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Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair Ken Martin has dismissed calls for the committee’s full “autopsy” report of the 2024 election to be released, saying that it would be “navel gazing” to focus on the historic loss for the party against President Donald Trump.
On his podcast Pod Save America on Tuesday, Jon Favreau grilled Martin, asking the party leader why he reneged on his pledge in February 2025 to release the full autopsy. At the time, Martin said that the DNC had “completed a comprehensive review” of the 2024 presidential election. He even criticized the DNC for not releasing its 2016 autopsy, and said that “of course” the party will release the 2024 report.
But, when confronted by Favreau this week, after blocking the release in December, Martin sang a different tune. Contradicting himself numerous times, Martin said that the party can’t release the report in full because they are focused on putting the lessons of the autopsy in motion, while apparently keeping them secret from the public and even non-senior DNC members.
Martin insisted that he has been consistent in his positions on the lessons of 2024. He said that there is no “smoking gun” in the report, and that the party is and has been focused on “the lessons that can actually help us win” — but that, also, the party has learned that “everything mattered,” and that there’s “nothing that didn’t impact that election.”
“It’s important for me, instead of navel gazing and looking backwards and trying to relitigate 2024,” Martin said, for the party to “learn the lessons” of the election. He said it’s not accurate to say that the party hasn’t released the report because they have been talking to party leaders about how to put the “lessons into action,” even though the committee explicitly said in a press release last year that it is not releasing the report.
“If there’s no smoking gun, why wouldn’t you just release it then?” asked Favreau.
“What ends up happening here is that people, of course, want to weaponize the report in a way to look backwards, to point fingers, place blame in a way that actually doesn’t keep us focused on the upcoming election. But instead, the navel gazing of focusing backwards actually takes us backwards,” Martin said, seemingly implying that examining the reasons behind the party’s catastrophic 2024 loss would be undoing progress.
Martin also said that the report, which is 200 pages long, was done by an “unpaid adviser to the DNC.”
As the 30-minute interview went on, Martin became more and more hostile to Favreau, a liberal who formerly served as President Barack Obama’s head speechwriter.
“I think you and others who continue to bet against the DNC, keep betting, because guess what? Here’s the reality, Jon. We’re winning,” Martin said, despite the last major election having seen the Democrats decisively lose every single swing state in the presidential race and control of the House and the Senate.
Advocates have been calling for the release of the autopsy for months, with many Democrats expressing frustration that the tussle over the report is actually, ironically, holding the party back from moving on as Martin has insisted.
“Just because we don’t like the results of the report does not mean that it is not the results and the outcome and the reality that we have to confront in order for us to move forward,” Rep. Delia C. Ramirez (D-Illinois), a DNC member, told NBC earlier this month.
A report by Axios found in February that the DNC’s data, as part of the report, shows that Kamala Harris’s backing of the Biden administration’s support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza was a net negative for Harris in the election, according to the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project, which was given access to the report.
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