First, the Democratic National Committee’s autopsy of the 2024 election was slated to come out last spring. Then, DNC chair Ken Martin promised members at their summer meeting last August in his home state of Minnesota, “Three weeks.” Then October. Then after the November elections.
Then, with Martin offering no explanation other than he suddenly didn’t want to look backward, he announced he wouldn’t be releasing it at all.
Each delay fed a rat’s nest of self-serving conspiracy theories: Martin was trying to protect Kamala Harris as she considers another presidential run, Obama campaign alumni were protecting each other, high-priced consultants were trying to keep millions in fees from being revealed, or the party was trying to hide how voters reacted to the Gaza crisis.
Or one of the most widespread: Maybe the autopsy didn’t even exist at all.
It does. At least, a version does. CNN is publishing it in full, along with never-before-reported details of how what was meant to be a look at what went wrong for the Democratic Party instead turned into a fresh collection of blunders that continues to hang over the party a year and a half after Harris lost and has become a crisis for Martin and the DNC.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Read the full autopsy here. CNN’s takeaways from the autopsy are available here.
Martin entrusted a top priority to a friend, Democratic consultant Paul Rivera, who volunteered to work on it part-time and waited several months to contact key officials with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ campaigns. Many top decision-makers in the campaigns were ultimately never interviewed, and Harris herself has expressed frustration privately that questions about the document have gone on.
Meanwhile, with public demands to see the autopsy growing, Martin booked himself onto “Pod Save America” to defend his decision not to release it, in an interview that immediately went viral.
Sapping faith in him even further among Democratic operatives inside and outside party headquarters: The interview only happened because he agreed to it after confronting the hosts at a Grindr-sponsored party the night before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, annoyed they were giving him too hard of a time over the autopsy.
Multiple past donors to the DNC, which is already in debt compared with its cash-flush Republican counterpart, have told Martin they will not write checks because of how he handled the autopsy. Others have clawed back promised donations in their fury over his decision to hold the report. Martin, meanwhile, has continued in private conversations to blame the money troubles on debt left over from Harris’ campaign, though she has since raised more money than that for the DNC.
Until just days ago, only a few staff at the DNC had seen even part of the autopsy. People familiar with the matter say Martin seemed to panic at several points when he thought others had gotten hold of it. But after CNN obtained extensive details about its contents, including slides from a presentation at a donor retreat that were in part generated using an AI model, DNC officials turned what they say is the entirety of what they have over to CNN, which independently verified the report published Thursday matches another version of the document.
The version CNN is publishing is missing key sections, including a conclusion, because those sections weren’t submitted, according to the DNC. There are factual errors, from misspellings of the names of former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine and former Kentucky gubernatorial candidate Matt Bevin to incorrectly listing the margin of victory in the 2024 race for North Carolina governor.
The DNC included in the document its own rebuttals of arguments Rivera makes and a disclaimer that the report “reflects the views of the author, not the DNC. The DNC was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented.”
Martin issued a statement to CNN apologizing for how he handled the autopsy.
“When I was elected DNC chair, I commissioned an after action review of the 2024 election that I wanted to be honest and transparent, and with actionable and specific takeaways for the future of the Democratic Party,” Martin said. “When I received the report late last year, it wasn’t ready for primetime — not even close — and because no source material was provided, it would have meant starting over. I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on the report that was produced.
“After last November’s massive Democratic wins, I didn’t want to create a distraction, but by not putting the report out, I ended up creating an even bigger distraction. For that, I sincerely apologize. For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged. 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.”
Rivera declined to comment.
“There’s no document that’s going to point directly to the one thing that could have been done differently, the one person who could have behaved differently to fix what happen in the election. It’s not on this one thing. It’s many, many things. And we all know what those many things were,” said Lavora Barnes, the Michigan Democratic Party chair during the 2024 election, who was interviewed for the autopsy.
“It’s become this whole thing because it sounds mysterious to people,” Barnes added. “Of course it seems like a bigger deal than it was because it seems like something is being hidden.”
