An Autopsy Report of the DNC’s Autopsy Report

Who killed the committee’s look back at the 2024 election—and why?

Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin in August 2025. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

WHEN KEN MARTIN TOOK OVER as chair of the Democratic National Committee in February, he promised to move in uncomfortable directions if they were merited. The committee, as he saw it, had been too conciliatory in the past, too reluctant to offend its powerbrokers.

Specifically, Martin stressed that he was not coming to Washington to placate the political consultant class. His allies said that underneath his Minnesota nice exterior, he could be cutthroat. They promised he would be. And that the getting down to brass tacks would start with a rigorous analysis of where the party went wrong in the 2024 election, written up in a report that Martin committed to release publicly.

“Of course it will be released,” Martin said after winning the chairmanship. “There has to be some lessons that we glean.”

Ten months later, Martin has backtracked completely, announcing last week that he would not release the report after all. “Here’s our North Star: does this help us win? If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission,” he said in a statement, suggesting that he did not think the intraparty debates that would result from releasing the report were worth the lessons that could be gleaned.

That calculus may hold true. But it has led to inevitable second-guessing of Martin and the DNC as well. What changed his thinking? And what might he be hiding?

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Martin declined to be interviewed for this piece, so he unfortunately can’t tell us himself. But in my conversations with DNC members and Democratic operatives, some said that they believed Martin withheld the report because it had been edited down so much that there was little value left in it.

Over the ten months spent compiling it, a small group of Martin’s confidants interviewed hundreds of Democratic officials and strategists from all fifty states. People who participated described it as a cathartic, almost therapeutic process with interviewees giving honest answers (“maybe too honest,” as one participant put it to me) about the party’s flaws. But Democrats familiar with the process say a number of relevant stakeholders also aggressively lobbied the DNC in hopes of coming out unscathed. Top consultants on the Biden-turned-Harris campaign privately urged the DNC to keep their names out of the report. And there has been persistent chatter circulating in Democratic circles that Future Forward—the main super PAC backing Democrats, which brought in $613 million from donors last year—was pressuring the DNC to not make them look bad.

Martin and the team of roughly five senior officials assigned with putting together the report listened to the cases the stakeholders made and incorporated elements of it into their findings. The end result was more a synopsis than an autopsy. When the time came to decide whether or not to release the report, the determination was made that it would prove more distracting than constructive. A source familiar with the process said the decision was unanimous.

“It would be a strategic failure to turn the entire ecosystem’s gaze back [to 2024],” is how they described it.

Xochitl Hinojosa, a former DNC communications director, also said it was the right call. “We all know why Dems lost in 2024. The DNC has and should continue to make changes, and that is one of the reasons Dems have been winning up and down the ballot. Let’s stop looking back. Let’s look forward and continue winning,” she tweeted.

Not everyone agrees. In fact, many Democrats don’t. Former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer said the move “reeks of the caution and complacency that brought us to this moment.” Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz posted his displeasure on X: “I believe the DNC should release the report because 1) that’s what they said they were going to do 2) this is going to be a thing 3) if there’s good analysis we should see it.”

“The fact that the DNC can’t even put out a watered-down product comes from the constant drive within Democratic circles to minimize intra-coalition disagreement,” Simon Bazelon, a Democratic strategist who was the lead author of another 2024 election analysis conducted by the centrist organization Welcome PAC, told me. “The problem is that if your primary goal is always to avoid upsetting anyone, it makes it really hard to learn from past mistakes.”

To the outside observer, the fallout may seem like a case of overwrought internal party feuding. But it also is a microcosm of the larger debate Democrats are engaged in: whether their attention right now needs to be universally geared toward beating back Trumpism or whether that task becomes impossible without major structural reforms.

Officials who participated in the fact-finding around the autopsy report told me they were genuinely interested in the conclusions, believing that they provided valuable tactical lessons when it comes to how the party and all of the various committees and super PACs spent money. While other reports had been published from various party organizations, the DNC’s upcoming analysis was expected to be the most thorough and authoritative.

But even before this week’s decision to not release the findings it was becoming clear that they would not be comprehensive. Martin had decided over the summer to avoid addressing Joe Biden’s decision to run for re-election, as well as other strategic choices made by Kamala Harris’s campaign.

The problem for Martin is that in deciding not to release the report, he risks furthering the perception that the DNC is irrelevant; that a committee charged with winning elections doesn’t have the gumption to understand the ones the party has lost already. The DNC may be willing to make that tradeoff to keep the focus on Trump and the upcoming midterms. But once those are over, the party will once again face scrutiny as to whether it has actually learned any lessons from the last presidential race, or whether it will convince itself that it can ride the wave of Trump backlash without making any real changes.

“I worry we’re gonna have a good year. And people will be like, ‘Oh, see, everything’s fine. We don’t really need to make the investments we need to make in the places we need to make them to be competitive in the next five or six years,’” Democratic strategist Steve Schale told me.

🫏 Donkey Business:

— There’s been plenty of conversation among Democratic operatives about how many House seats the party could lose if the Supreme Court guts Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in its upcoming decision in Louisiana v. Callais. And a new analysis from Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter Fund argues that it’s not just congressional seats that Democrats should worry about, but also state legislative seats. According to the report, Republicans could stand to gain two hundred state legislative seats across the South, most of which are currently held by black leaders in majority minority districts.

“The loss of Section 2 could lock in GOP supermajorities for a generation—this could strip Democratic governors of veto power and more broadly, block progress on healthcare, voting rights, public school funding, gun safety, criminal justice reform, reproductive freedom, and more,” the report says.

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