Democratic members of Congress are openly calling for Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin to step down, days after the party finally released a nearly 200-page autopsy of its 2024 election losses, a report Martin himself tried to bury and now says he refuses to endorse.
Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts did not mince words. "He should resign," Moulton told Axios, citing Martin's "lack of leadership." Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin agreed on air when a radio caller argued Martin should be replaced. Rep. Marc Veasey of Texas said the clock is ticking and Martin needs to go.
The revolt marks a rare moment of public fracture inside the DNC, and it was triggered not just by what the autopsy says, but by how long it took Martin to let anyone read it. The report was first delivered to the DNC last fall. Martin sat on it for months, claiming he did not want to create a "distraction" from Democratic wins in November. Only after sustained pressure did he finally release it Thursday, accompanied by a letter that read less like leadership and more like a disclaimer.
In his letter, Martin made the unusual choice of publicly trashing the very report his own handpicked strategist wrote. Democratic strategist Paul Rivera authored the autopsy at Martin's direction. Yet Martin wrote in his accompanying letter:
"I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won't meet your standards. I don't endorse what's in this report, or what's left out of it. I could not in good faith put the DNC's stamp of approval on it."
He then added that "transparency is paramount" and said he was releasing the report "in its entirety, unedited and unabridged, with annotations for claims that couldn't be verified."
Read that sequence again. Martin hand-picked the man who wrote the report, hid the finished product for months, and then released it only under pressure, while publicly disowning it. That is not transparency. That is damage control dressed up as principle.
The report itself paints a bleak picture. AFP reported that the autopsy describes a party that has "vacillated between stagnation and retrogression" since Barack Obama's 2008 victory. That is not a single bad cycle. That is nearly two decades of institutional drift, written in the Democrats' own words.
The autopsy also faults the Biden White House and the Harris campaign for failing to define their candidate beyond being "not Trump." It says Democrats failed to make a strong enough case against the former president during the 2024 campaign. In other words, the party's own internal review concluded that its entire closing argument amounted to opposition branding, and even that was poorly executed.
For voters who watched the 2024 race unfold, none of this is surprising. But having it confirmed in a party-commissioned document carries a different weight. This was supposed to be the Democrats' honest reckoning with themselves.
Not everyone thinks the autopsy is too harsh. Some prominent Democrats argue it dodges the real reasons voters rejected Kamala Harris and other Democrats in 2024.
Mega-donor John Morgan told Fox News in a Thursday night interview that the party's policies were "sure losers." Morgan pointed to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, what he called "woke" culture, open borders, and men competing against women in sports. He noted that across the report's 192 pages, those issues apparently go unaddressed.
That omission matters. If the autopsy was supposed to diagnose what went wrong, leaving out the policy positions that alienated working-class and moderate voters is like a doctor skipping the blood work and guessing at the diagnosis.
The calls for Martin's departure are not coming from fringe voices. Moulton, Pocan, and Veasey are sitting members of Congress. Moulton called it "utterly nuts it took us this long to release the autopsy." Pocan said bluntly:
"I agree.... Having what we have right now is not doing it."
Veasey told a news outlet that "there doesn't seem to be a plan to turn things around and the clock is ticking... I believe it's time for him to move on."
Beyond Capitol Hill, former top Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer told The Washington Post that Martin is "not the right person to lead the DNC at this time." Danielle Butterfield, executive director of the progressive super PAC Priorities USA, said Martin is "preventing us from moving forward."
Butterfield also offered what may be the most telling observation of the entire episode:
"It's pretty damning that instead of actually talking about the substance of the report, we're just talking about whether or not Ken Martin should resign."
She is right about the distraction, though perhaps not in the way she intended. Martin's handling of the autopsy has become its own indictment. He turned a document meant to spark reform into a story about his own management failures.
The autopsy is not Martin's only problem. Axios reported on the DNC's anemic fundraising numbers compared to its GOP counterpart. When a party chair cannot raise money and cannot manage an internal review without a public meltdown, the case for new leadership writes itself.
Martin took the helm of the DNC after the 2024 losses. His job was to rebuild. Instead, he buried an honest assessment of what went wrong, publicly attacked the work of the strategist he personally chose to write it, and released it only when the political cost of suppression exceeded the political cost of disclosure.
The deeper problem for Democrats is not Ken Martin. It is the pattern the autopsy describes, and the pattern Martin's behavior confirms. A party that has drifted since 2008, that defined its 2024 candidate as nothing more than "not Trump," that cannot bring itself to discuss the cultural and policy issues that drove voters away, and whose own chair tries to bury the evidence of all this, that is a party with a structural problem, not just a personnel one.
Replacing Martin may satisfy the immediate anger. But the autopsy's core finding, stagnation and retrogression stretching back nearly two decades, will not be fixed by swapping one chair for another. The report calls for an honest reckoning. Martin's response to it proved the party is not ready for one.
Democrats commissioned a mirror and then spent months arguing about whether to look into it. Now that they finally have, they want to fire the man holding the frame. The reflection, of course, stays the same.
