The Democratic Party did not lose the 2024 US presidential election on just a single issue. But a new Axios investigation into the Democratic National Committee’s post-election “autopsy” reveals that Gaza was one of the few issues that reliably cut across turnout, enthusiasm, and trust inside the coalition, and that it did so at a scale Democrats still hesitate to admit.
Axios reported that senior Democrats involved in the still-secret review concluded that Vice President Kamala Harris lost significant support because of the Biden administration’s approach to the Israel-Hamas War and because she was seen as aligned with it.
What makes the Axios story politically consequential is not only the finding, but the reaction to it. Axios reported that party leaders decided to keep the report “under lock and key” because of how explosively it could land within the party and beyond.
If Democrats truly believed that the investigation's results merely affirmed conventional wisdom, they would publish it, argue over it, and move forward. Treating internal research like contraband signals fear, and fear is a strategy only until it becomes a habit.
Axios reported that DNC aides assembling the autopsy conducted wide-ranging, closed-door conversations, including a meeting with the IMEU Policy Project, a pro-Palestinian advocacy group. IMEU later said it told Democrats that the administration’s support for Israel “drained support” among young people and progressives, and Axios reported that DNC staff acknowledged their own data described Gaza policy as a “net-negative” for Harris.
The DNC confirmed it spoke with IMEU and many others, but it declined to provide further details.
A decision long pushed down the road
That “net-negative” phrasing is the crux. It implies Democrats believe the issue cost them more votes than it gained, while also aggravating a deeper fracture: whether the party can sustain a pro-Israel posture while a vocal faction increasingly treats Israel as a moral litmus test.
Harris tried to thread the needle during her short campaign, backing Israel’s security while calling for a ceasefire and emphasizing Palestinian civilian suffering and the fate of hostages. In a polarized environment, however, balancing can read as evasiveness, and evasiveness can read as insincerity.
The Democratic Party now faces a decision it has postponed for years. It can choose to separate itself from activists and elected voices who demand maximalist rhetoric on Israel, frame any compromise as complicity, and too often tolerate antisemitic language when it is packaged as “anti-Zionism.”
Or it can keep trying to appease that faction, gambling that pro-Israel Democrats, Jewish voters, and swing-state moderates will remain captive because the alternative feels worse. Either choice creates pain. Only one prevents a perpetual internal veto.
Recalibration does not require indifference to Palestinian suffering. It requires language and policy that can hold two truths at once: Israel has a right and obligation to defeat Hamas after October 7, and civilian harm in Gaza is morally serious and politically corrosive. It also requires a firm boundary between legitimate criticism of Israeli policy and the demonization of Israel as uniquely evil.
Democrats cannot claim to belong to a party that fights bigotry while treating antisemitism as a secondary concern that becomes inconvenient precisely when Israel is debated most intensely.
This is not simply an argument about foreign policy. Axios’s reporting suggests Gaza became a domestic identity issue for many voters, a proxy for morality, belonging, and whether elites listen or merely manage. When an issue touches identity, it can outrank kitchen-table policy – even for voters who still care about prices, jobs, and healthcare.
This means that for many Americans, the relationship with Israel is, for all intents and purposes, a domestic issue and not one that either party can simply put off until it’s convenient.
The same dynamic is increasingly visible on the American Right, as well. Recently, The Jerusalem Post has extensively pointed to a widening Israel and antisemitism divide in conservative politics, including the rise of conspiratorial, Israel-baiting rhetoric that thrives on attention and factional grievance, and the failure of administration officials to call it out.
If Democrats believe Gaza was a “net-negative” in 2024, hiding the autopsy is not a solution. Publish it. Debate it. Set standards for how Democrats will talk about Israel’s security, Palestinian dignity, Hamas terror, and antisemitism, without moral blur or factional blackmail. If the party’s own research says this issue helped cost them the White House, then the American public deserves a nominee who can at least take a clear, public, moral stance.