The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
After months of speculation and anger, the Democratic National Committee finally released its autopsy of the party’s loss in the 2024 presidential election just before Memorial Day weekend. Despite pledging to release the document publicly when first elected to lead the Democratic Party’s organizational arm in early 2025, DNC Chair Ken Martin reversed course in December of last year, announcing that the report would not be published. Why? Some speculated it was merely a way for party insiders to avoid accountability for their failures; many others that it showed Kamala Harris lost because of her refusal to disavow Joe Biden’s policy toward Israel. As it turns out, the coverup was due to a much more banal and embarrassing reason: Martin’s friend whom he hired to complete the report turned in a pile of garbage.
Read more from the Revolving Door Project
The document is long, running 192 pages in total, but is missing entire sections, including a conclusion and executive summary. It is also, in a word, bad. It is poorly written, poorly researched, and built on half-baked axioms and middle school–level comprehension of political history. Some have alleged that it was written by ChatGPT, though LLMs can usually be trusted to avoid grammatical errors. One detail illustrates the problem: Not once does the report mention the post-pandemic inflation, which topped almost every issue poll in 2024. It’s bush-league stuff.
And yet, within two hours of the autopsy becoming public, two prominent Democratic groups released written statements attempting to capitalize on the report’s findings, claiming it showed Democrats must move to the center.
CNN first published the autopsy at 10 a.m. Eastern time. Two hours later, centrist think tank Third Way put out a statement on X, née Twitter, from president Jon Cowan. He blasted the “chronically online, highly educated, left-leaning team at the DNC” for “bury[ing]” the report, although the first line containing the attack was edited out just eight minutes later. “[T]his report,” Cowan asserted, “should be case closed” on the need for Democrats to “reclaim the vital center.” Why the group chose not to stand by its original attack on the DNC for being too educated is unclear (Third Way did not respond to a request for comment), but it is a bit of an own goal to complain about excessive education in defense of a report that largely lacks citations.
Not long after Third Way put out their short statement, Liam Kerr, co-founder of WelcomePAC—which aspires to be the “Justice Democrats of the political center”—published a Substack post at 12:31 saying that the autopsy report is “too moderate to handle,” which is “possibly a reason the DNC’s own autopsy was not released.” The brief column at several points implies the reason the report got shelved was because the DNC wanted to bury its centrist conclusions. Welcome did not respond to a request for comment asking whether this meant that they disagreed with Martin’s stated rationale that the report was “not ready for prime time.”
Setting aside how suspiciously quickly these groups could digest a nearly 200-page report, this left-bashing is a conclusion in search of evidence. The autopsy is useful because it is a hyperlink with some tangential legitimacy from being commissioned by the DNC, not because of its actual analysis. This is especially the case for Welcome, given they already have a report from 2025 that, while it has its limitations, is a far superior moderate analysis of where the Democratic Party is currently. It’s not only complete, but it doesn’t misspell key names or misstate election margins.
Of course, there is a good chance both WelcomePAC and Third Way’s analyses were prewritten attacks on their enemies to the left, prepared in advance no matter what the report might have said. It could be that, in their haste to be the first to pin 2024’s loss on the left, they rushed their preprepared conclusions out the door without even first checking why the report was buried.
The whole autopsy debacle is an excellent window into the rotting core of Democratic politics—just not in the way Kerr and Cowan think.
FOLLOWING HIS ASCENSION TO CHAIR of the Democratic National Committee, the governing body of the Democratic Party 75 percent of the time (in presidential election years, it’s the annoyingly similarly named Democratic National Convention), Ken Martin quickly commissioned an autopsy of the party’s 2024 loss. Martin had promised the postmortem both during and immediately after his campaign. To write it, he tapped his friend and Democratic consultant Paul Rivera.
Martin took office in February 2025. Despite promising an autopsy twice, he could not even commit to a timeline. First, the report would be released in the spring of 2025. That did not happen. On the contrary, according to reporting from CNN, Rivera waited months before even contacting key figures from the Harris campaign. Then in an August 2025 DNC meeting, Martin committed to releasing the autopsy report three weeks after the meeting. That stretched to October, then November. In early December, Martin abruptly changed course and announced that the report would actually not be released at all and that he believed the party should focus on recent off-year wins in Virginia and New Jersey instead.
February saw bombshell reporting from Holly Otterbein at Axios that the autopsy team had concluded that the Biden administration’s response to Israel’s aggression in Gaza damaged Vice President Harris during the 2024 campaign, something conspicuously absent from the autopsy draft released to the public in May.
Then in May, Edward-Isaac Dovere at CNN obtained slides summarizing the key points of the report and later, when CNN approached the DNC for comment, the entire report draft. Finally, as Dovere recounts, the DNC seemingly decided to just give up and release the report.
The most charitable reading of what happened is to take everything from the DNC at face value. By this view, the organization hired someone to do a report, retained that person and publicly covered for him for months, while he could not even fulfill basic requirements like supplying research documentation, lied to its own members about what was happening, spent months Streisand effect-ing the report, and then published a grossly unprofessional draft version in a panic, still supposedly without ever managing to get a completed version or documentation from the research team. Rivera, the point person on the autopsy, continued to be involved with DNC work until April 2026. That version of events reveals a severe lack of organizational competence, which tends to be important in running a massive nationwide political party.