What’s in the autopsy – and what’s not
The autopsy accuses the Biden administration of not doing more to boost Harris long before the president’s June 2024 debate performance forced him to withdraw, particularly on immigration given the Trump campaign tying the issue to her as the administration’s so-called “border czar.”
It analyzes why Harris underperformed Democratic Senate candidates in states she lost as well as North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein, while acknowledging Stein ran against Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who lost after his extensive history of posting inflammatory and racist comments on a pornography website was revealed by CNN’s KFILE.
Citing conversations with the Democratic Governors Association and Democratic Attorneys General Association, for example, the document has several firm conclusions about why Harris ran behind Stein, building to the assertion: “Candidate quality and name recognition matter for all down ballot races, but some dynamics don’t transfer uniformly across the ballot. Campaigns need to build their own contrast and definition.”
But it avoids many of the topics that have divided the party since 2024: Biden’s decision to run again, Harris taking over as the nominee without a nominating process or how the ticket’s positions on the war in Gaza affected Democrats in key states like Michigan.
At the DNC National Finance Committee’s retreat for top donors at a hotel in Middleburg, Virginia, last October, Rivera gave an hourlong presentation with slides in part drawn directly from the report, in part via running his findings through an AI engine.
One slide shared with CNN had a bar graph that compared the number of speeches, press conferences, events, interviews and podcasts for Harris, Tim Walz, Donald Trump and JD Vance. It pointed to Trump and Vance making more appearances than Harris and Walz.
Another tracked the candidates’ “areas of focus” by “content/theme” to argue that Trump and Vance focused many times more on immigration than Harris did. Rivera used an unclear methodology for the breakdown, assigning percentages to 10 categories of content or theme for Trump, Harris and their running mates. The percentages in every column, one for each candidate, added up to well over 100%.
The reactions of those who have seen parts of the autopsy or the presentation have been a mix of eyes being opened and eyes being rolled.
“This is a very high-integrity document that needs to see the light of day,” said one of the people who saw the donor presentation.
“Not cogent,” said another.
Complaints about process and timing
Martin called for an autopsy only after former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley made an issue of it in his own long-shot race for DNC chair. Once he did, Martin locked in, even ripping in private conversations former chair Tom Perez’s decision to withhold an autopsy of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss.
He asked Rivera, a longtime but low-profile Democratic hand based now in Texas, to be in charge. They were close, which helped, but Martin also liked that Rivera hadn’t been involved with the DNC or the Harris campaign, so he could be independent.
The problem, others involved argued then and now, is that Rivera hadn’t worked on any presidential bid since an inglorious turn on John Kerry’s campaign in 2004. Many who know Rivera describe him as having a savvy yet unconventional point of view, but say he also comes into conversations with a preset viewpoint.
Though he’d set the autopsy as a priority, Martin decided to have Rivera in charge as a part-time volunteer while juggling other clients. Rivera would sometimes say he was available to conduct interviews only before 9 a.m., after 7 p.m. or on weekends. Martin kept him so siloed that the most senior staff could do was occasionally chip in with suggestions of people he should consider contacting.
By late spring, after the original timeframe to have the report finished, Rivera reached out to the state party chairs in the battleground states. Several believed they were simply being used to validate conclusions Martin and Rivera had already made.
“I felt like I was in the category of people who are DNC stakeholders who might have some frustration they want to vent about how the party faithful weren’t listened to,” one state party chair told CNN.
“It was very clear that it felt like Ken’s theory of the case for the future of the party through the lens of 2024, as opposed to ‘autopsy,’” said another who spoke for it.
Not until September, several months into his review, did Rivera try to reach out to key Harris campaign aides. He has told people since that he always meant for the Harris team to be his last stop since he wanted to gather other information first. But holding out that long made campaign aides suspicious.
Rivera ultimately blew past several deadlines last year in finishing the autopsy, according to people familiar with the matter. It wasn’t until after Thanksgiving that Martin got a document that multiple people say was at best unfinished.
