DNC Chair Ken Martin wants Democrats to believe the party is "winning again." But more than fifteen months after their 2024 losses, a growing number of prominent Democrats, including the woman who lost the presidential race, are demanding to know why party leadership refuses to show its own voters what went wrong.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris recently told donors she believes the Democratic National Committee should make public its internal review of the 2024 election, Fox News Digital reported. NBC News first broke the story. The disclosure adds fuel to a fight that has simmered inside the Democratic Party since December, when Martin announced the DNC would keep its 2024 postmortem under wraps, reversing what had been an earlier indication that the findings would go public.
The result is a party heading into the 2026 midterms with one faction insisting everything is fine and another warning that burying the truth guarantees a repeat performance. For a committee already badly trailing the Republican National Committee in fundraising, the optics are not helping.
Martin ordered the review shortly after winning election as DNC chair early last year. Democratic Party officials interviewed more than 300 Democrats across all 50 states. The scope was broad. The expectation, at least among rank-and-file operatives, was that the findings would be shared openly.
Then, in December, weeks after Democrats scored victories in the 2025 off-year elections, the DNC reversed course. Martin framed the decision in blunt political terms:
"Here's our North Star: does this help us win? If the answer is no, it's a distraction from the core mission."
That "core mission," Martin said, is winning back congressional majorities in the midterms. He has repeatedly pushed back on calling the document an "autopsy," insisting the party has been sharing findings through briefings and putting lessons into practice. In a statement, Martin said the DNC has "completed a comprehensive review of what happened in 2024 and are already putting our learnings into motion."
He added: "The reality is we're not hiding the ball on this. We have been sharing those things out. There's no smoking gun here."
If there is no smoking gun, the obvious question is why the party won't let anyone see the report.
Harris's public break with Martin carries extra weight because she is the person most directly affected by the report's conclusions. She replaced Joe Biden as the party's nominee with just over three months to go before the 2024 election. Democrats lost the presidency, lost their Senate majority, and fell short of winning back the House.
A source with knowledge told Fox News Digital that Harris had not discussed the autopsy with Martin and did not know in advance about his December decision to bury it. That detail is striking. The party's most recent presidential nominee learned about the suppression of a review of her own campaign at the same time as everyone else.
Harris is now mulling another White House bid in 2028, which makes the autopsy fight more than an academic exercise. If she runs again, Democratic primary voters will want to know what the party's own internal review said about her 2024 campaign, and why leadership tried to hide it.
The Washington Examiner reported that Martin had reversed an earlier commitment to make the report public, reinforcing the sense that the DNC chairman changed course after seeing what the review contained, or at least after calculating that transparency carried political risk.
Harris is far from the only Democrat pushing back. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, who ran unsuccessfully for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and is himself considering a 2028 bid, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" this past weekend that the party should release the document.
"Yeah, release the autopsy. They should do that."
That kind of direct, on-the-record pressure from a sitting senator is hard for Martin to wave away as background noise.
Former DNC Vice Chair David Hogg, the gun-control activist who was elected alongside Martin and later stepped down after upsetting party leaders by backing primary challenges, went further on social media:
"They are spiking an autopsy of the election that gave us Trump 2.0. If party leaders won't take the steps required to rebuild ourselves into a winning coalition, we will take it into our own hands."
Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior advisor to President Barack Obama and co-host of the progressive podcast "Pod Save America," called the move "a very bad decision that reeks of the caution and complacency that brought us to this moment."
His co-host Jon Favreau labeled the DNC's reversal "unreal" and "baffling," then cut to the core contradiction in a post on X:
"The DNC's actual position is that if the public knew more about what Democrats got wrong in the last election, it would hurt the party's chances in the next election."
Favreau also asked a question Martin has not answered: "How does this rebuild trust between the party insiders and grassroots activists and organizers?"
The criticism is not coming from Republicans or conservative media alone. It is coming from inside the Democratic ecosystem, from Obama alumni, from sitting senators, from former DNC officers, and from the party's own 2024 nominee. That pattern matters. It suggests the autopsy fight is not a manufactured controversy but a genuine fracture over whether Democratic leadership is willing to be honest with its own base.
Former Democratic operative Rotimi Adeoye, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, argued in a social media post that the DNC's timing made everything worse: "The mistake the DNC made is they could've released the report earlier in the spring, whatever's in it, you get two weeks of bad publicity, then Trump does something stupid and everyone forgets."
Instead, Adeoye wrote, "Now it feels like something's being hidden, which makes it way more salacious."
Newsmax reported that Democratic strategists and insiders criticized Martin's decision, saying the party is avoiding hard conversations and denying donors, volunteers, and voters an explanation of what went wrong. One insider told The Hill the party has a habit of "gloss[ing] things over" and pretending "nothing to see here," adding: "And that's how we lose elections." Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons said volunteers, donors, and voters "deserve to know what went wrong."
Reports from last summer indicated the autopsy would skip analyzing whether Biden should have run for re-election in 2024 and would pass on judging key decisions made by Harris and her team. If true, the report was already pulling its punches before Martin decided to shelve it entirely. That raises the question of what could be so damaging in a document that was reportedly designed to avoid the hardest questions.
Martin's defense rests on a simple claim: Democrats are winning, so looking backward is pointless. He pointed to special election victories and overperformances in the months since President Trump returned to the White House.
"We completed a comprehensive review of what happened in 2024 and are already putting our learnings into motion. And we're winning again, even in places that haven't gone blue in decades."
But winning scattered special elections while badly trailing the RNC in fundraising is not the same as being a healthy party. And Harris's own push to release the autopsy undercuts Martin's claim that stakeholders across the Democratic ecosystem are "aligned on what's important."
A person familiar with the DNC's strategy told Fox News Digital that because of the mounting attention, "they are going to be forced to release something." The same person acknowledged the obvious: "It's just not helping to be talking about this."
Martin appeared on "Pod Save America" last month to push back against criticism, telling hosts "we've been providing briefings" and "we've been releasing that." But briefings to insiders are not the same as a public accounting. And the gap between what Martin describes and what Democrats outside his inner circle are demanding keeps widening.
The autopsy fight sits inside a broader pattern of Democratic uncertainty. Harris has not committed to a 2028 run or ruled one out. Early polling shows her dominating hypothetical Democratic primary fields, but her political positioning remains fluid. Booker is also weighing his options. The party's bench is restless, its fundraising lags, and its leadership is asking voters to trust a process nobody outside the DNC has been allowed to examine.
Meanwhile, the midterm clock ticks. Every week spent debating whether to release the report is a week not spent making the case against Republican incumbents. Martin's argument that transparency is a "distraction" may have a kernel of tactical logic. But the distraction now is the cover-up itself, or at least the appearance of one.
Harris has previously criticized fellow Democrats for clinging to titles and avoiding hard truths. The autopsy standoff is a test of whether she means it, and whether Martin's DNC can survive a public fight with its own most prominent figure heading into a midterm cycle.
Republicans conducted their own public autopsy after 2012. It was painful, widely mocked, and largely ignored by the candidate who won the next presidential nomination. But it existed. Voters, donors, and operatives could read it, argue with it, and hold leadership accountable against it. The process itself signaled that the party took its losses seriously.
Democrats interviewed more than 300 people in all 50 states, compiled their findings, and then locked the document in a drawer. The message that sends is not confidence. It is fear.
A party that won't tell its own voters what it got wrong is a party that expects those voters to show up on faith alone. In 2024, faith wasn't enough. Burying the evidence won't change that.
