Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin spent months refusing to release the party's internal report on its 2024 election loss. When he finally reversed course and put the document out on Thursday, the result managed to make things worse, drawing immediate fire from Democratic lawmakers who called it incomplete, evasive, and riddled with blank sections.
Martin himself admitted the report fell short. In a message posted to the DNC's website, he conceded he was "not proud of this product" and said it did not meet his own standards. He added that he could not "in good faith put the DNC's stamp of approval on it."
That raises an obvious question: if the party's own chairman won't vouch for the document, why release it at all? And if the DNC cannot produce a credible accounting of how Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential race, what exactly is the committee doing with its time and its donors' money?
The autopsy was supposed to give Democrats a clear-eyed look at what went wrong. Instead, as Fox News reported, entire sections of the report were left blank. The document was reportedly filled with omissions and factual errors. CNN reported that Democratic strategist Paul Rivera wrote the report.
Among the most glaring omissions: the report never mentioned the Gaza conflict that fractured the Democratic coalition throughout the 2024 cycle. It failed to address former President Joe Biden's age, a topic that dominated the campaign and ultimately helped force him from the race. And it said nothing about Harris's selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, a decision that itself became a flashpoint.
In other words, the party's official postmortem skipped the three subjects that most defined the 2024 Democratic campaign. That is not an oversight. That is avoidance.
The criticism from within the party was swift and pointed. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat, told reporters she found the omission of Gaza indefensible.
"I think it's pretty unbelievable that Gaza would not be mentioned once in the autopsy report."
Ocasio-Cortez went further, arguing that regardless of where individual Democrats stood on the issue, the conflict shaped the 2024 political environment in ways the party cannot pretend to ignore.
"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, and I think that for young people it was a huge part of the environment. I can tell you for myself, as a candidate during that cycle, there's no way that it was an ignorable issue or totally immaterial. So, I think that you know it's a real disservice to not speak to that or include or assess that."
Rep. Ro Khanna of California posted a video to his YouTube channel pressing the same point with sharper language. Khanna stated:
"We must speak and confront hard truths if this party is to win in 2028."
Khanna also claimed that "one of the reasons we lost was our blank check to Israel and Netanyahu while they committed genocide in Gaza", framing that reflects the progressive wing's view but remains a matter of fierce internal Democratic debate.
The sharpest rebuke came from Rep. Mark Veasey of Texas, who told Semafor that Martin should resign outright. Veasey did not mince words about the state of the party apparatus.
"There doesn't seem to be a plan to turn things around and the clock is ticking."
Veasey added a sense of urgency, noting that "November is literally around the corner" and declaring, "I believe it's time for him to move on."
Democratic strategist Steve Schale offered an even blunter assessment to NBC, calling the report's release "an unmitigated s***show." Schale went on to say that "there's just no confidence in the competence in the DNC."
That phrase, no confidence in the competence, is the kind of verdict a party chairman cannot survive for long. When your own strategists are telling national media that the institution you lead is incompetent, the job has become untenable.
Martin's handling of the report itself tells a story. For months after the 2024 loss, he refused to release the autopsy. His stated reason was that doing so would be a distraction. Then, facing sustained pressure, he reversed himself, and explained the reversal by saying that withholding the report had become "an even bigger distraction."
So the original plan was to bury it. And the backup plan was to release it while publicly disowning it. Neither inspires confidence.
Martin's admission that the product did not meet his standards only deepens the problem. If the chairman knew the report was substandard, he had months to fix it. He chose not to release it, then chose to release it in a form he himself called inadequate. The question is whether Martin was unable to produce a better document or unwilling to confront what an honest one would say.
The gaps in the report are more revealing than anything it contains. Leaving out Gaza means leaving out the campus protests, the "uncommitted" primary voters, the convention walkouts, and the young-voter disillusionment that dogged Harris from start to finish. Leaving out Biden's age means leaving out the central crisis of the 2024 cycle, the months of denial, the disastrous debate performance, and the chaotic late-stage candidate swap that left Harris with a compressed campaign timeline and no primary mandate.
And leaving out the Walz selection means declining to examine one of the few major strategic decisions Harris made independently. If the party cannot assess whether its vice-presidential pick helped or hurt, it cannot learn from the choice.
Taken together, these omissions suggest a document designed to avoid blame rather than assign it. That is the opposite of what an autopsy is for.
Democrats have been here before. After the party's 2016 loss, internal recriminations over rigged primaries and institutional rot consumed the DNC for years. The promise then was reform and transparency. Now, nearly a decade later, the committee cannot even produce an honest after-action report on its most recent defeat.
Fox News Digital contacted the DNC for additional comment. The committee's response, or lack thereof, was not detailed in the reporting.
Meanwhile, the 2026 midterms loom. Veasey's warning about November being "literally around the corner" is not hyperbole. If the DNC cannot diagnose what went wrong in 2024, it has no basis for a strategy in 2026, let alone 2028. The party is flying blind, and its own members know it.
The DNC's botched autopsy is not just an institutional embarrassment. It is a window into how the Democratic Party processes failure, which is to say, it doesn't. The instinct is to manage the narrative, not confront the record. Suppress the report, then release it with a disclaimer. Skip the hard questions. Leave the sections blank. Hope nobody notices.
But people notice. Democratic lawmakers noticed. Democratic strategists noticed. And voters, the ones who handed the party a loss in 2024, will notice when the same evasions produce the same results.
A party that cannot be honest with itself about why it lost has no business asking voters to trust it with power again.