And that story has some major cracks. For starters, a senior staffer at one organization that was consulted for the autopsy told me in no uncertain terms that the meetings they were in, which happened at the end of summer in 2025, included not just Rivera, but several people from the DNC, and that the whole thing was recorded by the research team. Also, Ken Martin said absolutely nothing about the poor quality of the report until the day it was made public—in fact, he had touted its insights for months.
More than what Martin said, though, the substance of the report draft would seem to impugn his insistence that it was being used to improve the DNC’s political strategy. Most of the defining elements of the campaign go unmentioned. In addition to glossing over Gaza, there is no discussion at all of Biden’s age and debate performance, or the failure of the party to pressure him to stand aside until after he imploded on national television, forcing Harris into an election already well under way and depriving the party of a rigorous primary to select the strongest candidate. As noted above, the report only mentions “inflation” in the context of inflation-adjusted campaign spending and fundraising despite polling finding that inflation and the cost of living was the single most important issue in the 2024 election. The phrase “cost of living” is totally absent.
Similarly, there is no mention of Harris’s brother-in-law Tony West taking over the campaign’s economic policy and messaging and reorienting it to be more friendly toward corporate interests. In fact, the word “populist” only appears once, in reference to how Trump appealed to working-class men.
The idea that anyone could understand politics in 2024 without covering inflation, populist messaging, or Israel and Gaza is ludicrous. It would be like a Republican autopsy of the 2008 election that didn’t mention the financial crisis or the war in Iraq.
Amidst these yawning lacunae, the autopsy does clumsily repeat some centrist shibboleths, which is probably what endeared it to Third Way types. It takes a moment to cover the “Kamala is for they/them” ad (though without the serious analysis Rob Flaherty, Harris’s deputy campaign manager, brought to bear on it), celebrates the halcyon days of the Democratic Leadership Council and the Democratic realignment it brought about through Bill Clinton, and blasts identity politics.
DESPITE THE ENTIRE DOCUMENT being riddled with annotations from DNC staff noting the lack of sourcing and factual inconsistencies, perhaps the most telling section is one largely unadorned by red ink: the historical section touting Ron Brown and the DLC for the return of successful Democratic politics. The DLC’s tacking to the center is something of a founding myth for the modern Democratic establishment. According to the autopsy, “In 1989, after losing three straight presidential campaigns, our party refocused the conversation around policy and purpose to reclaim the vital center of American discourse.”
The operative term in “founding myth,” however, is “myth.” It’s obviously true that DLC-aligned Bill Clinton won in 1992, but celebrations of his moderation misstate the order of events. Clinton’s ’92 campaign was fairly heterodox and included a healthy dose of progressive economic policy. The more aggressive pivot to the center under Clinton happened throughout 1993 and 1994. As such, the 1994 midterms are the first real referendum on third way politics. And Democrats suffered a shellacking there. Even as the report celebrates Brown’s focus on “the races we win,” it makes no mention of the fact that the 1990s saw the end of a half-century of Democratic dominance in Congress.
The early Obama years, toward which the autopsy is less reverent, rhyme with the Clinton myth. Centrists often mention Clinton and Obama in the same breath, as successful Democrats who won by pivoting to the center. But both of them tacked to the center mostly after taking office thanks in large part to Republican mistakes, and then proceeded to oversee midterm routs. There are certainly things to be learned from those campaigns, but those lessons don’t conform to a narrow view of “moderate, moderate, moderate” unless they are misrepresented.
Obama’s successful 2012 campaign, meanwhile, was so hard on Wall Street that it made Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) run to the media to complain. Are there no lessons to be learned there?
Anyway, arguably the best point the autopsy makes is one commonly heard on the left: the crumbling of party infrastructure. It mentions “disinvestment in state Democratic parties at the start of the Obama presidency” brought on by establishment resignation to economic determinism, which led party leaders to believe that the work of political organizing was not worth doing. Wherever one falls ideologically, the question of organizing capacity is foundational to coming back from electoral defeat or indeed to any kind of politics. Failing to produce even a written report on the party’s loss does not speak well to its attempts to rebuild institutional capacity.
AS THE REPUBLICAN TRIFECTA in Washington continues to wallow in corruption and the destruction of democracy, much of the Democratic Party seems determined to do whatever it takes to avoid meeting the moment. Over the past year, two prominent Democratic governors have aligned with Republicans to kill pro-labor measures, House leadership has worked to kill a ban on congresspeople trading stocks, and the governor of Colorado (and onetime darling of the abundance crowd) commuted the sentence of a county clerk who tried to overturn the 2020 election. He then protested his censure by the state Democratic Party by duct-taping his own mouth shut on a Zoom call.
The autopsy itself is small potatoes. But it matters for what the entire episode reveals about Democratic Party politics. At a time when organizational effectiveness is paramount, it makes the DNC look incompetent. At a time when Democrats need to reassess the approach they’ve been leaning on, it falls back on tired but comfortable fables about the salvation of the center. More importantly, it reveals that those promising we’ll find salvation through moderation aren’t merely reporting the facts as they see them. They’re offering conclusions based on information they themselves haven’t even read. And amidst a five-alarm fire for American democracy brought on in part by Democrats failing to meet the moment when they held power previously, the report refuses to even mention many of the defining issues of 2024. There are hard lessons to be learned here. They just aren’t the ones centrists are pushing.
