Democrats Tried To Bury 2024 Election Autopsy

Political parties that lose major elections will often create an “autopsy report.” Hoping not to make the same mistakes twice, an autopsy lets the party take stock of its failures, learn why its candidate failed to connect with voters, and get a sense of how to do better next time.

But 18 months after Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election to then-former President Donald Trump, the Democratic Party only got around to releasing an autopsy this week. Even then, the party only did so as a result of public pressure, having previously sworn off the prospect of ever publicly releasing the report. Why is the party so dead set against learning from its own mistakes?

The 2024 election “was a punch to the gut, and people were pissed off,” Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Ken Martin wrote Thursday in a statement accompanying the report’s release. “How, we all asked, could Democrats have lost to Donald Trump again? How did we blow through billions of dollars? And where do we go from here?”

The resulting report paints a bleak picture for Democrats. “We must admit and accept some hard truths about our Party,” it cautions. “Since the high point of the 2008 Obama landslide…the Democratic Party has vacillated between stagnation and retrogression. In doing so, we have lost the confidence we once received from everyday Americans—and election results show it. In the sixteen tumultuous years since that historic election, Democrats have lost ground at every level of government.”

This is actually the first time in more than a decade that Democrats have publicly taken any such introspection.

When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, the party appointed then-Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D–N.Y.) to compile an autopsy, only to effectively bury it. Politico reported at the time that “members were not allowed to have copies of the report and may view it only under the watchful eyes of [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] staff.”

One person who recognized the folly in this strategy was Ken Martin.

“The DNC spent a lot of time and money on [a 2016 autopsy], and it wasn’t even released to the DNC members,” Martin said in February 2025. “Was there any utility in doing that?”

As to whether the party would compile and release a report for the 2024 election, Martin added, “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.”

But when it was completed in December, Martin said he wouldn’t release the report, which he called “a distraction from the core mission.”

The decision was controversial. Last month, when Martin appeared on the progressive podcast Pod Save America, host Jon Favreau brought up his previous pledge to release the report and asked, “Why did you change your mind on that?”

Martin averred that the report itself was less important than the “lessons” it contained, “and we released those lessons.”

This week, the DNC bowed to pressure and finally released the report, though not without immediately disavowing it; each page bears a disclaimer that it “reflects the views of the author, not the DNC,” which did not receive “the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented.”

Indeed, the document contains numerous highlights and notations of issues to be corrected.

“When I received the report late last year, it wasn’t ready for primetime. Not even close,” Martin explained this week. “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.”

Of course, Martin is only releasing the report because of public pressure. In fact, CNN released a draft of the report hours before Martin did.

Martin added that he saw no reason to release the report in December because Democrats had done well in state and local elections the previous month. But the report had some caution on that front.

“Our candidates have proven incapable of projecting strength, unity, and leadership, and voters have drifted away,” it warned. “Indeed, many of our critical Democratic wins can be attributed to negative partisanship—where Republicans have nominated deeply flawed candidates, and we have been able to convince some Republicans and most Independents to support Democrats in those contests.”

“This remains true even in the face of the ‘Blue Wave’ in the most recent elections,” it added. “2025 gubernatorial and mayoral wins in Virginia, New Jersey, New York City, Detroit, and elsewhere may lead to a false sense of security and a belief the Democratic Party has again found ways to bring the voters back to the booth with their messaging.”

Flawed though the report may be, it still provided useful information and advice to be cautious about its recent electoral successes.

But ignoring the evidence of its own unelectability has become something of a trend among Democrats. Even examining the 2020 election, when Joe Biden defeated Trump, would have been useful. “Instead, Democrats apparently took Trump’s unfitness as so manifestly self-evident that it was not worth interrogating why 74 million people voted for him in 2020, and whether they would do so again,” I wrote after Harris’ loss in 2024.

In fact, the 2024 autopsy mentions another Democratic Party postmortem conducted after the 2022 midterms, which laid out a number of recommendations for future campaigns. “Unfortunately, none of these recommendations were implemented on the proposed timeline, if at all,” it notes. (“No evidence or sourcing provided for this claim,” the DNC retorts.)

Democrats often talk about Trump as an existential threat to the country and the rule of law—and the argument is compelling. Just this week, Trump settled his own lawsuit against the government, steering an arbitrary multi-billion dollar sum into an account he controlled while exempting himself from future investigatory scrutiny, as he and his children repeatedly benefit financially from various government actions.

And yet while Trump is deeply unpopular, the Democratic Party fares little better in polls of voters. Why is that? Perhaps a report dedicated to its most recent major loss, compiled and distributed to party officials, could shed some light.