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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If everybody who says the will vote the Democratic nominee when the DNC gives them a candidate they can vote for would go and vote in the primaries, then we would have that vote-worthy nominee. Our primaries turnout is absolutely atrocious. Have a look here, set filters for position == overall turnout, phase == primaries, turnout population == voting eligible. Not one single presidential or midterm year with a single state hitting even 50%.
Yes, I know that there were no serious challengers running in the 2024 primaries to vote for. But with only 4% of the primary votes being for Uncommitted and that was covered quite heavily and for the first time ever, an incumbent president who already had the nomination locked up withdrew (don't try and convince me that the donors didn't factor in the highly covered public opposition into their decisions to push for Biden to withdraw).
So now imagine if we actually had 70% turnout in the primaries and everyone who doesn't like any of the candidates writes in Uncommitted. That would probably be a hell of a lot higher than 4%. We already know that candidates ignore non-voters, and we saw in 2024 that people voting explicitly for "not these people" has an effect. So please lets amplify those voices for once!
edit: I do think the report should be released, I just don't think that we the voters should be so willingly subservient to "the party" by not voting in the primaries.
The US has extremely high turnout for primary elections (and a low turnout for general elections) compared to democracies, the vast majority of which don't even have open primary elections.
The problem is the two-party system.
The us primary system is used to gaslight the public into the candidates the oligarchy wants. Which is why the dates are staggered with weaker insignificant states first before super Tuesday