Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin spent months refusing to release his party's postmortem on Kamala Harris's 2024 presidential defeat. When he finally relented Thursday, the document he produced was so riddled with blank sections, factual errors, and glaring omissions that members of his own party immediately turned on him, with at least one Democratic congressman calling for his resignation.
The reversal satisfied no one. Martin himself acknowledged the report was substandard, writing on the DNC's Blueprint page that he was "not proud of this product" and that it did not meet his standards. He said he could not "in good faith put the DNC's stamp of approval on it." Yet he released it anyway, claiming that withholding it had become "an even bigger distraction" than publishing it.
That explanation did not land well with a party already rattled by its 2024 losses and searching for a path forward. Fox News reported that the autopsy, written by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, according to CNN, contained entire sections left blank and failed to address some of the most consequential dynamics of the 2024 race.
The omissions are difficult to explain as oversights. The DNC's autopsy did not mention the Gaza conflict that fractured the Democratic coalition throughout 2024. It did not address former President Joe Biden's age, the issue that dominated the first half of the election cycle and ultimately contributed to his withdrawal from the race. And it failed to mention Harris's selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, a choice that drew intense debate within the party about whether a different pick might have changed the outcome.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., did not mince words about the Gaza omission. She told reporters Thursday:
"I think it's pretty unbelievable that Gaza would not be mentioned once in the autopsy report."
Ocasio-Cortez, whose national profile has risen sharply since the 2024 cycle, went further in a longer statement. She called the exclusion "a major oversight" and said the Gaza issue was inescapable for Democratic candidates during that cycle.
"I think it was very clearly a major dynamic and a major thread that was happening in 2024, regardless of how one feels about that issue, the fact that it's not even addressed, I think, is a major oversight, and I think that for young people it was a huge part of the environment. I can tell you for myself, as a candidate during that cycle, there's no way that it was an ignorable issue or totally immaterial. So, I think that you know it's a real disservice to not speak to that or include or assess that."
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., was blunter still. In a video posted to his YouTube channel, Khanna said the party's support for Israel was a direct cause of its defeat.
"One of the reasons we lost was our blank check to Israel and Netanyahu while they committed genocide in Gaza. We must speak and confront hard truths if this party is to win in 2028."
The sharpest criticism came from Rep. Mark Veasey, D-Texas, who told Semafor that the DNC under Martin appeared to have no plan for recovery, and that time was running out.
"There doesn't seem to be a plan to turn things around and the clock is ticking. November is literally around the corner... I believe it's time for him to move on."
That a sitting Democratic congressman would publicly call for the party chairman's ouster over a botched report speaks to the depth of frustration inside the party. The DNC is supposed to be the institutional engine that rebuilds after a loss. Instead, it spent months stonewalling its own members on the autopsy, then delivered a document its own chairman called inadequate.
Democratic strategist Steve Schale, speaking to NBC, called the entire episode "an unmitigated s***show" and said "there's just no confidence in the competence in the DNC."
That assessment is hard to argue with. A party autopsy exists for one reason: to force an honest accounting of what went wrong so the mistakes are not repeated. The Republican National Committee's famous 2012 autopsy after Mitt Romney's loss was controversial, but it was thorough. It named problems, proposed solutions, and sparked a genuine internal debate. Whether one agreed with its conclusions, the document was serious.
What Martin produced is something else entirely. Blank sections in a political autopsy are not a sign of insufficient time or resources. They are a sign that the people responsible for the document either could not agree on what to say or chose to say nothing rather than confront uncomfortable truths. Either explanation reflects poorly on Martin's leadership.
The months-long refusal to release the report in the first place only compounds the problem. Martin's stated rationale, that releasing it would be a "distraction", raises an obvious question: a distraction from what? The DNC is not governing. It is not passing legislation. Its primary job between elections is exactly this kind of institutional self-examination and rebuilding. If the party chairman considers his core responsibility a distraction, the party has a leadership problem that goes beyond one document.
The internal Democratic tensions on display here mirror broader fractures that have been visible in recent intra-party positioning around figures like Ocasio-Cortez and Senate leadership. The progressive wing wants accountability on Gaza. The establishment wing wants to move past 2024 without relitigating Biden's candidacy or Harris's campaign decisions. Martin's blank-page autopsy managed to alienate both camps simultaneously.
Fox News Digital contacted the DNC for additional comment. The response, if any, was not included in the reporting.
For conservatives, the DNC's self-inflicted wound is worth watching for reasons beyond schadenfreude. A functional opposition party is part of a healthy political system. But a party that cannot produce an honest internal report, that leaves sections blank, ignores the age question that defined half the cycle, skips over its own vice-presidential selection, and pretends Gaza did not happen, is a party that has not yet begun the work of self-correction.
Martin made his speech during a DNC site visit press conference at Ball Arena in Denver on May 6. Ocasio-Cortez was at the Capitol on May 21 when she delivered her critique. Khanna spoke at the National Action Network National Convention in New York on April 8. The timeline suggests the discontent had been building for weeks before the report's release finally forced it into the open.
The pattern of Democratic officials facing accountability gaps is not unique to the DNC. Similar dynamics have played out when officials in positions of responsibility were confronted with evidence that their decisions fell short, and responded with evasion rather than candor.
Veasey's warning about November being "literally around the corner" points to the practical stakes. The 2026 midterms are approaching, and the DNC is the party's national coordinating body for those races. If the organization cannot manage the basic task of reviewing its own performance, its capacity to run a competitive midterm operation is an open question.
Ocasio-Cortez's critique, meanwhile, carries weight beyond the immediate controversy. She has emerged as one of the most prominent voices in Democratic politics, and her willingness to publicly challenge the party apparatus reflects a pattern of confrontation with institutional Democratic leadership that shows no signs of slowing.
The fundamental problem with the DNC's 2024 report is not that it reached the wrong conclusions. It is that it barely reached any conclusions at all. Blank sections are not analysis. Omitting Gaza, Biden's age, and the Walz selection is not an editorial choice, it is avoidance dressed up as a document.
Martin's own words condemn the effort. He said he was not proud of it. He said it did not meet his standards. He said he could not put the DNC's stamp on it in good faith. And then he released it anyway, apparently hoping that producing something, anything, would quiet the critics.
It did the opposite. Schale's verdict that the episode was "an unmitigated s***show" and that there is "no confidence in the competence in the DNC" captures where things stand. The party that spent 2024 telling voters it was the competent, responsible alternative cannot produce a competent, responsible review of its own defeat.
When a party chairman releases a report he himself calls unworthy, and his own members respond by calling for his resignation, the autopsy has become the patient.
