Democratic Primaries Reveal What the DNC Autopsy Buried
July 3, 2026
Photo by Colin Lloyd
The Democratic National Committee’s 192-page post-mortem on the 2024 election, titled “Build to Win. Build to Last,” failed to build, to win, or to learn. It never answered the only question that mattered: how did a twice-impeached, multiply-indicted former president walk back into the White House with more votes than prior to his indictments?
The report, authored by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera and released in May 2026 after months of stonewalling by DNC Chair Ken Martin, reads less as a serious political reckoning than as a confirmation-bias pamphlet drafted by people determined not to upset the party’s old guard. It calls for renewed focus on “Middle America,” criticizes years of disinvestment in state parties, and faults poor economic messaging. It is not wrong on any of these points. But these points alone did not cost the party America — not just Middle America.
The report boasts of conducting more than 1,200 interviews to assess the health of state parties in every state, district, and territory. While it seems to be an impressive number, it remains questionable whether the interviews were of local party leaders or general democratic voters. Did it include micro-level analysis of competitive districts? Or to account for 6.8 million voters who supported Biden in 2020, where they went, and why they left.
There was no breakdown of Harris’s collapse by age. No independent examination of what drove young voters away, particularly in university towns where Gaza protests defined the political atmosphere of 2024. How many of the 6.8 million were from Generation Z? And not a word on the Zionist bubble around Biden and how that funded and shielded Israel as it carried out a live-streamed genocide in Gaza.
This is not a methodological oversight. It is engineered by the plan. University towns and young voter precincts were precisely where the Democratic coalition was visibly disintegrating. Most likely the reason they lost states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Students who watched ‘genocide Joe’ enable the starvation of children in Gaza did not stay home out of apathy. They made a calculated judgment: that on the question of war crimes, there was no daylight between the two candidates. The autopsy never acknowledged the question existed.
Instead, it retreated into campaign mechanics: Harris “was not well prepared,” Democrats assumed Trump was unacceptable, and the party deluded itself that undecided voters would hold their noses and choose the lesser of two evils. Observations about messaging and strategy, carefully constructed to avoid touching the one issue that led the Arab Americans’ vote in Michigan to split evenly between Harris and Trump when it favored Biden by a large margin in 2020.
The autopsy’s authors, like much of the Democratic establishment, prefer to frame the party’s youth problem as a generational disconnect, a cultural or communication failure that better social media spending might fix. That framing is both disingenuous and lazy. There is no generational disconnect. There is a massive divide between the old guard and the young generation — and the base at large — when it comes to Israel.
Recent primary results could not be clearer, exposing the DNC autopsy’s failure. More than 80% of Democratic voters hold a negative view of Israel. That is not a fringe position within the party. That is the party. More than four out of five of the Democratic voters regard the long-held ‘sacred cow’ unfavorably, and the post-election study does not contain a single mention. That is dismissive of 80% of the Party. The analysis is not seeking lessons learned; it is a whitewash.
The Gaza omission was not an oversight. It was a cover-up. The IMEU Policy Project’s executive director was blunt, demanding the release of findings that the autopsy’s own author had reportedly acknowledged in private: DNC officials’ internal data showed Biden’s support for Israel was a net negative for Democrats in 2024. That finding never appeared in the report. It was buried. Former DNC Vice Chair David Hogg said publicly that he told Rivera directly, “We need to acknowledge the role that Gaza played in us losing younger voters.”
This is not an outlier critique. It is coming from people who participated in the process and are now openly saying its central finding was suppressed. When contributors to an autopsy publicly declare that findings are edited out, the document becomes a cover-up.
The autopsy’s Gaza omission collapses entirely when measured against what Democratic primaries have screamed in 2026. Candidates running on explicitly anti-Israeli-policy platforms have toppled incumbents and dethroned members of Congress backed by Democratic leadership and bankrolled by AIPAC. These are not noble protest campaigns falling short. They are winning Democratic voters, in Democratic primaries, on an explicitly pro-Palestine platform and making AIPAC a radioactive word and political liability.
