With midterm elections looming on the horizon, Democrats are only just beginning to examine their party’s flaws and analyze the failure of former Vice President Kamala Harris’s disastrous 2024 presidential campaign. After months of pressure from party insiders, Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Ken Martin finally released a nearly-200-page “autopsy” report studying why Democrats lost on such a wide scale in 2024. “For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged,” Martin said in a statement shared with media outlets Thursday. “It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”

The report contains a disclaimer at the top of every page, reading, “This document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC. The DNC was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented.” The post-mortem analysis was reportedly compiled after interviewing hundreds of Democrats across all 50 states. Both the executive summary and conclusion of the report are missing, with the DNC saying that the sections were “not provided” by the report’s author.

“In 1989, after losing three straight presidential campaigns, our party refocused the conversation around policy and purpose to reclaim the vital center of American discourse,” the report stated, noting that the Democrats moved away from race-based politics during that period, before returning to the issue in the 21st century. “Understanding the

center is where most people live, then-DNC Chairman Ron Brown led Democrats out of the political wilderness by supporting candidates putting people first, prioritizing the economy, and offering America hope,” the report continued. “Finding our way back to this level of success will not be easy, and it will not happen overnight.”

While the report acknowledged that the contentious 2024 presidential race evinced a “nation divided,” it went on to observe that the presidential races of 2020 and 2016 were also “close,” indicating that political division “is not unique to the 2024 election.”

The report refrains from overt criticism of Harris as a candidate, positing that she had a more positive impact for down-ballot Democratic candidates than her boss, then-President Joe Biden, would have, but emphasized that Democrats focused too heavily on “abstract issues and identity politics,” rather than the issues that voters consistently rated the most important to them, such as the economy, affordability, housing, and immigration. “The sad truth is Democrats have lost ground at every level from inconsistent messaging and improper planning, even as the policies the Party advances continue to earn voter support at the ballot box,” the report stated, noting that Democratic platform-aligned policies have been approved by voters even in red states. (In Ohio, for example, voters approved a ballot measure in 2023 creating a “constitutional right” to abortion.) “This divergence means the Party and our candidates have lost the confidence and trust of voters. In the face of misinformation and disinformation, our candidates have proven incapable of projecting strength, unity, and leadership, and voters have drifted away.”

The report identified several chief problems for Democrats, based on the 2024 Harris campaign:

1. Harris, like many other Democrats, failed to connect with male voters. The report noted that Josh Stein, the Democrat who was narrowly elected governor of North Carolina after running against former Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson (R), received 51% of the male vote in his state, while Harris won only 40%. “That 11-point gap suggests fundamentally different approaches to male voter engagement,” the report said. “The Harris campaign appears to have focused heavily on women. Stein’s results show some candidates can appeal strongly to women AND compete effectively with men.”

2. The Democratic presidential campaign largely ignored rural voters, presuming that urban and suburban margins “would compensate” for the voters neglected in rural regions. “The math doesn’t work. You can’t lose rural areas by overwhelming margins and make it up elsewhere when rural voters are a significant share of the electorate,” the report suggested. “If Democrats are to reclaim leadership in the Heartland or the South, candidates must perform well in rural turf. Show up, listen, and then do it again.”

3. Harris failed to “identify” herself in contrast to Trump, essentially running on a campaign of, “Vote for me because I’m not Trump.” The report noted that Harris “struggled” to “define herself” as a candidate, offering voters little idea of who she is or what she stood for and further failing to differentiate herself from the unpopular Biden in terms of policy. “The Harris campaign appears to have relied on Trump being unacceptable rather than building an affirmative case for Harris,” the report observed, arguing that she did not give the Democratic base — or irregular and undecided voters — a reason to vote for her, only against Trump. Furthermore, the report stressed that anti-Trump messaging “has limits. Build affirmative cases for candidates to drive enthusiasm instead of relying on reductive messaging.”

4. Many undecided and moderate voters considered Harris and the Democrats too extreme in their policies on gender transitions, abortion, and a handful of other issues. The report specifically singled out an attack ad from the Trump campaign, highlighting Harris’s previous statements on gender transitions, which the report said was “very effective,” leaving Harris and her “campaign … boxed — the ad was a video of her saying what she said, and it was framed as an attack on her economic priorities.” The report added, “If the Vice President would not change her position — and she did not — then there was nothing which would have worked as a response.”

While Martin and the DNC have indicated that the Democrats are unlikely to shift their left-wing policies or move beyond anti-Trump attacks, Democratic Party voters have signaled that they would prefer a more moderate candidate in 2028. According to a New York Times/Ipsos poll published Wednesday, 52% of Democrats and Democrat-aligned independent voters want the party’s 2028 presidential nominee to embrace more centrist policies” 50% say that the nominee must shift towards the center on crime, and 46% say the same regarding immigration, but only 38% said that the nominee needs to move to the center on gender transitions.

Numerous registered Democrats interviewed by The New York Times reported their frustration with the party, particularly its aggressive focus on LGBT issues and immigration. “They’ve got their eyes all on the wrong narratives,” a 62-year-old New Jersey Democrat said. Another voter said that the party’s emphasis on gender transitions and LGBT issues was distracting from more serious matters. Regardless of where voters stood on policy, most agreed that the Democrats were unlikely to win a national election while maintaining their current messaging on gender transitions.