Democrats’ 2024 Autopsy Is Described as Avoiding the Likeliest Cause of Death
An audit being conducted by the D.N.C. is not looking at Joe Biden’s decision to run or key decisions by Kamala Harris’s team, according to six people briefed on the report.A Democratic audit of the 2024 election is said to be focusing less on the Biden and Harris campaign and more on how outside groups supported the effort.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
By Reid J. Epstein and Shane Goldmacher
July 19, 2025
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 audit, which the committee is calling an “after-action review,” is expected to avoid the questions of whether former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. should have run for re-election in the first place, whether he should have exited the race earlier than he did and whether former Vice President Kamala Harris was the right choice to replace him, according to the people briefed on the process so far.
Nor is the review expected to revisit key decisions by the Harris campaign — like framing the election as a choice between democracy and fascism, and refraining from hitting back after an ad by Donald J. Trump memorably attacked Ms. Harris on transgender rights by suggesting that she was for “they/them” while Mr. Trump was “for you” — that have roiled Democrats in the months since Mr. Trump took back the White House.
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.
Producing a tough-minded public review of a national electoral defeat would be a politically delicate exercise under any circumstance, given the need to find fault with the work and judgment of important party leaders and strategists. It is particularly fraught for the new D.N.C. chairman, Ken Martin, who promised a post-election review from his first day on the job but whose first few months in the role have been plagued by infighting and financial strains.
“We are not interested in second-guessing campaign tactics or decisions of campaign operatives,” said Jane Kleeb, the Nebraska Democratic chairwoman, who heads the association of Democratic state chairs and is a close ally of Mr. Martin. “We are interested in what voters turned out for Republicans and Democrats, and how we can fix this moving forward.”
Locked out of power at the federal level, Democrats are struggling to show that they have taken to heart the message that voters sent in November and are well suited to regain power in future elections.
The review, which was begun in March and is being led by Paul Rivera, a veteran Democratic operative, is not yet complete and the report is not fully drafted. Mr. Rivera nonetheless has begun briefing people on what the report has found so far, and those briefings suggest that the Democratic autopsy will avoid addressing some of the likeliest or leading causes of death.
Among those is whether Mr. Biden should have run for re-election. Some of Ms. Harris’s top aides have faulted him for dropping out so late that she had just 107 days to campaign as the presidential nominee. But Mr. Biden’s son Hunter said on a podcast this week that Democrats lost “because we did not remain loyal” to his father.
Top Democrats said they did not intend for the report to address strategic decisions made by leaders of the Biden and Harris campaigns. Indeed, in a sign of the report’s narrow scope, more than half a dozen people who were senior officials on the campaigns say they have not yet been interviewed.
D.N.C. officials cautioned that interviews were still taking place and the report’s conclusions might change before it is released this fall. “We’re glad to see there’s so much interest in an after-action report on how Democrats can win again,” Mr. 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.”
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“We are not interested in second-guessing campaign tactics,” said Jane Kleeb, the Nebraska Democratic chairwoman.Credit...Aaron J. Thornton/Getty Images for One Fair Wage
People briefed on the report’s progress said they had been told it would focus more on outside groups and super PACs that spent hundreds of millions of dollars aiding the Biden and Harris campaigns through advertising, voter registration drives and turnout efforts.
Ms. Kleeb said she expected the report to accelerate the party’s diversion of resources from advertising to organizing.
“The days of us spending millions and millions of dollars on traditional TV ads are over,” she said. “And I do think that this report will put an exclamation point on that.”
In particular, the people briefed on it said, the after-action review is expected to place blame with Future Forward, the party’s main super PAC, which spent $560 million to support Mr. Biden and then Ms. Harris. They said the report would argue that Future Forward spent far too much propping up Ms. Harris and not nearly enough attacking Mr. Trump.
It is expected to argue that Future Forward’s advertising approach was too focused on television programs to be effective. And it will review the lack of coordination between the super PAC’s advertising and the Harris campaign’s, which were often not in sync.
A Future Forward document that was distributed to donors and reviewed by The New York Times said about half of the super PAC’s advertising was delivered on digital platforms, which includes television-like streaming services. The group said it spent more than $51 million just on YouTube ads.
A Future Forward aide, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the group’s operations, said just 13 percent of its advertising was positive about Ms. Harris, with the rest attacking Mr. Trump.
The critiques of Future Forward will not be new to Democrats who read real-time coverage of the campaign last year, along with more recent book-length and magazine accounts of the Biden and Harris campaigns.
A D.N.C. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that Future Forward had been reflective and candid in its conversations with the review’s authors, denied that Future Forward would be blamed for the loss and insisted that any criticisms of the group would also apply to the broader Democratic world.
Mr. Rivera has conducted more than 200 interviews with officials from all 50 states, an aide said.
“The D.N.C.’s post-election review is not a finger-pointing exercise, it’s about bringing together Democrats across the ecosystem to adopt an actionable playbook to win, not just for 2026 and 2028, but to dominate for cycles to come,” said Rosemary Boeglin, a spokeswoman for the committee. “Democrats are cleareyed about the challenges facing the party — many of which are rooted well before the 2024 cycle — and it requires all of us to make structural changes in how we run campaigns.”
Mr. Rivera’s team has included aides to Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Representative Raul Ruiz of California. Mr. Walz, the party’s 2024 nominee for vice president, has spent time since November on an atonement tour publicly explaining what he thought went wrong in the campaign, including what he saw as his own missteps.
The D.N.C.’s election review, which will extend to contests for Congress and state offices, is not the only one underway. Jen O’Malley Dillon, who oversaw the Biden and Harris campaigns, is involved in a separate monthslong project being led by Melissa Williams, a former top official at Emily’s List who oversaw the group’s independent political spending.
That project is seeking to piece together as comprehensively as possible the technical and tactical decisions made both by the campaign and leading outside groups, and to document the results from those spending decisions, according to three people with knowledge of the research. The results are not expected to be made public but rather to be circulated privately among Democratic strategists to provide a fuller record and greater understanding of what happened, the people said.
A third look back is being led by the Strategic Victory Fund, a network of liberal donors and organizations.
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Ken Martin, the D.N.C. chairman, has promised a review of the party’s national electoral defeat since taking on his role.Credit...Annie Mulligan for The New York Times
Scott Anderson, the group’s president, said it had so far interviewed more than 100 people, including top officials from the Biden and Harris campaign and the D.N.C. Mr. Anderson said he did not intend to make its report public but would instead use it to inform Democratic donors and decision makers.
“So many people in my world, after 2016, jumped into a resistance mode that there wasn’t a real thoughtful moment to talk for a minute with all the key people about what we’re doing right and wrong about every aspect of politics and culture,” Mr. Anderson said. “We really need to take a step back in a way that I don’t feel was done after 2016, and have hard conversations.”
The D.N.C.’s report is expected to be far different from the so-called autopsy that Republicans produced after the 2012 election of Barack Obama. In March 2013, the Republican National Committee released a 100-page “Growth and Opportunity Project” report that declared the G.O.P. was in an “ideological cul-de-sac” and called for moderation on immigration along with a number of other changes.
While Republican leaders did adopt many of its recommendations in time for the 2016 election, Mr. Trump’s campaign ran counter to many of the changes the R.N.C. had proposed, and he has since remade the Republican Party in his image.
Tyler Pager contributed reporting.
Reid J. Epstein covers campaigns and elections from Washington. Before joining The Times in 2019, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Newsday and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Shane Goldmacher is a Times national political correspondent.
