The Democratic National Committee plunged into a fresh round of chaos Thursday after Chair Ken Martin was forced to release an autopsy report he commissioned about the failed 2024 presidential campaign.
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Instead of quelling speculation about the findings and outrage over Martin’s initial insistence on keeping it secret, the release aggravated an extended public relations and management nightmare.
After months refusing to make the autopsy public but saying the DNC was learning important lessons from it, Martin on Thursday gave a different story: Actually, he said, the report wasn’t complete, and he didn’t stand behind it. The document that was released was filled with DNC annotations rebutting various assertions.
Now, jittery donors are second-guessing whether they can trust the DNC with their money, according to two sources with knowledge of internal discussions. Martin spent part of the day on the phone talking through his decision-making.
Progressive groups are apoplectic that the report released Thursday does not even mention Gaza, even though DNC officials interviewed pro-Palestinian groups.
And some of Martin’s chief critics are calling on him to step down.
“This is an unmitigated s—show,” Steve Schale, a veteran Democratic strategist, said of the events as they unfolded. “There’s just no confidence in the competence in the DNC.”
The question now, Schale said, is whether DNC members will do anything about it. There is no mechanism for party members to remove a DNC chair. But they can take part in a no-confidence vote.
In a staff call Thursday, Martin indirectly addressed pressure to step aside.
“This was a major mistake,” he said in a staff-only call, according to a person familiar with the call. “I own it, and now it’s time for us to move forward at the DNC, and I hope that you’ll move forward with me.”
But Martin only ushered in a fresh round of invective with his reasoning for keeping it under wraps. He had tapped a longtime friend, Paul Rivera, whom he knew for more than two decades, to produce the report. Rivera, who could not be reached for comment, had not been paid to do the work.
Martin said the DNC didn’t receive source material from Rivera’s review. A person with knowledge of what happened said that the DNC had demanded but never received a list of people who were interviewed and that the committee never received transcripts or notes of interviews, either, despite multiple requests.
Before the release
But amid Martin’s shifting public story about the autopsy, his behind-the-scenes interactions with Rivera belied some of those explanations.
Rivera had recently sat in on senior-level meetings at the committee, and he had been inside the DNC building talking to Martin in the months after Martin decided in December to keep the autopsy secret, according to two sources.
The DNC didn’t immediately provide comment about Rivera’s continued involvement, nor did it say when it cut ties with Rivera. In a call with DNC members Thursday, Martin said Rivera was no longer with “or advises the DNC in any capacity.”
At a meeting of the DNC’s national finance committee in Middleburg, Virginia, last fall, Martin introduced Rivera and sang his praises. Rivera presented slides about the report’s findings. Those with knowledge of the event said there was no indication that the report wouldn’t eventually be released.
A source with knowledge of the situation said Martin didn’t see major sections of the report until shortly before Christmas.
The shifting stances on the autopsy only brought more intense skepticism from those looking for answers about how the Biden administration and Vice President Kamala Harris’ stance on Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza played in her election loss.
“The party has a leadership crisis. I think the base is way ahead of the party leaders,” said Norm Solomon, a co-founder of RootsAction, which pushed for the report’s release. “Part of the challenge is it’s easier to change one leader than it is to change the culture of a party.”
Solomon said the situation is a “replica of how we got so screwed up with the Biden 2024 campaign. People who knew better privately wouldn’t say out loud what they knew. They deferred to people at the top. Since then, in this process of the autopsy, people deferred to Ken Martin and allowed him to string us along.”
The Institute for Middle East Understanding called for additional transparency, saying the author of the autopsy report previously told members about research on the role Gaza played in the 2024 election.
“Ken Martin should release the information that the author of the autopsy told us clearly and unambiguously, which is that DNC officials’ review of their own data found Biden’s support for Israel to be a net-negative for Democrats in 2024,” Executive Director Margaret DeReus said in a statement.
Not everyone was upset with Martin, and Martin allies say the issue isn’t one that average Americans care about, even as Beltway types and the media are consumed.
Former DNC Chair Jaime Harrison on Thursday lamented the amount of energy and distraction the report had stirred within the party and criticized people for not directing that energy toward protesting the Supreme Court’s recent decision weakening the Voting Rights Act.
