More than four months after Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin announced that he was breaking his promise to release its autopsy report on the 2024 election, the decision remains highly controversial. Arguments 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 Kamala Harris, who currently leads in polling of Democrats for the party’s 2028 nomination.
As Harris eyes another run, she has a major stake in the DNC continuing to keep the autopsy under wraps – and has a lot to lose if it reaches the light of day. She must feel gratified when Martin defends keeping the autopsy secret, saying that the party should not “relitigate” the 2024 election 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’s chances of becoming president in January 2029. Partly based on interviews with more than 300 prominent Democrats and others in all 50 states, it reportedly concludes that Harris’s 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” Republican voters, many in the Democratic base were repelled by the full backing that Harris gave to President Biden’s massive arming of Israel as civilian deaths mounted in Gaza. She 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.
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 her post-election book 107 Days, which dismisses antiwar protesters at her rallies as mere “hecklers.”
Harris’s protracted book tour has been beset by disruptions as well as her inability to provide cogent responses.
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To a certain extent, I understand where you’re coming from, and it doesn’t surprise me we had a black president before a female president, but Hillary won the popular vote. I think if Hillary didn’t have an already well established hate campaign against her and was not carrying the Bill Clinton baggage, she would’ve won. I think Elizabeth Warren would have done well had she not had to contend with the more progressive Bernie.
I think people forgot what Trump was like and people were suffering economically under Biden and there wasn’t enough acknowledgment of that. I think had Warren been the pick instead of Biden the first time she would have won. Biden was a filler episode as a president and people wanted someone willing to do something, or at least give them the appearance of having done something. Trump does a great job of that.
Harris getting all chummy with Liz Cheney, pandering to gun nuts and refusing to deviate in any way from the Biden administration line on any topic mattered a lot more than her ethnicity or gender.
She worked so hard for the R votes and didn’t even move the needle.
They ran her because they didn’t want to win