Democrats Renew Pressure on DNC to Release Buried 2024 Election Autopsy

Pressure on the Democratic National Committee and its chair, Ken Martin, from Democratic Party supporters to release the party’s internal review of its 2024 election losses has continued.

Progressive group RootsAction, which organized mobile billboards outside the DNC’s spring meeting in New Orleans earlier this month and helped coordinate disruptions of the general session in which members confronted Martin directly, has since launched a letter-writing campaign that flooded Martin and four other DNC officers with more than 9,000 emails from nearly 2,000 people in a matter of days.

Martin and DNC vice chairs Artie Blanco, Shasti Conrad, and Jane Kleeb, as well as DNC secretary Jason Rae, have not replied, according to RootsAction. The DNC did not respond to a request for comment for this report.

“It has been said that those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it,” said India Walton, a RootsAction senior strategist and former Democratic nominee for mayor of Buffalo, in a statement. Walton was one of the individuals forcibly removed from the New Orleans meeting after speaking up during the proceedings.

“We who are prudent would like to know what mistakes were made that thrust us into this nightmare we are living. Now is not a time for saving face. Releasing the autopsy will help us understand what voters really want heading into midterms and the next presidential election. That’s the least we deserve,” Walton said.

Martin promised in February 2025 to publicly release the review after being elected party chair. In December, he reversed course, saying publication would be a distraction from the party’s goal of winning upcoming elections.

“Here’s our North Star: Does this help us win?” Martin said in a statement at the time. “If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.”

The decision drew immediate criticism from Democratic elected officials and strategists. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), the Senate’s chief deputy whip, called for the report’s release, writing on social media that “any organization that fails that spectacularly has to figure out what went wrong and hash it out.”

Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) said he was “curious why they decided not to release it.”

In March, the DNC released a 200-plus-page organizing playbook that acknowledged the party’s approach to reaching voters “is not fit for the moment”—but offered no parallel accounting of what went wrong at the top of the ticket in 2024.

Axios reported the buried review found that the Biden administration’s policy on Gaza cost Harris significant support, particularly among young and progressive voters. The Epoch Times has not been able to verify this claim.

Norman Solomon, RootsAction’s national director, said the DNC’s refusal to share what it learned from hundreds of interviews conducted in all 50 states amounted to a breach of faith with the party’s own base.

“We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at least doing interviews in 50 states, and now we know a lot more about what went wrong and how to fix it, but we’re not going to tell the thousands and thousands of Democratic candidates around the country what we found out,” Solomon said, characterizing the DNC’s position.

The autopsy was not on the official agenda at the New Orleans spring meeting—but it surfaced anyway.

At least three people stood in succession during the general session to interrupt Martin, shouting about Israel, the lobby group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and the decision not to release the review. Martin did not acknowledge the interruptions and continued with the meeting.

The outburst came one day after the DNC’s resolutions committee voted down a resolution naming AIPAC by name as a source of corrosive outside spending in Democratic primaries—a debate that continues along with speculation about its relevance to the autopsy.