July 3, 2026

Democratic Primaries Reveal What the DNC Autopsy Buried

Jamal Kanj

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Photo by Colin Lloyd

The Democratic National Committee’s 192-page post-mortem on the 2024 election, titled ‘Build to Win. Build to Last,” failed to build, to win, or to learn. It never answered the only question that mattered: how did a twice-impeached, multiply-indicted former president walk back into the White House with more votes than prior to his indictments?

The report, authored by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera and released in May 2026 after months of stonewalling by DNC Chair Ken Martin, reads less as a serious political reckoning than as a confirmation-bias pamphlet drafted by people determined not to upset the party’s old guard. It calls for renewed focus on “Middle America,” criticizes years of disinvestment in state parties, and faults poor economic messaging. It is not wrong on any of these points. But these points alone did not cost the party America — not just Middle America.

The report boasts of conducting more than 1,200 interviews to assess the health of state parties in every state, district, and territory. While it seems to be an impressive number, it remains questionable if the interviews were of local party leaders, or general democratic voters? Did it include micro-level analysis of competitive districts? Or to account for 6.8 million voters who supported Biden in 2020, where they went, and why they left.

There was no breakdown of Harris’s collapse by age. No independent examination of what drove young voters away, particularly in university towns where Gaza protests defined the political atmosphere of 2024. How many of the 6.8 million were from Generation Z? And not a word on the Zionist bubble around Biden and how that funded and shielded Israel as it carried out a live-streamed genocide in Gaza.

This is not a methodological oversight. It is engineered by design. University towns and young voter precincts were precisely where the Democratic coalition was visibly disintegrating. Most likely the reason they lost states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Students who watched ‘genocide Joe’ enable the starvation of children in Gaza, did not stay home out of apathy. They made a calculated judgment: that on the question of war crimes, there was no daylight between the two candidates. The autopsy never acknowledged the question existed.

The autopsy is defined as much by its omissions as by its findings. Missing entirely is any serious examination of the “Uncommitted” movement that emerged during the 2024 Democratic primaries. A new political phenomenon that mobilized at least 700,000 of Democratic voters in protest of the Biden administration’s Gaza policy. Despite becoming one of the most visible grassroots insurgencies of the 2024 nomination process, the report neither analyzes its causes nor assesses its electoral consequences. It asks how Democrats lost public voters but avoids asking why so many of its own primary voters publicly warned the party months before Election Day that its support for Israel’s war in Gaza carried profound political and moral costs. An autopsy that omits one of the election cycle’s most significant internal rebellions is less an honest diagnosis than an exercise in belief perseverance and selective memory.

Instead, it retreated into campaign mechanics: Harris “was not well prepared,” Democrats assumed Trump was unacceptable, and the party deluded itself that undecided voters would hold their noses and choose the lesser of two evils. Observations about messaging and strategy, carefully constructed to avoid touching the one issue that led the Arab Americans vote in Michigan to split evenly between Harris and Trump when it favored Biden by a large margin in 2020.

The autopsy’s authors, like much of the Democratic establishment, prefer to frame the party’s youth problem as a generational disconnect, a cultural or communication failure that better social media spending might fix. That framing is both disingenuous and lazy. There is no generational disconnect. There is a massive divide between the old guard and the young generation — and the base at large — when it comes to Israel.

Recent primary results could not be clearer exposing the failure of the DNC autopsy. More than 80% of Democratic voters hold a negative view of Israel. That is not a fringe position within the party. That is the party. More than four out of five of the Democratic voters’ regard the long-held ‘sacred cow’ unfavorably, and the post-election study does not contain a single mention. That is dismissive of 80% of the Party. The analysis is not seeking lessons learned, it is a whitewash.

The Gaza omission was not an oversight. It was a cover-up. The IMEU Policy Project’s executive director was blunt, demanding the release of findings that the autopsy’s own author had reportedly acknowledged in private: DNC officials’ internal data showed Biden’s support for Israel was a net negative for Democrats in 2024. That finding never appeared in the report. It was buried. Former DNC Vice Chair David Hogg said publicly that he told Rivera directly, “We need to acknowledge the role that Gaza played in us losing younger voters.”

This is not an outlier critique. It is coming from people who participated in the process and are now openly saying its central finding was suppressed. When the contributors to an autopsy publicly declare that the finding is edited out, the document becomes a cover-up.

The autopsy’s Gaza omission collapses entirely when measured against what Democratic primaries have screamed in 2026. Candidates running on explicitly anti-Israeli-policy platforms have toppled incumbents and dethroned members of Congress backed by Democratic leadership and bankrolled by AIPAC. These are not noble protest campaigns falling short. They are winning Democratic voters, in Democratic primaries, on an explicitly pro-Palestine platform and making AIPAC a radioactive word and political liability.

The DNC must root out AIPAC money buying its primaries and align itself with the overwhelming majority of its own voters on Israel. It must confront the political cost of a foreign policy that millions of Americans no longer view as merely misguided, but as complicit in war crimes.

The autopsy did not diagnose the cause of failure, it smothered it. Without an honest accounting of the party’s failures in 2024, and without acknowledging the electoral success of anti-Israel Democratic candidates in the 2026 primaries, there can be no realistic path forward. The lesson is simple: votes count; money does not.

Jamal Kanj (jamalkanj.com) is the author of Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Palestine/Arab world issues for various national and international publications. 

https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/07/03/democratic-primaries-reveal-what-the-dnc-autopsy-buried/