The Democratic National Committee released a version of its 2024 autopsy Thursday — months overdue, incomplete, and disowned almost immediately by the organization that published it.
The report lands like a sigh. It paints a bleak portrait of a party still reeling from its loss to Donald Trump, who carried every battleground state in November. And yet, in 192 pages, it manages to say very little. It does not formally conclude what went wrong. It barely touches on Joe Biden’s exit from the race. It does not mention Israel and Gaza — the fault line that cracked Democratic coalitions in city after city, campus after campus.
The DNC slapped a bright red disclaimer across every page: the report, it noted, “reflects the views of the author, not the DNC.” The committee added that it could not independently verify many of the claims because it was never provided the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data.
This is a party publishing its own autopsy and simultaneously refusing to stand behind it.
The document was first obtained by CNN, then released by the DNC itself. Its author, Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, is not mentioned anywhere in the published version. Rivera wrote that Democrats “have proven incapable of projecting strength, unity, and leadership, and voters have drifted away.” That much, at least, rings true.
The reaction from within the party was immediate and harsh.
Adrienne Elrod, a senior adviser to both the Biden and Harris campaigns, urged Democrats to take the report “with a massive grain of salt,” saying the process was “highly ineffective” and “ill-researched.”
Ashley Etienne, a former communications director for Vice President Harris, said what mattered most was what was missing — that the DNC appeared to be “cherry-picking the parts of it that it wants to actually release.”
A senior Democratic operative close to the process called it, without diplomatic cushioning, “stupid.”
DNC Chair Ken Martin, releasing the document himself, acknowledged it plainly: “This does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards.”
One wonders, then, why it was released at all — at least in this form. The answer may be political arithmetic.
Martin has been under sustained pressure from within a financially struggling party. A Democratic operative who worked on the Harris campaign called the release “a self-inflicted wound.” Others suggested it could accelerate questions about his future as chair.
There is something almost poignant in the spectacle. A great party, trying to learn from its failures, produces a document it won’t vouch for, written by someone it won’t name, released with a disclaimer that amounts to: don’t blame us. It is less an autopsy than an alibi.
