The D.N.C. Is Scrapping Its Report on What Went Wrong in 2024

Ken Martin, the Democratic National Committee chairman, ordered the autopsy months ago but is now said to believe that its release would be counterproductive for the party.

The Democratic National Committee is killing its autopsy of the 2024 election.

Ken Martin, the chairman of the D.N.C., said on Thursday that he had decided not to publish a report that he ordered months ago into what went wrong for the Democratic Party last year. Party officials have conducted more than 300 interviews with Democrats in all 50 states to create a document that Mr. Martin had once pitched as crucial to charting a path forward.

Mr. Martin will instead keep the findings under seal. He believes that looking back so publicly and painfully at the past would prove counterproductive for the party as it tries next year to take back power in Congress, according to a D.N.C. spokeswoman who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share the thinking behind his decision.

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

Many Democrats want to move on from 2024 and keep the focus on President Trump. They began the year demoralized but now feel emboldened after the party’s series of victories in November and strong showings in special elections this year.

Still, even if it is good politics to stuff the report in a filing cabinet, Democrats may well be avoiding self-examination and a chance for introspection.

The party’s brand still appears deeply damaged in the eyes of many voters. A national poll from Quinnipiac University this week found that only 18 percent of voters approved of how Democrats in Congress were doing their jobs, a record low.

Since the day of his election in February, Mr. Martin had promised an audit of 2024’s mistakes and a road map for the future. He was adamant that it not be called an autopsy because, he said, the party was “not dead”; he preferred the more anodyne label “after-action review.”

No matter the title, the report’s existence has proved contentious. Those initially briefed on the planned document over the summer had said it would skirt past the question of whether former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. should have run for re-election, as well as key decisions from the campaign of former Vice President Kamala Harris.

There has been subsequent tussling behind the scenes about both the audit’s scope and who should take the brunt of the blame for Ms. Harris’s loss. Some senior Harris officials declined to be interviewed.

The D.N.C. had warned over the summer that any analysis of its report was premature.

“Folks might be better off holding their applause, or their criticism, until we have had a chance to complete our work and people can actually read it,” Paul Rivera, a confidant of Mr. Martin’s who had taken the lead in researching and preparing the report, said at the time.

Now those people will never get the chance.

Rising dissatisfaction with Mr. Trump and the economy could be a recipe for Democratic success in 2026 even if voters continue to have misgivings about the party. In the Quinnipiac poll that showed record-low approval of congressional Democrats, voters said by four percentage points that they would prefer Democratic control of Congress to a Republican majority.

At a gathering of the Democratic National Committee last week in Los Angeles, party officials were more bullish than they had been in months about their chances.

Mr. Martin punctuated the party’s looming affordability message: Things, he said, using an expletive, are “too expensive.”

Mr. Martin appears determined not to step on any potential momentum. Many political insiders who questioned why the party had commissioned an autopsy in the first place are expected to greet the report’s demise with glee.

“In our conversations with stakeholders from across the Democratic ecosystem, we are aligned on what’s important, and that’s learning from the past and winning the future,” Mr. Martin said in his statement.

The D.N.C.’s finances remain precarious. Mr. Martin’s candidacy for chairman was opposed by some major donors, and this fall he took out a $15 million loan to keep the party fully funded.

After the loan, the party entered November with just $18.3 million in cash on hand — meaning it had only about $3 million after accounting for the debts.

The Republican National Committee, by contrast, had $91.2 million and no debts.

D.N.C. officials provided a summary of some of the report’s findings. The prescriptions were more tactical than strategic. For example, the audit found that so-called peer-to-peer text messaging had not actually generated meaningful conversations — or moved the needle in persuading voters.

The research also found that the party had been too focused on the overall numbers of doors knocked on and calls made rather than on quality interactions. In 2024, Trump campaign officials had mocked the statistics that the Harris team was releasing and argued that the Republican operation was more narrowly and effectively targeting its outreach to lower-propensity voters.

Other findings include that Democrats did not spend sufficiently on streaming services to reach younger voters — whom it described as a new swing coalition — and that the party’s data infrastructure showed signs of strain.

The unreleased report also said, according to the officials, that the party had operated from a defensive posture on issues like public safety and immigration, while ceding ground on the economy to Republicans.

Some Democratic donors have demanded a more thorough accounting of how exactly the party and Ms. Harris spent $1.5 billion in 15 weeks en route to losing every battleground state in 2024.

Since the election, it has come out that a former top aide to Mr. Biden, Mike Donilon, received $4 million from the campaign — even though he did not work meaningfully with the Harris campaign after Mr. Biden left the ticket.

“I read about that,” Ms. Harris said of Mr. Donilon’s compensation in an interview last month with The New York Times. “That was before I got there.”

Ms. Harris took responsibility for the spending that occurred after she became the nominee. “The buck stops with me,” she said. “There are a lot of expenses associated with running for president of the United States, especially a new candidate with three and a half months to go.”

Related Content