Everyone is baffled

‘A huge omission’: Everyone is baffled by the exclusion of Gaza in DNC autopsy

The exclusion is roiling a party still grappling over how to address Gaza and Democrats’ shifting views on Israel.

By Lisa Kashinsky, Andrew Howard and Samuel Benson

The Democratic National Committee’s autopsy of the 2024 election doesn’t mention the war in Gaza. That’s sparking condemnation from across the party — and reigniting questions about leaders’ reticence to engage on the polarizing issue.

Multiple progressive activists said they had spoken with the report’s author about how the Biden administration’s approach to the Israel-Hamas conflict hurt former Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, especially with younger and more progressive voters.

David Hogg, a former DNC vice chair who was ousted last year, said in an interview Thursday that he had told Democratic operative Paul Rivera, the report’s author, “we need to acknowledge the role that Gaza played in us losing younger voters.” Hogg also said that during his time as vice chair he raised the same concern during a three- hour meeting with party officials.

The exclusion of the war in the report caught pro-Israel Democrats off guard as well.

“When it arrived in my inbox, I immediately clicked on it, used the search function, and searched for Gaza. Came up as zero,” said Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America. “Israel came up as zero, Jews came up as zero. I was surprised. It looks like there’s a huge omission.”

Members of the pro-Palestinian group IMEU Policy Project told those working on the post-mortem that the Biden administration’s support for Israel had cost the ticket. At the closed-door meeting last July, they were told in return that the DNC’s own data found the administration’s approach was a “net-negative” in the election.

And yet, that finding wasn’t included in the report.

“Ken Martin should release the information that the author of the autopsy told us clearly and unambiguously, which is that DNC officials’ review of their own data found Biden’s support for Israel to be a net-negative for Democrats in 2024,” IMEU Policy Project Executive Director Margaret DeReus said in a statement.

Martin said in a lengthy statement Thursday that he released the report “as I received it — in its entirety, unedited and unabridged.” He also said that he does not “endorse what’s in this report” or, pointedly, “what’s left out of it.”

Democratic divides over Israel roiled the 2024 campaign and continue to be a flashpoint within the party in 2026. Pro-Palestinian activists launched an “uncommitted” movement during the Democratic primary to buck former President Joe Biden’s handling of the war, and racked up hundreds of thousands of protest votes. They pushed Harris on the issue when she took over atop the ticket, only to be denied a speaking slot for a Palestinian American at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that year and for the vice president to stay largely in lockstep with Biden on the war.

Support for Israel within the Democratic Party has continued to slump. Some Democrats have long blamed the Biden administration’s approach to Gaza for hurting the ticket that year, and said the report’s omission continued the pattern.

“Either the choice to not share that part of things — or worse, to ignore the impact that our party’s failure to get it right on human rights had on the outcome of the 2024 election — suggests that our party is still not willing to face down the consequences and learn from our mistakes,” said Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive Michigan Senate candidate, in an interview Thursday. He was a major backer of the “uncommitted” movement to protest Biden’s handling of Gaza during the 2024 presidential primary.

The report contains other notable omissions — while it acknowledged Biden’s vulnerabilities, it did not explicitly discuss his age — along with misspellings and factual errors. A person within the DNC, granted anonymity to disclose details of the process, said the committee was not provided additional data, a list of interviewees or transcripts of the interviews despite multiple requests.

James Zogby — a longtime DNC member and critic of Israel who is president of the Arab American Institute — said Democrats are already addressing voters’ shift on Israel even if the report itself does not. Last month, a record number of Senate Democrats voted to block U.S. weapons sales to Israel. This week, voters nominated a progressive in a deep-blue Philadelphia House seat who was outspoken in calling the war in Gaza a “genocide.”

“There were mistakes made on this issue and there were mistakes made by Biden and it alienated a lot of young voters, a lot of voters of color, and the result was that it did take a toll,” said Zogby, who sits on the DNC’s embattled Middle East Working Group that Martin launched last year. “Candidates are moving forward and voters are moving forward and Democratic leaders are moving forward.”

Debates over how closely the U.S. should hew to its longtime ally and over whether to call the war in Gaza a “genocide” have roiled key Democratic primaries this year. So, too, have efforts by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, to influence Democratic elections.

The report’s abrupt release and its incomplete nature have upped scrutiny on the already-embattled Martin, who has been facing a crisis of confidence from within as the party struggles financially. Hogg has called for Martin’s ouster, and while some DNC members downplayed the chances that Martin would be ousted, one DNC member told POLITICO that Martin’s standing is at risk.