Who Rivera reached out to, and who he didn’t, tells part of the story of what he was producing. While the DNC has said Rivera and others conducted “hundreds of interviews” with “sources from all 50 states,” he didn’t start to talk to the people who ran the Biden and Harris campaigns until September, according to multiple people involved.
Among those not included in interviews: Biden, Harris or Walz. Top strategists, including Biden aides Mike Donilon, Anita Dunn, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed, and top Harris decision-makers like Jen O’Malley Dillon, Stephanie Cutter and David Plouffe, weren’t interviewed either. Neither were close Harris aides Sheila Nix, Kirsten Allen, Erin Wilson, Brian Fallon and Jalisa Washington-Price, or Sam Cornale, the Walz traveling chief of staff who had also been executive director of the DNC.
Most were never asked and even fewer participated, though deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty came to Zoom calls with ideas about building an organic brand versus a paid brand and how unclear Harris’ reasons for running came across. Flaherty has since published his own account of what he told Rivera in The Bulwark.
Becca Siegel, who oversaw polling and analytics for the campaign, spoke to Rivera as did several other pollsters and fundraisers. Rivera did not ask Siegel for the campaign’s paid media plans, tracking polls and ad testing results, which go much deeper into what worked and what didn’t.
Jaime Harrison, who preceded Martin as chair through the 2024 election, didn’t speak to Rivera until late September, months after the project was supposed to be complete and only after he reached out to offer.
Leaders of the pro-Palestinian Institute for Middle East Understanding claimed that Rivera agreed that Biden’s policy toward Israel was a “net-negative” and later circulated a letter obtained by CNN claiming the DNC’s “suppression of this report is motivated, at least in part, by their finding that support for Israel is an electoral liability for the party.” But Rivera did not have that data, according to people familiar with the process, and the autopsy does not include any such findings.
Key leaders on both sides of the debate over what Harris should have said about Gaza didn’t get a call about the autopsy. They included Ruwa Romman, a Georgia state representative and a Palestinian American who endorsed the vice president, and other leaders of the Uncommitted movement, which led the primary protest vote effort and push to get a pro-Palestinian speaker at the convention. Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, didn’t get a call either, nor did any officials at the Democratic Majority for Israel.
“The lack of curiosity is honestly baffling to me,” Romman told CNN.
The few defenders of the autopsy, who contend that the DNC needed a systemic analysis not caught up in the particular circumstances of one election, acknowledge the document Martin received wasn’t finished but say it was still worth building on — though they declined CNN’s requests to attach their names to these arguments.
Some say underlying research, including notes and transcripts of interviews, was deleted from DNC servers. But a DNC source familiar with the process told CNN that Rivera didn’t provide even a list of names of people he spoke to, notes or recordings. Nor, the source said, did he provide some of the data that he was given to him by senior campaign leadership.
The fight over the autopsy has become about much more than a document. As Democrats think ahead about the next long, bitter presidential primary battle leading into a long, bitter general election, multiple senior operatives and others involved with the DNC argue Martin’s handling of the autopsy proves he’s not ready to lead the party.
Martin has a four-year term through 2029, and he can be removed only if he resigns. He’s spent the last few weeks making site visits to potential convention host cities and has told many he plans to pick the locations for not just 2028, but 2032.
Rivera, meanwhile, has kept showing up occasionally at the DNC headquarters a few blocks from Capitol Hill, since he is still managing another project jointly conceived with Martin called the Office of Strategy and Innovation. Multiple aides say that seeing Rivera around the DNC makes morale nosedive, as they’re reminded of the mess he put them in, and the bigger mess Martin made out of it.
Efforts continue to ramp up for the midterms, but conversations often come back to the autopsy. Rivera’s repeated line that they shouldn’t call it an autopsy because the DNC isn’t dead now gets quoted as a rueful joke.
“The notion that any of this was nefarious or by design…” sighed one former DNC official. “It’s much more Keystone Kops than that.”
For all the attention to the drama, operatives working to win 2026 races for Democrats say they months ago gave up on anything useful being produced.
One person involved summarized the feelings of many interviewed by CNN: “This was a bad idea in the first place.”