“You go into Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, South Carolina right now and you ask: ‘What is on your top 10 priority list?’ And I can tell you that the DNC report is not on it,” Harrison said in an interview Thursday.
One donor who spoke with Martin on Thursday credited him for his work and said she had faith in his leadership.
“What’s really important from my perspective is certainly that, yes, we lost in 2024 by a narrow margin. But the side of the story that’s not out there as much is that we’re overperforming,” said Ursula Terrasi, a donor from Kansas City, Missouri. “In some unlikely districts, we have had stunning wins. So we’re coordinating, he’s coordinating, he’s helping the states. We have to win legislative elections in the states, and he’s doing the right things, and most people are agreeing with that.”
Vinod Thomas, a DNC member from North Carolina, pointed to some of the takeaways in the autopsy.
“The ironic part about the report is that the contents of the report validates what Ken has been saying we need to do: Rather than investing in year-round organizing and voter contact, they spent too much money on last-minute media blitzes,” Thomas said.
Constant pressure
The current episode is the latest flash point for a DNC that has been under pressure constantly since Martin took the helm almost 16 months ago.
Democrats made gains around the country in important 2025 races and have overperformed in key special elections as President Donald Trump’s approval rating and voter frustration with the economy play into their hands.
But Martin’s tenure has been plagued by a spate of bad headlines, including his intraparty spat with Gen Z activist David Hogg and repeated questions about the Republican National Committee’s massive cash advantage over the Democrats — $124 million to $14 million in the bank at the end of last month, per the latest campaign finance filings. Meanwhile, the DNC’s debt is bigger than its cash reserves.
The debate over the autopsy report has been a durable thorn in Martin’s side, too.
Mere hours after he was elected to lead the DNC in February 2025, Martin spoke about how important it was to conduct a full-scale audit of what went wrong in 2024, and he pledged to release the report to the public, chiding past party leaders for not having done so after the party’s 2016 presidential loss.
“There was a postelection review done many years ago, right after the ’16 election, right? And that was never released. The DNC spent a lot of time and money on it, and it wasn’t even released to the DNC members. So what happened with that, right? Was there any utility in doing that?” he said at the time.
“Of course it will be released, right? It will be released to our members, and we all have to learn from that,” Martin continued. “There has to be some lessons that we bring on so that we can operationalize it.”
Then came the about-face in December.
While the party “completed a comprehensive review of what happened in 2024 and are already putting our learnings into motion,” Martin said in a statement then, the DNC wouldn’t release it to avoid distracting Democrats from looking forward.
At the time, a DNC official told NBC News the review included hundreds of interviews, specific lessons and details about how the party needed to be more responsive to voters’ concerns. Neither Martin nor the official raised any public concerns about the quality of the report in their possession.
Nor did Martin give any indication he lacked faith in the report in an interview on “Pod Save America,” the liberal podcast hosted by Obama campaign veterans, late last month.
Martin took a different tone Thursday on Substack, where he wrote that “when I received the report late last year, it wasn’t ready for primetime.”
“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,” he wrote. “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.”
Devin Remiker, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told NBC News that while he gets Martin’s criticism of a report that’s “incomplete and riddled with mistakes,” the entire situation was “disappointing on several fronts.” Democrats, he said, missed their opportunity to do the full review of 2024 that so many wanted. And it’s hard to know what may be salvageable from the report for Democrats hoping that work could lead to meaningful improvement in future campaigns.
“One of the reasons the Democratic Party’s brand is in the absolute toilet right now is that even Democrats don’t believe in the Democratic Party writ large,” Remiker said, adding that the autopsy episode wouldn’t help.
Asked multiple times whether he had confidence in Martin to remain as chair to repair that trust, Remiker didn’t say either way — but he did call for the party to stay unified in an important election year.
“I don’t spend my days thinking about whether or not Ken Martin should stay on or resign,” Remiker said. “I’m pleased that he released the autopsy, finally. And I hope this is a reflection point for him to be able to find ways to improve. Because as far as I know, he’s going to be chair through this midterm election and I want all of us to be successful — him in the DNC, states around the country, candidates for office up and down the ballot. But we can only do that if we trust each other, if we are united.”
