AP Photo/Susan Walsh
The Democratic National Committee is compiling an autopsy of the 2024 election that does not examine actions taken by former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, The New York Times reported on Saturday.
Biden made the ill-fated decision to run for reelection at the age of 82, despite clear signs that his cognitive abilities were declining. Nowhere was this clearer than in his first and only debate last June with President Donald Trump, where Biden repeatedly stumbled in his responses and at one point declared that he “finally beat Medicare.” In July, Biden withdrew from the race and threw his support behind Harris, the eventual nominee. Harris inherited Biden’s campaign staff, which – along with Biden himself – reportedly advised the vice president not to distance herself from the president. Harris’s campaign advisers also steered her away from casting Republicans as “weird” because they thought that messaging was too negative.
Regarding the DNC’s forthcoming autopsy, the Times reported:
The Democratic National Committee’s examination of what went wrong in the 2024 election is expected to mostly steer clear of the decisions made by the Biden-turned-Harris campaign and will focus more heavily instead on actions taken by allied groups, according to interviews with six people briefed on the report’s progress.
The paper stated that the assessment is expected to eschew the question of whether Biden should have tried to run for reelection and whether Harris was the best choice to succeed him as the nominee. Moreover, the autopsy is poised to forgo analyses of key decisions made by the Harris campaign.
“Party officials described the draft document as focusing on the 2024 election as a whole, but not on the presidential campaign — which is something like eating at a steakhouse and then reviewing the salad,” the Times cheekily added.
Jane Kleeb, the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party and a close ally of DNC Chair Ken Martin, said the party is not seeking to review the decisions of Democratic Party operatives.
“We are not interested in second-guessing campaign tactics or decisions of campaign operatives,” she said. “We are interested in what voters turned out for Republicans and Democrats, and how we can fix this moving forward.”
The autopsy, which is incomplete and undrafted, is being led by longtime Democratic strategist Paul Rivera. He cautioned against rushing to judgment until the final report is made public.
“We’re glad to see there’s so much interest in an after-action report on how Democrats can win again,” Rivera said. “But folks might be better off holding their applause, or their criticism, until we have had a chance to complete our work and people can actually read it.”
