Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin on Thursday released a highly anticipated, 192-page autopsy report detailing the party’s 2024 election losses, doing so under significant pressure from the Democratic base while openly criticizing the quality of the document.
The report, first obtained and published by CNN, evaluates the failed presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris against Donald Trump and tracks broader party performance. Martin released the document alongside a sharp disclaimer regarding its accuracy and utility.
“For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged,” Martin told CNN. “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.”
Journalists and political pundits immediately echoed Martin’s reservations. CNN’s Aaron Blake noted that the document is full of “factual inaccuracies and is sometimes hard to follow, and there isn’t a coherent strategy laid out for the future so much as a series of disparate points of analysis.”
External criticism of Martin’s handling of the situation also persisted after the release. Tommy Vietor, co-host of Pod Save America, expressed his frustration on social media.
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“I’m glad that Ken released this statement and the flawed 2024 autopsy,” Vietor wrote. “If he’d done this in the first place and not lied about why it hadn’t been released, things might be different. As it stands, this raises more questions about his judgment, candor and ability to lead the DNC.”
The document lacks an executive summary but includes a comprehensive review of the party’s historical trajectory, stating that Democrats have “vacillated between stagnation and retrogression” since Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential victory. The authors attribute these long-term declines to structural failures at the local level. “These losses are the direct result of missed opportunities to invest in our states, counties, and local parties and candidates,” the report states.
The analysis claims that Democratic candidates have systematically lost the trust of voters while navigating a modern media landscape filled with misinformation. “In the face of misinformation and disinformation, our candidates have proven incapable of projecting strength, unity, and leadership, and voters have drifted away,” the text notes, adding that previous victories often relied on “negative partisanship — where Republicans have nominated deeply flawed candidates.”
A significant portion of the report assigns blame to the Biden White House and its political operation. It argues that the administration permitted right-wing media outlets to negatively define Harris over her three-and-a-half-year tenure without adequate pushback, particularly regarding immigration.
“Democrats won the election and President Biden assigned the Vice President a brief including immigration, which was poorly framed by Republicans as the ‘border czar,’” the report reads. “It was not the official title, but it was the one that the media propagated and the White House failed to contradict or correct.”
The report also details a lack of institutional research to support Harris compared to other members of the administration. It notes that before the midterm elections, the White House ordered DNC polling to determine how First Lady Jill Biden could best support the president’s agenda. However, the report states that “no similar research was conducted to support the Vice President – to identify the issues she should talk about, the ways in which she should talk about them, the audiences with which she could perhaps resonate and support the President’s agenda.”
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Furthermore, the authors argue that the administration failed to use the presidency effectively to lower Trump’s political standing, writing that “the national campaign did not effectively drive Trump’s negatives, and the White House did not effectively support Vice President Harris over three and half years to improve her standing before the candidate switch.”
To evaluate the loss, the report contrasts Harris’s performance with successful statewide Democratic candidates, particularly in competitive U.S. Senate races where Democrats won despite Trump winning the state overall.
In Michigan, the report praises Senator Elissa Slotkin’s strategy of “losing better.” Instead of focusing entirely on maximizing turnout in heavily Democratic hubs like Detroit and Ann Arbor, Slotkin actively sought to reduce losses in conservative strongholds. Slotkin outperformed Harris in 68 of Michigan’s 83 counties. For example, Slotkin won suburban Oakland County by 12 points compared to Harris’s 10.5 points, and she lost GOP-leaning Macomb County by 10 points while Harris lost it by 14 points. The report attributes Slotkin’s success to her direct outreach to working-class demographics regarding manufacturing and auto industry protections.
The report also points to the successful campaigns of Senators Ruben Gallego in Arizona and Jacky Rosen in Nevada as blueprints for the party, noting they won their races despite a broader “surge with Latino voters” toward Trump. “Successful candidates like Gallego and Rosen showed how year-round presence, economic messaging, and addressing cost-of-living concerns resonate more than identity politics,” the report notes. It recommends that labor groups with heavy Latino membership become central partners to maintain community credibility.
When assessing Harris’s specific campaign decisions, the autopsy reports that her operation targeted the wrong voting demographics and failed to counter cultural attack ads, such as a prominent Trump campaign advertisement focusing on transgender rights titled “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” Campaign pollsters for Harris reportedly “all recognized the attack as very effective,” and the report notes that “if the Vice President would not change her position – and she did not – then there was nothing which would have worked as a response.”
The report additionally criticizes the campaign’s geographic focus, stating that “Harris’s focus on college-educated suburbs left gaps at unwinnable levels” and that she “lagged in rural areas nationally, which proved to be insurmountable in swing states.” The authors conclude that “Harris wrote off rural America, assuming urban/suburban margins would compensate.”
The document highlights a fundamental messaging struggle, stating that Harris could not define her candidacy beyond a compressed timeline and basic anti-Trump rhetoric. “Harris struggled with definition beyond ‘not Trump’ and ‘prosecutor vs. felon.’ The truncated campaign timeline didn’t help, but the campaign did not quickly resolve on how to tag Trump and define Harris,” the report states.
Finally, the autopsy asserts that Democrats miscalculated Trump’s enduring popularity and operates on an outdated political framework. “At times, it seems Democrats are trying to win arguments while Republicans are focused on winning elections. Democrats operate in an ecosystem defined by reason even in cycles when the electorate is defined by rage,” the report claims.
It concludes that the party mistakenly assumed Trump’s high negative ratings were unchangeable. “The retrospective job approval for Trump was too high, and the campaign and allies failed to remind voters of his incompetence,” the report notes. “The idea Trump’s negatives were ‘baked in’ is a major failure of analysis and reality, given how his favorability has cratered less than a year into this term.”
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