DNC's Ken Martin disputes New York Times report of missing 2024 autopsy chapter

Martin denies report that 2024 DNC autopsy left out key chapter

by Caroline Vakil - 08/03/26 11:08 AM ET

The author of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) post-mortem on the 2024 election said in an interview published Monday that the report left out a key chapter — accusations that DNC Ken Martin disputes.

The 2024 DNC report’s author, Paul Rivera, told The New York Times that he included a chapter that raised whether former President Biden should have run for reelection, examined how former Vice President Harris and President Trump fared with different racial voting blocs, analyzed the party’s challenges with voter participation and suggested that top Democratic leadership was blind to the economic realities of everyday Americans.

“An emerging critique of Democratic decision-making is there are too many people who have become generationally wealthy off politics and drive too much of the decision-making within the ecosystem,” Rivera wrote in one section, according to a copy of the report obtained by the newspaper.

“This is deeply frustrating to many Democratic strategists, activists, and donors who want to try a different set of politics but keep banging their heads up against a system proven to be inflexible and self-enriching,” the report reads.

Rivera told the Times that he included the chapter in the broader 2024 report he gave Martin during a meeting in January. He also told the newspaper he sent a different member of the party an early draft of the reported missing chapter as well, though the Times notes that DNC emails are automatically deleted after 30 days.

Martin pushed back Rivera’s claim, arguing he never received the chapter and that it could not be found within the party headquarters. Martin also said that the material Rivera did share was about “lessons learned” — materials that would be used for DNC’s own personal planning and organizational purposes.

“As we said at the time, in May we released all of the draft report as we’d received it from the author. If we had this in May, we would have released it with the rest of the report,” Martin said.

“The work I did with Paul in January was on those ‘lessons learned’ products,” Martin added. “That effort did not include reviewing new report material, only the material the DNC had already received, which is what we released in May.”

The Hill reached out to several organizations where Rivera is an adviser for comment.

The DNC report was released in May after Martin had initally announced the party would not be releasing the autopsy.

Martin’s pitch in his bid for the chairmanship focused on examining what went wrong for the party in the last presidential election. The chair also suggested he wanted to get rid of the consultant class if elected chair.

“The first thing to do is to really be as introspective as possible with the post-election review and …. be as inclusive as possible in bringing partners together,” he told The Hill in December 2024 while still a candidate.

Martin on Monday also argued that his whole pitch to DNC members during his chair election was to take on the consultant class, suggesting it wouldn’t have made sense for a chapter questioning consultants to be removed from the report.

“I ran for Chair, and one of my key priorities remains, to hold the consultant-industrial complex accountable and ensure the party only pays for work that actually helps us win,” Martin said in a statement. “If I or the DNC had report materials that went after self-enriching consultants, we absolutely would have included them — just as we included all other materials provided by the author.”

Regardless, DNC’s handling of the 2024 report has steadily angered Democrats.

The Times reported last year that the DNC was likely to avoid weighing in on the question of whether Biden should have run for president in 2024.

Martin said in December that he would not be releasing the 2024 autopsy after all, suggesting at the time that was a “distraction from our core mission” and that the national party had already conducted its own review and were “already putting our learnings into motion.”

The DNC chair, however, later reversed that position and released the report in May, saying that the contents he received last year were not “ready for primetime.” He said that he did not endorse the report or that it didn’t meet his standards.

“I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on it. But transparency is paramount,” Martin said in a statement in May.

In recent months, Martin has been met with mounting scrutiny over the party’s finances. The DNC is $2 million in debt, compared to the Republican National Committee’s nearly $130 million in the bank.

Tensions have also risen amid reports, also from The Times, that the DNC chair threw a phone at an aide’s desk last month, prompting a complaint to the human resources department. Martin later met with HR about the incident, per the outlet.

Most Democrats have not called for Martin to leave his post – which would create further turbulence for the party just several months out from the midterms – however, questions are growing around whether the party will keep him as head after November.