The Democratic National Committee completed a comprehensive “post-mortem” review of the party’s 2024 landslide election losses – and then Democrats promptly buried their findings, according to reports.
The DNC will not release the report publicly, despite repeated promises from DNC Chair Ken Martin to do so.
Martin ordered the autopsy shortly after he took over as national party chairman earlier this year. He had stressed that the report should be released to help the party learn from its mistakes. But Martin said in a statement Thursday that his top priority is not distracting from helping the party win in future elections.
“We completed a comprehensive review of what happened in 2024 and are already putting our learnings into motion. And we’re winning again — even in places that haven’t gone blue in decades,” Martin said in the statement.
“In our conversations with stakeholders from across the Democratic ecosystem, we are aligned on what’s important, and that’s learning from the past and winning the future. Here’s our North Star: does this help us win? If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.”
Democratic Party officials interviewed over 300 Democrats from all 50 states for the report, which Martin promised would drill down on the mistakes in 2024 and offer a roadmap going forward.
The report includes hundreds of interviews with people from all 50 states and includes specific lessons, like ways to revamp campaign organizing and better ways to reach young voters.
What they found was apparently too “un-woke” for the public to see.
The decision to bury the report came despite Martin’s repeated public pledges to release it. When he won the campaign to become DNC chair earlier this year, Martin confirmed to reporters that a post-election review would be his top priority on his first day. He also said he would release the report publicly, and he criticized the party for not releasing its post-2016 election autopsy publicly.
“There was a post-election review done many years ago, right after the ’16 election, right? And that was never released. The DNC spent a lot of time and money on it, and it wasn’t even released to the DNC members. So what happened with that, right? Was there any utility in doing that?” Martin said in February. “Of course it will be released, right? It will be released to our members and we all have to learn from that. There has to be some lessons that we bring on so that we can operationalize it. … What are our marching orders? What did we learn from this last election that can help inform the future and help put us back on track? Absolutely, 100%.”
Vice President Kamala Harris lost all of the key swing states to President Donald Trump after she took over the ticket from President Joe Biden in July of the election year.
Democrats also lost control of the Senate and failed to win back the House majority in the 2024 elections as Republicans made major gains with key Democratic Party voters.
The decision to bury the report drew criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike.
Former DNC vice chair David Hogg slammed the move. “They are spiking an autopsy of the election that gave us Trump 2.0. If party leaders won’t take the steps required to rebuild ourselves into a winning coalition, we will take it into our own hands,” Hogg warned in a social media post.
Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama and a co-host of the popular progressive podcast Pod Save America, also blasted the move.
“This is a very bad decision that reeks of the caution and complacency that brought us to this moment,” Pfeiffer wrote.
Republican National Committee national press secretary Kiersten Pels argued in a statement that voters do not need an autopsy of Democrats’ 2024 failures to understand why their party is collapsing.
“Ken Martin still can’t connect the dots: voters and donors are fleeing because Democrats pour millions into radical candidates who hate this country. Now they’re literally taking out loans to prop up a broken operation,” Pels said. “Republicans sincerely hope they keep up the great work.”