No Israel. No Gaza. No mention of President Joe Biden’s age, unpopularity or his decision to run again.
After months of speculation and infighting, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee released an unfinished, unpolished “autopsy” report Thursday that failed to answer many of the party’s central questions about 2024. And it is being almost universally panned by the very Democrats it was meant to help.
“The report is a disaster,” one DNC member told MS NOW, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the closely guarded operation. “The only thing worse than the report explaining that the party is wrong on policy is the appearance of incompetence at evaluating what went wrong in 2024.”
The problems began with the process itself. Another person who was interviewed for the report, worked on the 2024 campaigns of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and was granted anonymity to speak about the secretive process told MS NOW that it was clear from the outset that the project wasn’t being taken seriously by DNC leadership.
“They only gave interview availability for before 9 A.M. or after 7 P.M. on weekdays, or the weekends,” the person said. It suggested to them the schedule of a volunteer side project, not a professional institutional undertaking.
The dysfunction continued from there. No senior campaign advisers were interviewed, according to four people familiar with the autopsy process, and the author did not reach out for interviews with former President Joe Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris, or members of the Uncommitted Movement, among many others whose insights might prove valuable to understanding what went wrong in the campaign.
A person inside the DNC who is familiar with the document said the party never received a list of the people interviewed, no transcriptions or notes of those interviews. When DNC leadership asked for a finished report, the author — Paul Rivera, a longtime associate of Martin’s — refused, according to this person, who was granted anonymity to address an issue they were not authorized to speak about.
Rivera did not respond to a request for comment.
Another person inside the committee, also granted anonymity to share their knowledge of the autopsy project, said deadlines were repeatedly punted, major sections weren’t provided and no clear methodology for the interviews was ever established.
“I wish [DNC Chair Ken Martin] had seen the document, seen it was terrible and actually hired a firm or some of the people who knew what they were doing and redo it,” said Adrienne Elrod, who was a senior adviser for the Harris campaign and was never contacted for an interview for the report. “He could have said, ‘This is not up to my standards, this is not something I can release,’ and then do an aggressive effort to give people something to work with.”
Multiple Democrats said the entire saga deepened concerns about Martin’s leadership of the DNC — adding to questions that were already swirling over his fundraising and performance in interviews, and which have grown significantly more acute since the report’s release.
The tenor within Democratic politics Thursday in the report’s aftermath felt eerily similar to the reckoning that played out nearly two years ago, when Biden’s June 2024 debate performance led to him eventually ending his re-election campaign. There had been rumblings for a while, concerns raised. But now a major public blunder brought to life by a series of missteps spilled out into full view and damage control was underway even if the harm was deep and building.
“I personally think that to save our democracy and save our country, that we have to have strong, confident leadership,” said one DNC member who did not support Martin for chair when he ran, and was granted anonymity to share their candid views. “I think he comes across as very weak on controversial things, or things that he doesn’t agree with or doesn’t want to talk about.”
Allies of Martin, who has deep ties to party leaders across the country, have intensely defended him. There was also an emphasis that the chairman shared clear concerns about the sloppiness of the report that he made public, an irk made clear by the red disclaimers added to the document ahead of its release.
“We have won election after election across the country since Ken’s election,” New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Ray Buckley, a former DNC vice chair, said in a text message. “The DC elite are [mistaken] if they think their attacks weaken Ken Martin. It only reminds us how disconnected to the real world they are.”
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The timing of the release made things worse. Martin unveiled the report Thursday during a stretch of politically damaging news for President Donald Trump — suddenly shifting media attention away from Trump’s roughly $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded stockpile to pay political allies purportedly victimized by partisan “weaponization” of the Justice Department. Instead, the DNC’s internal dysfunction became a major story.
“I kind of took it as … ‘You know what? Screw it: This is what you want to talk about? Well here it is. Now that you have the report, now let’s all get back to work,’” said John Verdejo, a DNC member from North Carolina.
That Martin found himself in this position at all was largely of his own making. He had promised to release the report around the time he was elected chair in early 2025, then backtracked late in the year, declining to put it out in full. That decision drew fierce criticism even as Democratic candidates were winning elections and building momentum ahead of the 2026 cycle — and the secrecy only fueled further speculation about what the report had found that was worth keeping hidden.
“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,” Martin said in a message that accompanied the report. “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.”
The document raises serious questions about sourcing. Portions appear to borrow heavily — in some cases, nearly verbatim — from news articles, including wording strikingly similar to local coverage about the 2024 U.S. Senate race in Ohio, a piece in MIT Technology Review from 2012, and a 2019 Wired article — all without citation.
The report itself mirrors some of the broader ailments it was meant to diagnose. It is pockmarked with inconsistencies, strains to be forward-looking while remaining firmly stuck in the past, and leans on charts and data to explain in clinical terms how the party lost — twice — to a candidate many Democrats believed was eminently beatable.
It offers some clear-eyed observations but flinches from assigning real blame. It is particularly evasive about how Harris ended up with just 107 days to run a general election campaign, and what role Biden played in putting the party in that position.
“The White House did not position or prepare the Vice President,” the report states. “Had the White House explored and evaluated ways to leverage Kamala Harris earlier in the administration, perhaps it would have improved the President’s standing, and it certainly could have helped prepare her to lead the ticket.”
The report is filled with campaign finance figures and history lessons, but skirts around the central gamble Democrats made: that running against a candidate they viewed as a threat to democracy — one who had incited a mob to storm the Capitol — was best accomplished by sticking with the oldest president ever to hold the office. When enough voices finally raised alarms about that choice, their alternative was ill-equipped to meet the moment for reasons both within her reach and far beyond it.
“At times, it seems Democrats are trying to win arguments while Republicans are focused on winning elections,” notes the report. “Democrats operate in an ecosystem defined by reason even in cycles when the electorate is defined by rage.”
The DNC’s own annotations flag the passage for lacking evidence.
Eugene Daniels is an MS NOW senior Washington correspondent and co-host of "The Weekend,” which airs on Saturdays and Sundays from 7 to 10 a.m. ET on MS NOW.
Hunter Woodall covers politics for MS NOW. He’s reported on politics and presidential campaigns for The Associated Press and CBS News and reported on Congress for The Minnesota Star Tribune.