Gaza Wasn’t the Biggest Omission in the Democrats’ 2024 Autopsy |
Gaza Wasn’t the Biggest Omission in the Democrats’ 2024 Autopsy
Two other issues went unmentioned in the report—and were even more decisive in the party’s loss to Donald Trump.
If you’ve read anything about the Democrats’ “autopsy” of its 2024 election loss, which was released Thursday after being suppressed for months, it probably highlighted what the report doesn’t include: any mention of Gaza, the Biden administration’s refusal to curb Israel’s genocidal war, or Kamala Harris’s mealy-mouthed efforts to triangulate a position after becoming the nominee in July. “There are 50,000 Words in the DNC Autopsy. ‘Gaza’ Isn’t One,” Mother Jones announced. The Intercept struck a similar note: “DNC Autopsy Doesn’t Mention Gaza or Israel At All.” On the other side of the aisle, National Review crowed about the omission: “DNC Autopsy Exposes the Left’s ‘Gaza’ Excuse as Nonsense.”
“When it arrived in my inbox, I immediately clicked on it, used the search function, and searched for Gaza. Came up as zero,” Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told Politico. “Israel came up as zero, Jews came up as zero. I was surprised. It looks like there’s a huge omission.”
Well, yes. The omission of Gaza, which played an important role in Harris’s disappointing showing with young voters, is appalling and suggests a party leadership still unwilling to reckon with the cost of Biden administration’s support for Israel—or even to acknowledge just how far Democratic attitudes toward Israel have shifted in recent years. But the overriding focus on this one omission misses a more important point.
The problem with the DNC autopsy........