The Democratic Party’s long-suppressed 2024 election autopsy was leaked on Thursday, detonating a fresh civil war inside the party over how Donald Trump was allowed to claw his way back into the White House.
The nearly 200-page report, commissioned by the Democratic National Committee after Kamala Harris’s defeat, paints Democrats as increasingly “denialist,” culturally disconnected, and filled with candidates incapable of projecting “strength, unity, and leadership.”
It argues the party has steadily hemorrhaged support since the era of Barack Obama, while Republicans became vastly better at “flooding the zone” with aggressive messaging and culture-war attacks.
The haphazard, typo-ridden report was released by DNC chair Ken Martin unedited—but only after CNN obtained a copy first, despite calls from party members for its release months ago.
The autopsy also sharply criticizes the orbit of Joe Biden, accusing the former president’s loyalists of failing to prepare Harris for a national campaign and of refusing to aggressively counter Republican attacks that branded her the administration’s “border czar.”
It also takes aim at Harris for leaning too heavily on a “not Trump” strategy rather than offering a compelling economic agenda for working and middle-class voters.
But the autopsy’s omissions sparked even more outrage than its conclusions.
Despite months of earlier reporting that Democratic officials privately concluded the war in Gaza hurt Harris politically—particularly among young and progressive voters—the newly released version contains little meaningful discussion of the conflict.
It also largely sidesteps Biden’s disastrous decision to seek reelection before dropping out, as well as the chaotic absence of a competitive primary once he exited the race to find the best candidate to take on Trump.
“This alleged autopsy is almost worthless,” said grassroots liberal group RootsAction in a statement.
“There’s no mention of the Biden/Harris administration’s Israel policy that abetted the Gaza massacre. That cost votes, and helped Trump win. There’s no criticism of Biden for his insistence on seeking reelection, or the lack of any kind of open process to choose Biden’s replacement. No analysis of Harris for her lack of principles—leading to her avoiding media platforms reaching millions of potential voters.”
Former Obama senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer was equally scathing, taking aim at Martin, who commissioned Democratic strategist Paul Rivera to produce the report and then infuriated rank-and-file members by not releasing it in the first place.
“It’s hard to imagine anyone handling anything worse than Ken Martin handled the DNC autopsy. It was a disaster of his own making, and it’s sufficient evidence that he is not the right person to lead the DNC at this time,” the Pod Save America co-host wrote on X.
Saikat Chakrabarti, who served as chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and also worked on Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, described the autopsy as “an embarrassment.”
“It makes painfully obvious that we cannot continue down a path of electing establishment Democrats who do nothing but lose and cede territory to the far right,” the California congressional candidate added.
“The Democratic Party has got to change. We can either seize this opportunity and finally build a movement that fights for working people, or live in denial and end up with the same incompetent leaders who led to Donald Trump’s re-election,” Chakrabarti said.
A chastened Martin eventually apologized in a call to DNC members on Thursday.
“For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged,” he said in a statement.
“It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”
