More than four months after Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin announced he was breaking his promise to release the organization’s autopsy report on the 2024 election, the decision remains highly controversial. Arguments continue to swirl around whether it’s wise to proceed without public scrutiny of what went wrong during the last presidential campaign. But scant attention has focused on how hiding the autopsy provides an assist to former Vice President Kamala Harris, who currently leads in polling of Democrats for the party’s nomination in 2028.
As Harris eyes another run, she has a major stake in the DNC continuing to keep the autopsy under wraps — and a lot to lose if it reaches the light of day. So she must feel gratified when Martin defends keeping the findings secret, saying that the party should not “relitigate” what happened in 2024 and claiming that release of the 200-page document would result in “navel-gazing.”
Release of the entire autopsy would likely be a blow to Harris’ chances at winning the party’s nomination and becoming president.
Release of the entire autopsy would likely be a blow to Harris’ chances at winning the party’s nomination and becoming president. Partly based on interviews with more than 300 prominent Democrats and others in all 50 states, it reportedly concludes that Harris’ unwavering support for U.S. weapons shipments to Israel was a significant factor in her loss to Donald Trump.
While she pursued an unsuccessful strategy of wooing scarce “moderate” and disaffected Republicans, many in the Democratic base were repelled by the full backing that Harris gave to President Joe Biden’s massive arming of Israel as civilian deaths mounted in Gaza. The vice president adhered to Biden’s admonition that there be “no daylight” between the two of them as she campaigned for president after he withdrew from the race. In an infamous appearance on ABC’s “The View” on Oct. 4, 2024, a month before the election, she demurred when asked if there was anything she would have done differently than Biden. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she said, a response, according to her memoir about the election “107 Days,” she would come to regret.
At the time, polls showed that Harris was harming her election prospects by refusing to distance herself from Biden’s policy toward Israel. She evades that reality in “107 Days,” in which she dismisses antiwar protesters at her rallies as mere “hecklers.”
Harris’ protracted book tour has been beset by disruptions, as well as her inability to provide cogent responses. At one appearance last fall, protesters yelled “Your legacy is genocide! Your legacy will always be genocide!” Her rejoinder was, “You know what, I am not president of the United States. You want to go to the White House and talk to him, then go on and do that.” Weeks later, speaking in Chicago, when a protester accused her of complicity in the Gaza horrors, she fired back: “Are you the same person that was telling people not to vote?”
Renewed attention to the Harris campaign’s finances would also be unwelcome. Thirteen months after the election, the New York Times reported that “some Democratic donors have demanded a more thorough accounting of how exactly the party and Ms. Harris spent $1.5 billion in 15 weeks en route to losing every battleground state in 2024.” In mid-April, NBC News noted that “to date, a full accounting has not been made of who was paid what from the $1.5 billion, though the DNC later disclosed it carried more than $20 million in debt from Harris’ loss.”
A few weeks ago, Harris told an audience of influential Black leaders that she’s “thinking about” running for president again, saying, “I know what the job is and I know what it requires.” POLITICO described those comments as “the most explicit sign yet she’ll run for president in 2028.”
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Just about the last thing Harris would need is enormous publicity about an authoritative audit from the DNC — the governing body of the Democratic Party — about what was wrong with her 2024 campaign. Such an autopsy would stoke fires of negativity and apprehension about making her the party’s standard-bearer again.
The DNC’s scrapping of the autopsy is a political gift that keeps on giving to Harris as she appears to be gearing up for the 2028 campaign. A straw in the wind: The DNC national coalitions director, Gabriel Uy, recently emailed colleagues that he will leave that job in early May to “be working for VP Harris again, so let’s keep in touch.” Uy was the Nevada political director for Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign and later served as deputy director of public engagement and intergovernmental affairs for her when she was vice president.
Under ongoing pressure from a variety of Democrats, Martin has begun to indicate that he will supply “top lines” summarizing the autopsy rather than the full report. Such a move would do little to placate critics, raising pointed questions about what was omitted and why the DNC was only willing to engage in cherry-picking instead of fully informing the party faithful.
During an MS NOW television interview in late April, Martin used head-spinning illogic to defend concealing the autopsy and denied he was “here to protect anyone.” But it seemed to be an instance of “the chairman doth protest too much.”
Martin has properly emphasized that the Democratic National Committee should maintain strict neutrality in relation to presidential primaries, unlike what happened in 2016 when the DNC secretly assisted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton against Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. A year ago, in a well-publicized dustup with David Hogg, the gun control activist who was serving as DNC vice chair, Martin insisted that Hogg could not run a funding operation for candidates in party primaries and remain a DNC officer.
“I am determined to make sure we don’t repeat the same errors of the past,” Martin wrote in Time magazine. He explained that “I’ve spent the past decade making sure our party cannot ever again be perceived as having a thumb on the scale for one candidate.”
But now, in effect, Martin’s concealment of the autopsy report puts a thumb on the scale for one candidate: Kamala Harris.
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