a major reason Harris lost the election.
A 2025 IMEU Politics Project poll showed that Gaza was a top issue for people who voted for Biden in 2020 but did not back Harris four years later.
However, there is no mention of Gaza and Israel in the 192 pages of the autopsy report.
Rob Flaherty, who served as Harris' deputy campaign manager, recently highlighted the effects of Gaza policy on the election.
“For many voters who saw the horrific and painful images of Gaza, it became a moral question, one for which we had no good answer,” Flaherty wrote in The Bulwark posts on Substack.
“In ways that may not be reflected in a poll, it significantly reduced enthusiasm. As one campaign person told me, 'We spent the entire election with a giant rotting fish around our neck.'”
Missing sections, errors and annotations.
The Democratic National Committee released the report in its plain format, and it was not pretty.
Several sections were completely missing, including the executive summary and conclusion. In its place appeared the word “pending” with the annotation “this section was not provided by the author.”
The document also makes numerous questionable and false claims, leading to notations such as “claim contradicts public reporting,” “data appears to be inaccurate and contradicts public reporting,” and “an analysis not supported by publicly available data.”
The document had some basic facts incorrect. For example, he said Democrats won two gubernatorial elections 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 conduct the audit. But the names of the authors do not appear in the document.
The report was withheld for months, but Martin argued it was virtually irreparable.
“What I asked for were practical conclusions for the future. I wanted real, deep and specific recommendations to improve our resource allocation, technology, data, organization, media strategy and more. I chose someone who I thought could produce this type of report,” the Democratic National Committee chairman said Thursday.
“When I received the report late last year, it wasn't ready for prime time. Not even close. And since no source material was provided, fixing it would have meant starting over, from the beginning: every conversation, every interview, every set of data.”
Biden did not support Harris enough
According to the report, the Democratic National Committee conducted polls ahead of the 2022 midterm elections to explore ways then-first lady Jill Biden could support her husband, but no similar research was conducted for Harris, the vice president.
The document also appeared to blame the White House for assigning Harris immigration responsibilities without adequately training her to handle the issue politically.
The vice president had taken the lead in addressing the root causes of migration from Central and South America, not immigration enforcement. Still, Republicans were quick to label her a “border czar.”
“The White House's approach of elevating the vice president with a report on a controversial issue without leveraging research to understand how taxpayers and voters would react to the Democratic administration's messengers was a huge missed opportunity,” the audit said.
He added that if Biden had “evaluated ways to leverage Kamala Harris earlier in the administration,” it would have benefited them both.
“The idea that a prepared and supported vice president could not have helped the president in the previous three and a half years is a significant failure of imagination,” the report reads.
The 'no Trump' approach failed
The audit highlighted a familiar criticism of Harris' campaign: that it failed to promote the Democratic candidate's own vision and instead focused on the importance of defeating Trump.
“Harris struggled with a definition beyond ‘not Trump’ and ‘prosecutor vs. criminal.’ The truncated campaign timeline didn't help, but the campaign didn't quickly resolve how to label Trump and define Harris,” the report reads.
But amid the affordability crisis gripping the country under a Democratic administration, “the obvious contrast with Trump was not a sufficient motivator” for voters, the document said.
He also argued that when Harris' campaign turned negative against Trump, it did not effectively highlight the Republican leader's flaws.
“Trump's retrospective approval of his work was too high, and the campaign and allies failed to remind voters of his incompetence,” the document said. “The idea [that] “That Trump’s negative opinions were ‘integrated’ is a huge failure of analysis and reality.”
The report did not provide a concrete example to support its claims.
Transgender ad 'boxed in' Harris campaign
The report said one of the most memorable ads of the campaign season, an ad in which Harris says she supports access to sex reassignment surgeries for “all transgender inmates” in the prison system, worked.
The ad played a video of Harris making that statement and concluded with a narrator saying, “Kamala is for them; President Trump is for you.”
Pollsters “all recognized the attack as very effective and felt the campaign was boxed in: the ad was a video of her saying what she said, and it was framed as an attack on her economic priorities,” the report said.
“If the vice president had not changed her position – and she did not – then there would be nothing that would have worked in response,” he added.
“Pollsters generally agreed with the views shared by campaign leaders: Given what was at stake and the timing, the focus should be on attacking Trump.”
