Democrats keep winning at the ballot box as the party works to win back congressional majorities in this year’s midterm elections.
But despite a slew of electoral victories and overperformances in the more than 15 months since President returned to the White House, the party’s image remains well underwater in public opinion polling and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) finds itself badly trailing the rival Republican National Committee in fundraising, a crucial gauge of a party’s strength.
To make matters worse, the DNC is facing continued calls to release its internal autopsy of the party’s sweeping setbacks in the 2024 election, when Democrats lost the presidency and Senate majority and fell short in winning back control of the House.
Among those calling on the DNC to make public their report on what went wrong for the Democrats in 2024 is former Vice President , the party’s presidential nominee two years ago.
Harris, who is mulling making another White House bid in 2028, recently told donors she believes should make the autopsy public. The news was first reported by NBC News and confirmed by Fox News Digital.
A source with knowledge said that Harris had not discussed the autopsy with DNC Chair Ken Martin, and that the former vice president did not know in advance about Martin’s decision in December to keep the 2024 election postmortem under wraps.
Martin ordered the report soon after he was elected DNC chair early last year.
Democratic Party officials interviewed over 300 Democrats from all 50 states for the report, which Martin promised would examine the party’s mistakes in 2024 and offer a roadmap to victory going forward.
There was controversy surrounding the report as it was being compiled, after reports last summer said the autopsy would skip analyzing whether then-President should have run for re-election in 2024 and would pass on judging key decisions made by Harris and her team, after she replaced Biden as the party’s nominee with just over three months to go until the 2024 election.
Throughout the process, Martin repeatedly pushed back on calling the report an “autopsy,” since he noted that the Democratic Party wasn’t dead. He instead labeled the report an “after-action review.”
But in December, weeks after in the 2025 off-year elections, the party announced it would not be releasing the report.
Martin, in a statement at the time, said releasing the report would be “a distraction” from the party’s “core mission” to win back congressional majorities in the midterms.
In explaining his decision, Martin wrote, “We completed a comprehensive review of what happened in 2024 and are already putting our learnings into motion. And we’re winning again â even in places that haven’t gone blue in decades. In our conversations with stakeholders from across the Democratic ecosystem, we are aligned on whats important, and thats learning from the past and winning the future.”
“Heres our North Star: does this help us win? If the answer is no, its a distraction from the core mission,” he emphasized.
But the DNC chair’s decision was criticized not only by Republicans but also by fellow Democrats.
“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,” former DNC Vice Chair David Hogg warned in a social media post at the time.
Hogg, a gun-control crusader who was elected a DNC vice chair as Martin won election as chair, stepped down from his position last summer after upsetting party leaders for his efforts backing primary challenges against what he called “asleep at the wheel” older, longtime incumbents in safe, blue districts.
Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior advisor to th
