The Democratic National Committee (D.N.C.) released a nearly 200-page internal draft report on Thursday analyzing what went wrong in the 2024 presidential campaign, amid ongoing efforts to prepare for the midterm elections and the 2028 cycle. The report, an autopsy of the party’s performance, assigns blame to multiple facets of the campaign but has faced criticism from within the party itself for its lack of clarity and perceived incompleteness.

The draft report points to several key factors contributing to former Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat. It argues that Harris’s campaign relied heavily on the assumption that voters would reject former President Donald J. Trump, but failed to make a compelling, affirmative case for her candidacy. The report notes that her campaign did not develop a consistent or clearly defined strategy to significantly challenge Trump’s rising approval ratings. Furthermore, it suggests the Biden administration exhibited a “significant failure of imagination” in its positioning of Harris, indicating that the White House did not effectively support her advancement after President Joseph R. Biden Jr. withdrew from the race.

The report also highlights a pivotal moment in the campaign: a Trump attack advertisement focusing on Harris’s support for transgender rights among inmates. The ad, which featured Harris’s statements endorsing taxpayer-funded surgeries for transgender inmates and included the tagline “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” was described as “very effective” and represented a challenge from which the Harris campaign struggled to recover. The report suggests this ad successfully framed the narrative and made it difficult for Harris to respond without altering her stance.

Despite the criticisms leveled at Harris’s campaign and the party’s messaging strategy, the report acknowledges that Biden’s exit from the race ultimately benefited Democrats overall in the November elections by allowing the party to consolidate efforts. However, both the Biden and Harris campaigns are faulted for not pursuing negative advertising against Trump at the necessary scale. The report states there were grounds to more effectively argue why Trump should have been disqualified from holding office again, but the messaging efforts fell short.

In its broader recommendations, the report advises Democrats to focus less on identity politics and more on economic issues such as cost-of-living concerns, citing examples of successful Senate campaigns in battleground states like North Carolina and Arizona that used this approach. Notably, the report does not address foreign policy topics such as Israel or Gaza, issues that have caused internal divisions and influenced voter attitudes during the primaries.

The handling of the report’s release also raised concerns about D.N.C. leadership. Party Chair Ken Martin initially promised the autopsy, then refrained from releasing it, and ultimately put out a draft document accompanied by critical annotations that undercut its findings. This sequence has led to questions about the management of the party’s internal assessments and the need to repair trust with grassroots activists and donors. Martin acknowledged this challenge, writing that restoring confidence would be a priority moving forward. Some party officials have called for rebuilding faith in the D.N.C.’s leadership following the contentious release and fallout.