Liberal NY Times Columnist Blasts Democrats’ 2024 ‘Autopsy’ Of Harris Loss

Liberal New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg sharply criticized the Democratic National Committee’s long-delayed 2024 election postmortem Friday, calling the report “mysterious,” “anticlimactic,” and “ridiculous” after months of Democratic infighting over whether it should be released at all.

The report was supposed to offer Democrats a serious diagnosis of how President Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in 2024. Instead, its rollout has become another embarrassing reminder of the party’s internal dysfunction.

“The document, it’s now clear, was kept under wraps not because it was impolitic, but because it’s a disaster,” Goldberg wrote.

Goldberg also took aim at DNC Chairman Ken Martin, who had originally promised transparency before later attempting to keep the report from public view.

“What’s most striking is its utter lack of substance,” she noted further, pointing out that the words “Israel” and “Gaza” do not appear anywhere in the 192-page document.

“It offers little insight into why the Democratic Party lost large numbers of Black and Latino men, or its failure to speak to disconnected, irregular voters… I wondered if it was written by A.I., though A.I. probably would’ve done a better job,” she added.

That kind of criticism from a liberal New York Times columnist underscores just how poorly the report has landed inside the Democratic coalition.

When Martin was running for DNC chair, he said he would release the party’s autopsy of the 2024 election. After taking over the party, however, he reversed course and said the report would not be made public.

That decision only fueled more speculation.

Goldberg wrote that the secrecy turned the report into “an object of suspicion and fascination.”

“Some thought he was protecting Kamala Harris ahead of 2028. Many progressives were convinced that the D.N.C. quashed the autopsy because it would show Harris was done in by Gaza,” she wrote.

“Rob Flaherty, who’d been deputy director of both the Harris and Joe Biden campaigns, speculated that it didn’t even exist,” she said.

Conservative Washington Post columnist Ramesh Ponnuru also focused on the report’s glaring omissions.

“There’s nothing about President Joe Biden’s age and voters’ worries about it. Nothing about the border crisis the Democrats first caused through their policies and then denied in their rhetoric,” he said.

“Nothing about the party’s declining appeal to religiously observant voters,” he continued.

“Nothing about the boutique left-wing views — such as support for taxpayer-funded sex changes for illegal immigrants and prisoners,” he added.

The report also failed to seriously fault Harris, despite her ineffective campaign and the staggering $1.5 billion spent during the 2024 cycle.

It also avoided a serious examination of how Harris became the nominee after Biden dropped out, a process many critics saw as a coronation rather than a democratic contest.

The document, released Thursday and first detailed by CNN, argued that the DNC damaged its own political infrastructure through declining voter registration efforts, reduced financial support for state parties and a broader failure to engage key voter blocs.

It also said Democrats must renew their focus on voters in Middle America and the heavily Republican South.

For conservatives, the report’s admissions only scratch the surface.

President Trump’s 2024 victory exposed a Democratic Party that had become increasingly detached from working-class voters, border security concerns, religious Americans, free speech issues and the economic frustrations of ordinary families.

Yet the DNC’s report appears to avoid many of the most politically uncomfortable topics.

Martin himself distanced the party from the document.

“I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards,” he said, per Fox News.

He added that he could not “in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on it.”

The report, written by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, was released with a disclaimer saying it “reflects the views of the author, not the DNC.”

The committee went even further, admitting it could not fully verify many of the claims in the document.

It said it “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.”

Martin said the report was released for transparency “as I received it – in its entirety, unedited and unabridged – with annotations for claims that couldn’t be verified.”

Rivera, a longtime Democratic consultant, had reportedly not worked on a presidential campaign in more than two decades.

The result is a document that Democrats waited months to release, only for leaders inside and outside the party to immediately distance themselves from it.

Rather than providing a hard look at why President Trump returned to the White House, the report has deepened questions about whether Democrats are willing to confront the real reasons voters rejected them.

The DNC promised an autopsy.

What it delivered was another political mess.