The autopsy did not diagnose the cause of failure; it smothered it. Fifty thousand words telling Democrats to organize better, message harder, and court the working-class voter they lost. Sound advice, and entirely beside the point, as long as the party establishment continues to dismiss the verdict of 80% of its rank and file.
Without an honest accounting of the party’s failures in 2024 and without acknowledging the winning streak for anti-Israel democratic candidates in 2026, there can be no realistic path forward. The DNC must root out AIPAC funding in Democratic primaries and recognize the views of the party’s majority on Israel. It must confront the political cost of a foreign policy that millions of Americans now see not only as wrong, but as criminal.
If over 80% of Democratic voters hold an unfavorable opinion of Israel, and candidates running on that sentiment keep winning primaries, the data is not ambiguous. The base has moved. The party leadership has not.
Photo by Colin Lloyd
The Democratic National Committee’s 192-page post-mortem on the 2024 election, titled “Build to Win. Build to Last,” failed to build, to win, or to learn. It never answered the only question that mattered: how did a twice-impeached, multiply-indicted former president walk back into the White House with more votes than prior to his indictments?
The report, authored by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera and released in May 2026 after months of stonewalling by DNC Chair Ken Martin, reads less as a serious political reckoning than as a confirmation-bias pamphlet drafted by people determined not to upset the party’s old guard. It calls for renewed focus on “Middle America,” criticizes years of disinvestment in state parties, and faults poor economic messaging. It is not wrong on any of these points. But these points alone did not cost the party America — not just Middle America.
The report boasts of conducting more than 1,200 interviews to assess the health of state parties in every state, district, and territory. While it seems to be an impressive number, it remains questionable whether the interviews were of local party leaders or general democratic voters. Did it include micro-level analysis of competitive districts? Or to account for 6.8 million voters who supported Biden in 2020, where they went, and why they left.
There was no breakdown of Harris’s collapse by age. No independent examination of what drove young voters away, particularly in university towns where Gaza protests defined the political atmosphere of 2024. How many of the 6.8 million were from Generation Z? And not a word on the Zionist bubble around Biden and how that funded and shielded Israel as it carried out a live-streamed genocide in Gaza.
This is not a methodological oversight. It is engineered by the plan. University towns and young voter precincts were precisely where the Democratic coalition was visibly disintegrating. Most likely the reason they lost states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Students who watched ‘genocide Joe’ enable the starvation of children in Gaza did not stay home out of apathy. They made a calculated judgment: that on the question of war crimes, there was no daylight between the two candidates. The autopsy never acknowledged the question existed.
Instead, it retreated into campaign mechanics: Harris “was not well prepared,” Democrats assumed Trump was unacceptable, and the party deluded itself that undecided voters would hold their noses and choose the lesser of two evils. Observations about messaging and strategy, carefully constructed to avoid touching the one issue that led the Arab Americans’ vote in Michigan to split evenly between Harris and Trump when it favored Biden by a large margin in 2020.
The autopsy’s authors, like much of the Democratic establishment, prefer to frame the party’s youth problem as a generational disconnect, a cultural or communication failure that better social media spending might fix. That framing is both disingenuous and lazy. There is no generational disconnect. There is a massive divide between the old guard and the young generation — and the base at large — when it comes to Israel.
Recent primary results could not be clearer, exposing the DNC autopsy’s failure. More than 80% of Democratic voters hold a negative view of Israel. That is not a fringe position within the party. That is the party. More than four out of five of the Democratic voters regard the long-held ‘sacred cow’ unfavorably, and the post-election study does not contain a single mention. That is dismissive of 80% of the Party. The analysis is not seeking lessons learned; it is a whitewash.
The Gaza omission was not an oversight. It was a cover-up. The IMEU Policy Project’s executive director was blunt, demanding the release of findings that the autopsy’s own author had reportedly acknowledged in private: DNC officials’ internal data showed Biden’s support for Israel was a net negative for Democrats in 2024. That finding never appeared in the report. It was buried. Former DNC Vice Chair David Hogg said publicly that he told Rivera directly, “We need to acknowledge the role that Gaza played in us losing younger voters.”
