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

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.

The report was withheld for months, but Martin argued that it was practically unfixable.

“What I did ask for were actionable takeaways for the future. I wanted real, in-depth, specific recommendations to improve our allocation of resources, tech, data, organising, media strategy and more. I chose someone who I thought could produce this type of report,” the DNC chair said on Thursday.

“When I received the report late last year, it wasn’t ready for primetime. Not even close. And because no source material was provided, fixing it would have meant starting over, from the beginning – every conversation, every interview, every data set.”

Biden did not support Harris enough

According to the report, the DNC conducted polling ahead of the 2022 midterm elections to explore ways then-First Lady Jill Biden could support her husband, but no similar research was done for Harris – the vice president.

The document also appeared to fault the White House for assigning Harris immigration responsibilities without adequately training her to handle the issue politically.

The vice president had taken the lead on addressing the root causes of migration from Central and South America, not immigration enforcement. Still, Republicans were quick to label her as “border czar”.

“The White House’s approach towards elevating the Vice President with a controversial issue brief without leveraging research into understanding how taxpayers and voters would react to the messengers of the Democratic administration was a massive missed opportunity,” the audit said.

It 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 preceding three and a half years is a significant failure of imagination,” the report read.

‘Not Trump’ approach failed

The audit outlined a familiar criticism of the Harris campaign – that it failed to promote the Democratic candidate’s own vision and focused on the importance of defeating Trump instead.

“Harris struggled with definition beyond ‘not Trump’ and ‘prosecutor vs. felon.’ The truncated campaign timeline didn’t help, but the campaign did not quickly resolve on how to tag Trump and define Harris,” the report read.

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.

It also argued that when the Harris campaign did go negative against Trump, it did not highlight the Republican leader’s flaws effectively.

“The retrospective job approval for Trump was too high and the campaign and allies failed to remind voters of his incompetence,” the document read. “The idea [that] Trump’s negatives were ‘baked in’ is a major failure of analysis and reality.”

The report did not provide a concrete example to back its assertions.

Transgender ad ‘boxed’ Harris campaign

The report said one of the most memorable commercials of the campaign season – an ad featuring Harris saying she supports access to sex change surgeries for “every transgender inmate” in the prison system – worked.

The commercial played video of Harris making that statement and concluded with a narrator saying, “Kamala is for they/them’; President Trump is for you.”

Pollsters “all recognised the attack as very effective, and felt the campaign was boxed – 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 would not change her position – and she did not – then there was nothing which would have worked as a response,” it added.

“The pollsters generally concurred with the opinions shared by campaign leadership – given the stakes and timing, the focus needed to be on attacking Trump.”