DNC Autopsy Exposes the Left’s ‘Gaza’ Excuse as Nonsense

By Noah Rothman

Friday, May 22, 2026

 

It’s hard to summon any sympathy for Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin following his reluctant decision to release a half-finished and wholly unsatisfying draft of the party’s long-awaited 2024 election “autopsy.” His fellow Democrats may, however, commiserate with the embattled party functionary over his torment by the far-left activist class amid its effort to force him to rewrite history.

 

Back in February, Axios reporter Holly Otterbein dropped a bombshell: The autopsy’s release was delayed due to internal Democratic friction over acknowledging the degree to which Benjamin Netanyahu tanked Kamala Harris’s presidential bid. According to Otterbein’s sources within the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project, which had supposedly been granted early access to the report, the Biden administration’s pro-Israel policies alienated fellow activists, handing the election to Donald Trump. Worse, the DNC was covering up what it knew, perhaps in a suicidal effort to preserve those pro-Israel policies — an indication of the extent of Israel’s malign reach.

 

The far left took the report as gospel. The “uncommitted” movement — an anti-Israel revolt against Harris originating within Muslim communities in Michigan — cost Harris winnable states, they said. If Harris had been willing to “consider an arms embargo on Israel as it continued its genocide against Palestinian people in Gaza,” RootsAction director Norman Solomon told the far-left talk show host Amy Goodman, there is “no doubt” that “she would have gained a lot more votes than she would have lost.” Indeed, in her post-campaign memoir, Harris herself accused Biden of hurting her chances by giving Netanyahu a “blank check” to prosecute the post-October 7 war against Hamas (all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding).

 

It was all nonsense. The draft autopsy released to the public on Thursday contains no mention of either the Gaza Strip or Israel — not even once. With the exposure of the lie that the activists had retailed for months, those same activists pivoted to savaging the DNC for failing to produce fabricated evidence designed to prop up their delusion of self-importance.

 

The onetime DNC apparatchik David Hogg insisted, “We need to acknowledge the role that Gaza played in us losing younger voters,” whether that is true or not. Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed accused the Committee of choosing “to ignore the impact that our party’s failure to get it right on human rights had on the outcome of the 2024 election.” Maine’s Graham Platner was similarly incensed. “The words ‘Gaza’ and ‘genocide’ appear precisely zero times in the DNC autopsy,” he fumed. “Turning a blind eye to crimes against humanity was a grave injustice, and a terrible election strategy.”

 

The most durable conspiracy theories are those that are inherently unfalsifiable. Indeed, any effort to falsify them deepens their believers’ convictions. This one is a classic example. In the activists’ framework, the DNC’s failure to reference Gaza, Israel, or the imaginary “genocide” in the Palestinian territories is more evidence of pernicious Israeli influence.

 

Kamala Harris’s defeat may be one of the most overdetermined phenomena in modern political history. Her loss was attributable to Joe Biden’s infirmities and the party’s mulish refusal to acknowledge them, the inflation and migrant influx over which he presided, and her objective lack of political talent. Late deciders “were more concerned about Democrats being too extreme than Republicans,” one of the hundreds of data-rich post-election analyses read. The Jews’ supposedly mesmeric hold over Joe Biden’s presidency dominated the thinking of only a handful of far-left obsessives, the overwhelming majority of whom pulled the lever for Harris despite their misgivings. Pre-election polling found that — even when it came to foreign policy, a subject about which general election voters are notoriously apathetic — the war in Gaza was a subject of little salience to most voters.

 

Beyond that, as the think tank Third Way’s executive vice president for policy, Jim Kessler, observed, Harris lost in states where Democratic candidates triumphed in state-wide contests. Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin, Arizona’s Ruben Gallego, Nevada’s Jacky Rosen, Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin, and North Carolina’s Josh Stein managed to engineer victories for themselves despite maintaining, to varying degrees, a nuanced view toward Israel’s defensive war. Likewise, Kessler noted, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro had and maintains the support of a majority of Keystone State Democrats, all while Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman has shed Democratic support. The factor driving that discrepancy seems more likely to be their relative hostility toward Trump, not their almost indistinguishably sympathetic outlook toward Israel.

 

The evidence in support of the notion that an electorally relevant segment of the activist left scuttled Harris’s campaign is so thin that we can see why the activist class would attempt to strongarm Democrats into falsifying some. That’s all this ever was: a power play. It was a campaign prosecuted by the querulously myopic anti-Israel left to bully the DNC into conceding that they commanded more political authority than was empirically observable. And now that their strongarming failed, they’re busily accusing the DNC of executing a vast cover-up. And it might work.

 

Rank-and-file Democrats have every reason to be furious with a party that clearly refuses to debrief their voters. Martin himself admitted that the report “does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards.” It is a dog’s breakfast of excuse-making and obfuscation, dressed up in nauseatingly saccharine prose. That anger will be exploited by the unscrupulous.

 

The activist left should be thanking the DNC for forcing them to confront their own impotence. After all, they failed.

 

They failed to muscle (literally) the party into endorsing their preferred delusions in 2024. They failed to extort the party into retroactively giving them more authority than they objectively deserved in 2025. And they failed to force the party into authoring a revisionist history of that election in 2026. Given this record of failure, you’d think Democrats would feel no qualms about excising this political tumor. But they dare not practice that sort of political hygiene.

 

Movements like these don’t win power through persuasion. They ascend through intimidation, menace, and the selective application of force. And that is why they’re rising to a place of primacy within the Democratic coalition today, even though their minority status within the Democratic Party should be clear. They will not countenance reality. Those who confront them with it risk real consequences. And all in the name of “anti-fascism.”