This is not an outlier critique. It is coming from people who participated in the process and are now openly saying its central finding was suppressed. When contributors to an autopsy publicly declare that findings are edited out, the document becomes a cover-up.
The autopsy’s Gaza omission collapses entirely when measured against what Democratic primaries have screamed in 2026. Candidates running on explicitly anti-Israeli-policy platforms have toppled incumbents and dethroned members of Congress backed by Democratic leadership and bankrolled by AIPAC. These are not noble protest campaigns falling short. They are winning Democratic voters, in Democratic primaries, on an explicitly pro-Palestine platform and making AIPAC a radioactive word and political liability.
The autopsy did not diagnose the cause of failure; it smothered it. Fifty thousand words telling Democrats to organize better, message harder, and court the working-class voter they lost. Sound advice, and entirely beside the point, as long as the party establishment continues to dismiss the verdict of 80% of its rank and file.
Without an honest accounting of the party’s failures in 2024 and without acknowledging the winning streak for anti-Israel democratic candidates in 2026, there can be no realistic path forward. The DNC must root out AIPAC funding in Democratic primaries and recognize the views of the party’s majority on Israel. It must confront the political cost of a foreign policy that millions of Americans now see not only as wrong, but as criminal.
If over 80% of Democratic voters hold an unfavorable opinion of Israel, and candidates running on that sentiment keep winning primaries, the data is not ambiguous. The base has moved. The party leadership has not.
Victims of Communism?
July 3, 2026
Photograph Source: cspirtos – Public Domain
The ruling class appears shaken, their brains rattled, and their nightmare once thought vanquished—the Red Menace—appears reborn. Following the recent sweep of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in New York and Colorado elections, there has been a torrent of backlash and public meltdowns from President Trump claiming, “I’d be the greatest communist in history,” to humanity’s first billionaire posting the usual anti-communist nonsensical blather that communism has the “[h]ighest death count of any philosophy.” Elon Musk unabashedly cites inflated, unserious death counts that include in their tally of so-called “victims of communism” the Red Army’s liquidation of Nazis and fascists during the World War II.
Adding to the frenzy, one New York City council member even invoked the halcyon days of the FBI and the CIA, bragging that they would have “made sure unabashed revolutionaries” like the DSA National Political Community “were neutralized one way or another. In fact, that was basically the entire point of having them.” Vicki Paladino made a candid admission that domestic and foreign intelligence agencies were never designed to defend “democracy.” Rather, they were engineered as clandestine political police forces operating with lethal, counter-revolutionary violence.
And decades of disclosures and investigations reveal this. From the Church Committee convened five decades ago that investigated illegal intelligence operations to Florida Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna’s recent hearing on the CIA’s mind control program called MK-ULTRA, domestic and foreign intelligence agencies have been mired in deeply nefarious practices, from illegal surveillance and counterintelligence operations to outright assassination. Put bluntly, the CIA and FBI, during the glory days of Cold War Red Scare politics, acted in service of capital, alleviating real or imagined threats to the profits of an increasingly paranoid ruling class, and building their own pile of bodies along the way as they waged a protracted and often secret war against those seeking to build power for the many rather than the few.
Indian Country itself paid a heavy price. And only recently have we begun to come to terms with the consequences, with the commutation of Leonard Peltier’s two consecutive life sentences for the killing of two FBI agents during the federal reign of terror waged against the American Indian Movement on the Pine Ridge reservation. While Peltier walked out of a federal prison, many more never went home and still more await justice. While we have yet to heal from the wounds of the past, this generation faces a different battle.
Putting aside whether the recent DSA electoral wins pose an existential threat to the capitalist class, the underlying fear has a material basis. As the billionaire class, and now, grotesquely, the trillionaire class, reap record profits, the quality of life in the heart of global capitalism and imperialism appears to be in rapid decline. Among the top leading causes of death for young people in the United States are drug overdoses, death by suicide, and gun deaths. Life expectancy has cratered across the board. For American Indian people, the decline in life expectancy is particularly acute, falling in recent years from an already abysmal of 71 years down to 65—with South Dakota reporting a median age of death for American Indian people of death at a staggering 58 years. Despite more than a million COVID deaths in the United States, the drop in life expectancy is caused by more than the pandemic; it includes massive inequalities and social and economic factors.
