The Democratic National Committee has released its long-awaited "autopsy" of the 2024 presidential election, and it is getting panned from all sides for being evasive, poorly constructed, and conspicuously silent on the two most consequential decisions the party made in 2024.
DNC Chair Ken Martin had been sitting on this report since late last year. He pledged transparency, then reversed course in December, saying he would not release it. The reversal created a slow-motion credibility crisis. NBC News described Martin as having "been pummeled in public for months" over the episode, and last week Kamala Harris herself called for the report to be made public. So Martin released it on Thursday, though not quite on his own terms.
"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 said in a statement Thursday.
“I could not in good faith put the DNC's stamp of approval on the report that was produced."
Martin continued, "After last November's massive Democratic wins, I didn't want to create a distraction, but by not putting the report out, I ended up creating an even bigger distraction. For that, I sincerely apologize."
The document was released in full, but no one seems to be satisfied with it.
NBC News reported that large sections are devoted to "a lengthy recap of modern American political history dating to the 2008 presidential election, historic fundraising and spending data from past elections, and more." The annotations flagged factual errors, including incorrect election results, and challenged claims that the annotators said were unsupported by evidence.
When the report does engage with 2024, it leans on broad themes like an “inability or unwillingness to listen to all voters” that provided the GOP “with opportunities for advancement at the expense of Democratic growth, evolution, and ability to find common ground with seemingly disparate groups of voters from coast to coast, and the heartland Democrats tend to ignore.” It also claims that Harris failed to make her positions known and didn’t go far enough in attacking Trump, in an apparent attempt to avoid addressing the specific problems with the campaign.
The report also claimed that state parties were underfunded and that Democratic infrastructure was too weak in key battlegrounds. However, that argument doesn’t align with the actual circumstances of the election. Kamala Harris’s campaign raised and spent more than $1 billion, giving her every conceivable resource advantage heading into the election.
Despite the massive war chest, the campaign failed to win a single swing state. Rather than confront why all that money still couldn’t connect with working-class voters in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the report leans heavily on vague complaints about “messaging” while largely ignoring the real problems that doomed her campaign.
CNN Senior Reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere pointed out what the report conspicuously omits. “It does not touch a couple of topics that a lot of people were very interested in, and thought were the reasons for this report not being out,” he said. “There's nothing about Joe Biden and what happened in the debate. There's nothing about Kamala Harris getting the nomination without any kind of primary process. And also there is nothing about the way that voters were responding to Gaza and how the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris policies and comments about it were hitting their minds.”
Democrats themselves have not been kind.
"It sounds like we need a malpractice attorney, because we couldn't even do the autopsy correctly,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) told CNN. "Obviously, it was the Joe Biden issue at the debate. It was the switchover to Kamala without a process. And, at the end of the day, Democrats weren't talking enough about affordability and the economy."
Moskowitz added, “We're too afraid to tell them the truth. They know the truth. They saw the debate. They saw what happened."
Former CNN commentator Chris Cillizza also bashed the autopsy.
“I was a BIG advocate for the DNC releasing the 2024 autopsy,” he wrote on X. “Having now read it, I can see now why there was so much resistance within some corners of the party to releasing it. It is an utter disaster. And a failure on virtually every front.”
He expressed his frustration in a video post.
“Takeaway number one: Joe Biden is almost not in this report,” he said. “So it's 192 pages long. Again, how many times and what section do you believe how much time is devoted to Joe Biden's advanced age? He was 81 years old in 2024. And the concerns that the public voiced over and over again to pollsters that he was too old to do the job and shouldn't run again. It's zero. There is no mention of Biden's age, the polling on his age, his infirmity physically and mentally that was on display, the hiding of Biden from the public. There's none of it.”
Cillizza continued, “In fact, I was so surprised that after I kind of scanned through the entire 192-page document, I did a control F, a find, and I searched for Biden's name because I figured I must have missed that section. No, I didn't miss that section. The only acknowledgement is this statement. Two sentences. ‘The debate obviously changed many things. The dial testing during the debate demonstrated the weakness of the president's performance in a post debate survey was scrapped.’ Okay, that's it. That's it about the debate, Biden's age, etc.”
The real autopsy, the one the DNC apparently declined to write, would grapple with candidate quality, a compressed general election timeline, unpopular policies, and the impact of covering up Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and letting him implode on stage with President Trump.
Instead, the party hid behind clichés and generic excuses, ignoring what really went wrong.