In a surprising turn of events, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin on Thursday released an unfinished, error-laden draft of the 2024 election autopsy report he had commissioned last year but then refused to release in December on the grounds that it would be a “distraction.”
Martin wrote a peculiar note announcing the unexpected release of the 192-page report, which read, in part:
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. But transparency is paramount. So, today I am releasing the report as I received it – in its entirety, unedited and unabridged – with annotations for claims that couldn’t be verified.
But if this report doesn’t represent the DNC’s views, then why release it at all? And why the sudden epiphany about “transparency” some five months after publicly spiking the postmortem?
Perhaps the most likely explanation is that Martin was trying to get ahead of an imminent CNN report on the document that was published Thursday — and scramble to control the narrative ahead of yet another round of withering criticism.
The report is also striking for what it doesn’t include.
The DNC report itself is at once both boring and a mess. And the drama surrounding its release distills how utterly disastrous Martin’s handling of the autopsy has been from start to finish. It’s all marked by an irony: If he had followed through on his original promise, this report wouldn’t be shrouded in a fraction of the controversy it is now.
Martin doesn’t name the author of the report, but according to a DNC official familiar with it, the author is Paul Rivera, a longtime New York Democratic strategist who is friends with Martin.
Martin’s argument in his announcement message is that the reason he didn’t release the report is because Rivera’s work was subpar. “It wasn’t ready for primetime. Not even close,” he wrote. “And because no source material was provided, fixing it would have meant starting over, from the beginning — every conversation, every interview, every data set.” Martin apparently eventually decided it wasn’t worth the effort to fix it.
If Martin thinks that statement is exculpatory for him, it isn’t. When he was elected chair in February 2025, he promised a report investigating what went wrong for the party in 2024. It was initially supposed to come out in spring 2025, but then he delayed and delayed until he ultimately said he refused to release it at all. He had ample time to either clearly lay out expectations for the report’s quality or work to fix what was submitted. And when he torpedoed the report, he did not explain why other than to say the party ought to look forward. The result is a failure on his part: He made a pledge, and he did not fulfill it.
Reading the report is a strange experience. At the very top of the document there’s a “disclaimer” that reads: “This document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC. 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.” Again, this would seem to be a reason to not release the document at all.
The draft report contains awkward language, grammatical errors, factual errors and is missing entire sections, including an executive summary and a conclusion. The document is also marked up with many notes calling for sourcing backing up claims.
The analysis of what went wrong is narrow in scope and tracks with what one might expect from a moderate, risk-averse member of the Democratic establishment. For example, there’s an assessment that then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign did not make a sufficient “affirmative case” for the presidency, and that she was successfully hit by attack ads pointing out her past support for surgery for transgender inmates.
The report is also striking for what it doesn’t include. CNN’s review found that the report omits discussion of “Biden’s decision to run again, Harris taking over as the nominee without a nominating process or how the ticket’s positions on the war in Gaza affected Democrats in key states like Michigan.”
Skipping over those issues is political malpractice, and suggests this wasn’t a serious autopsy or wanted to avoid certain debates. But, again, one is left wondering whether the final report would’ve mentioned those issues because this one is incomplete. One can’t help but wonder, too, if Martin has preemptively derided the report as so bad it needed to be shelved because he sought a way to avoid tussling with activists who would’ve assailed the report’s assessment of issues like Gaza.
The DNC has managed to achieve the worst of all worlds. If it had released a report similar to this when it initially was expected to, it would likely have caused a few days of debate between moderate and progressive Democrats, and then most people who have forgotten about it. But Martin’s process of delaying it, quashing it and then releasing a sloppy, incomplete report has attracted far more scrutiny than it would’ve gotten otherwise, and made the party look cowardly and incompetent in the process.
At a time when the party is suffering from an extreme trust deficit with its voters, this is the last thing it needed.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.