It should be no surprise this generation has little hope in the system that robbed them of a future, to say nothing of a bleak present. A poll last year by the rightwing think tank the Cato Institute found that more than a third of people under the age of 30 in the United States had a favorable view of communism. Still more, nearly two-thirds, looked kindly on socialism. While the turn towards anti-capitalism may be partially a natural reaction to the death drive of capitalism, it doesn’t mean the embrace of left wing and liberatory politics translates directly into socialist and communist movements or just societies. In fact, revolutions are quite rare events, and when they succeed or fail, they can be quite deadly, with much of the violence often stemming from the forces of counter-revolution. What is often misunderstood is that this counter-revolutionary violence doesn’t necessarily happen in the context of, or in reaction to full-blown revolution. It instead should be understood a structural phenomenon, something that is expressed in policing and intelligence agencies ready to crush even the most benign forms of resistance, such as the most recent sentencing a Prairieland defendant to 30 years in federal prison for moving a box of antifascist zines.
As historian Gerald Horne has pointed out in his aptly titled book The Counter-Revolution of 1776, the founding of the United States was borne of a counter-revolution against the abolition of slavery. Most African people sided with the British against the colonists, viewing the British empire as a more favorable ally in the ending the tyranny of chattel slavery. One might add that this counter-revolution also included the genocidal assault on Native people, whom Thomas Jefferson described as “merciless Indian savages” in the Declaration of Independence. Indigenous wars against the United States often entailed allying with the competing empires such as Britain against the American colonists, whom Indigenous nations viewed as a greater threat. This was in an effort to stave off the white invasion of Indigenous homelands. While counterfactual history has its limits, it is a worthy pursuit to examine the freedom dreams of Black and Indigenous people—and to understand exactly how U.S. imperialism has suppressed those aspirations. Those aspirations have sometimes coalesced with socialist movements and often not, but the general ignorance of their liberatory impulses is a symptom of the larger miseducation project.
To start, most people in the United States are ill-equipped to discuss the actual social policies of past or present communist societies. Decades of anti-communist indoctrination have effectively blunted the public’s ability to conceptualize alternatives to capitalism. This mass ignorance is no accident; it is the result of a deliberate miseducation that reduces socialism to a caricature of authoritarian misery, while sanitizing capitalism as a beacon of personal liberty and market choice. Consequently, history is viewed through a double standard: the structural failures of socialist states are deemed unforgivable atrocities, while the global body count of capitalism is dismissed as the unavoidable friction of an imperfect but necessary system.
These myths are supposedly backed up by the numbers, which attribute 100 million deaths to communist societies, numbers that far exceed the Nazi and fascist body counts and do not begin to offer up comparable studies of colonial and capitalist societies. It is worth noting that these overblown statistics come from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was established by a unanimous act of Congress in 1993 and opened a museum in 2022. The foundation even counts deaths from COVID-19 as victims of communism. This asymmetric accounting leaves the capitalist empire entirely off the hook. If we apply the exact same rigorous, unforgiving metrics of state responsibility to U.S. capitalism alone, the narrative of Western benevolence completely collapses into an endless ledger of mass murder.
Factoring the true cost of U.S. capitalism and imperialism requires mapping what historian David Michael Smith terms the “endless holocausts” of U.S. empire. This global empire was built on the theft of a continent through Indigenous genocide and the theft of tens of millions of Black lives via the transatlantic slave trade. Smith places the total body count of the U.S. empire at close to 300 million dead. If we scrutinized global capitalism’s daily, preventable toll—from structural poverty and enforced starvation to imperialist wars and corporate healthcare monopolies—with the same metrics applied to communist societies, the free market might register 100 million deaths every few decades. Ultimately, the ruling class does not fear the Red Menace because they value human life; they fear it because they know their empire of accumulation by dispossession is fundamentally fragile, driving them to unleash the counter-revolutionary violence they have always weaponized to survive.
This piece first appeared on Red Scare.
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