The Democratic National Committee released its autopsy report on the 2024 presidential election months after party chairman Ken Martin said he would keep it private. The report argues that the Biden White House failed to sufficiently promote Vice President Kamala Harris over the course of the administration and then when she became the party's nominee and that the Harris campaign failed to respond to an effective Trump campaign ad on transgender issues. It is also riddled with errors and lacks a formal conclusion, which may explain why Martin disavowed the report while releasing it.
"When I received the report late last year, it wasn't ready for primetime—not even close—and because no source material was provided, it would have meant starting over," Martin, who hired the report's author, Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, said in a statement. "For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged. It does not meet my standards, and it won't meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word."
It is unlikely the release of the report will help the party meet that goal. The report's title page reads only "BUILD TO WIN. BUILD TO LAST" followed by a blank white space. It has placeholders for a "LEADERSHIP MESSAGE," an "EXECUTIVE SUMMARY," a "CONCLUSION," and "APPENDICES," but all four sections are blank. Some of the report's sentences are incomplete, including a section on Harris's failure to win over educated voters in North Carolina, which includes the sentence fragment "It was specifically about how Harris as a candidate"—without punctuation. The report also gets wrong the number of states that elected governors in 2024 and claims that the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate Herschel Walker ran for Senate in Georgia for "rubber stamping the president's agenda." Walker ran in 2022, when Democrat Joe Biden was president.
That's not to say the autopsy contains no meaningful takeaways for Democrats. It states, for instance, that the Biden White House "did not position or prepare" Harris to run for president and declined to "conduct polling" to "identify the issues she could talk about" as vice president, perhaps because the addled Biden was bent on running for reelection and then furious he was forced off the ticket, though the report doesn't say as much. It also argues that Democrats falsely assumed that "identity politics" would "hold male voters of color" in their camp and notes that Harris had no effective response to a Trump campaign ad declaring Harris "is for they/them" because Harris "would not change her position" on issues like gender transition surgeries for prisoners and that "climate change and green energy transition messaging created anxiety among workers in traditional industries worried about job losses."
Prominent Democrats have largely ignored those takeaways and criticized the report's incomplete nature.
"Clearly, the people who put it together ran a highly ineffective, ill-researched process. Therefore it's difficult to draw constructive conclusions," Adrienne Elrod, a senior adviser to the Biden and Harris campaigns, told Politico. "What's important is what's missing, what they're not releasing."
The ordeal is an embarrassment for Martin, who upon being elected chairman of the DNC in February 2025 promised to commission and release a report that would provide "a handle around what happened last election cycle." He then tapped a "close" ally, Rivera, to write the report, though Rivera "had not worked on a presidential campaign in more than two decades," according to Axios.
After months of work, Martin announced in December that he would not release the report, calling it "a distraction from the core mission," a decision that prompted intense criticism. Last month, for instance, former Obama White House speechwriter and Pod Save America host Jon Favreau asked Martin why he refused to release a report on which he spent "a couple hundred thousand dollars." Martin responded that he did not pay Rivera for his work, prompting criticism from some on the left.
"Did the DNC really hand over so important a task as the 2024 autopsy to pro bono volunteers rather than professional consultants?" asked The Nation.
In his Thursday statement, Martin suggested that he declined to release the report to avoid creating "a distraction" but acknowledged that "by not putting the report out, I ended up creating an even bigger distraction."
"For that, I sincerely apologize," Martin wrote.
Though Martin said the report was released "in its entirety, unedited," every page includes a "Disclaimer" message in bolded red font.
"This document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC," the message states. "The DNC was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented."
Also included in red font and littered throughout the report are DNC-authored annotations pushing back on the report's claims or questioning its sourcing. The phrase "No evidence provided" appears in at least 40 annotations.
