WASHINGTON — A slipshod, error-riddled draft “autopsy” of Donald Trump’s crushing 2024 election victory commissioned by the Democratic National Committee largely blamed allies of former President Joe Biden for failing to properly support former Vice President Kamala Harris — but also knocked the party apparatus as relying on “negative partisanship” to win races.
The draft, begrudgingly released by the DNC on Thursday, made no mention of Biden’s advanced age or evidence of his cognitive decline; Harris’ pick of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as a running mate; Democrats’ turn against Israel following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack; or four-decade high inflation during the 46th president’s term as reasons for Trump becoming the first Republican nominee in 20 years to win the popular vote en route to an Electoral College blowout.
The report, drafted by former Bill Clinton strategist Paul Rivera, did make sure to knock Team Biden for not conducting advanced polling on Harris prior to the incumbent abandoning his re-election bid that July and failing to push back effectively on the narrative that the veep was an ineffective “border czar.”
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“The national campaign did not effectively drive Trump’s negatives, and the White House did not effectively support Vice President Harris over three and half years to improve her standing before the candidate switch,” the report read, while arguing that Harris’ immigration portfolio had been “poorly framed by Republicans.”
“It [‘Border czar’] was not the official title, but it was the one that the media propagated, and the White House failed to contradict or correct,” the report added.
The only mention of reservations about Biden’s candidacy for a second term included a reference to the White House asking the DNC ahead of the 2022 midterms to poll “how Dr. [Jill] Biden could support her husband as president … No similar research was conducted to support the Vice President — to identify the issues she should talk about, the ways in which she should talk about them, the audiences with which she could perhaps resonate and support the President’s agenda.”
The autopsy did grapple with fallout from the most successful Trump campaign ad, a spot focused on transgender issues whose tagline declared: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
Pollsters “all recognized 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 stated.
“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.”
However, the autopsy warned the party had relied too much on demonizing Republicans, resulting in fielding candidates “incapable of projecting strength, unity, and leadership.”
“Voters have drifted away. Indeed, many of our critical Democratic wins can be attributed to negative partisanship – where Republicans have nominated deeply flawed candidates, and we have been able to convince some Republicans and most Independents to support Democrats in those contests.”
In another striking section, the autopsy concluded: “The GOP’s victory in 2024 largely came down to its ability to learn more from President [Barack] Obama’s victory [in 2008] than Democrats did.
“The GOP’s campaign was powered by data, amplified by social media, and enabled by ardent supporters at every level,” it noted, adding: “[W]e failed to meet these voters in the ecosystems where they spend the majority of their time and where narratives are built.”
Still, the autopsy cautioned against splurging Democratic campaign funding “on legacy and social media platforms owned by oligarchs” in future election cycles — claiming that their party can only “rent” the systems that the GOP appears to “own.”
The Harris campaign spent $2.28 billion and still failed to get the vice president elected. Throughout the 2024 cycle, the Democratic Party also outspent Republicans in Senate and House contests.
The DNC and Chairman Ken Martin had come under intense pressure to publicly release the report, with even Harris urging its disclosure.
But the draft was missing several sections and critical information, such as a list of the supposed 12,000 interviewees — which did not include Biden, Harris, Walz or top White House advisers such as Mike Donilon, Anita Dunn, Steve Ricchetti — and data citations.
DNC officials had repeatedly requested that data from Rivera, including transcriptions and notes of interviews, a source familiar with the matter told The Post.
A second source inside the DNC noted that the Clinton alum refused to finish the report in a timely manner.
The draft was also annotated to highlight several factual errors, including Democrats’ winning margin in the 2024 North Carolina gubernatorial race and a misspelling of the name of former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine.
Another passage seemed to suggest that 2022 Republican Georgia Senate hopeful Herschel Walker would offer “little more than rubber-stamping the president’s agenda” — despite Biden being in office at the time.
In a statement Thursday, Martin said the party opted to release the autopsy after learning that CNN planned to run an in-depth piece on it.
“I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards,” the DNC chairman said. “I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it. I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on it.
“But transparency is paramount. So, today I am releasing the report as I received it – in its entirety, unedited and unabridged – with annotations for claims that couldn’t be verified.”
Martin’s handling of the autopsy report, as well as the DNC’s financial and management struggles, has fueled backlash against his leadership of the party apparatus.
Rivera included a grim rundown of Democrats’ standing, describing their slippage among working-class voters and panning their media strategy.
“Since the high point of the 2008 Obama landslide, when he received nearly 10 million more votes than John McCain, the Democratic Party has vacillated between stagnation and retrogression,” the report said.
“In the sixteen tumultuous years since that historic election, Democrats have lost ground at every level of government.”
Part of the issue, the report argued, is that Democrats “failed to capitalize on the economic disaster of the Bush presidency by cementing a relationship with working Americans.”
Rivera called on Democrats to get better organized at the state and local level and to work on making inroads in Middle America and the South, touting Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s (D-Mich.) “losing better” strategy of trying to reduce the GOP’s edge in rural areas.
The autopsy also pushed for the DNC to “[i]nvest in partisan voter registration — where permissible and possible” going forward to reduce Republicans’ gains in recent years in critical states.
