Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) harshly criticized the recently released Democratic National Committee autopsy report of the 2024 election for its apparent exclusion of anything Gaza.
“Did you notice that it doesn’t mention the word Gaza?” Khanna told reporters outside the Capitol on Thursday. “I mean, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know Gaza was one of the big issues in the 2024 election. So first, I skimmed it, the 192 pages; I didn’t see Gaza. Then I put it into ChatGPT, I said, ‘Did I miss something? Is Gaza mentioned?’ No Gaza.”
“You know this party needs to start telling hard truths. One of those truths is that Israel committed a genocide, that Israel is an apartheid state, that we should not have given a single dollar to Israel to commit that genocide,” he continued.
Khanna added that Gaza will likely remain a concern in the upcoming midterms and the 2028 presidential election.
Ocasio-Cortez expressed similar sentiments, saying that regardless of anyone’s stance, it’s a “major oversight” that it wasn’t addressed in the report.
“I think it’s pretty unbelievable that Gaza would not be mentioned once in the autopsy report. I think it was very clearly a major dynamic and a major thread that was happening in 2024. Regardless of how one feels about that issue. The fact that it’s not even addressed, I think, is a major oversight,” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters on Thursday.
DNC Chair Ken Martin had been under mounting pressure to release the report, which was intended to examine the Democratic Party’s failings in the 2024 election and provide a route forward.
“I didn’t want to create a distraction,” Martin wrote on Substack after the report was released on Thursday. “Ironically, in doing so, I ended up creating an even bigger distraction. And for that, I sincerely apologize.”
The war in Gaza became a wedge issue within the Democratic Party during the 2024 election, as many left-leaning voters refused to support then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ bid for president due to her continued support for Israel.
Harris said when accepting the Democratic presidential nomination that she will “always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.”
A recent poll from The New York Times/Siena found that 60% of Democratic voters were more sympathetic to the Palestinians than to Israel.