Why is the Democratic party hiding its 2024 autopsy report?

If the DNC isn’t open and transparent about why they lost, then how can we be sure they will learn their lesson this time?

By Norman Solomon, The Guardian

The Democratic National Committee’s decision to block the release of its own autopsy report on the 2024 election is stunning but not surprising. Averse to unpleasant candor, the Democrats’ governing body functions more like a PR firm than a political organization devoted to grassroots capacities for winning elections. The party’s leaders pose as immune from critique, even if they have led the party to disaster.

Unwilling to depart from the party establishment’s culture of conformity, the DNC has remained under the Biden-Harris shadow throughout 2025. Release of an official autopsy might have shown that party leaders actually want to encourage public discourse about the missteps that enabled Donald Trump to become president again. But the DNC is proceeding as if there’s nothing to be learned from the tragic debacle of 2024 that its leaders don’t already know – and they don’t need to share their purported wisdom with anyone else.

In early December, the DNC featured Kamala Harris as the keynote speaker at the semi-annual meeting of its 450 members. Predictably, her formulaic speech received a standing ovation. No matter that in recent months, on the long book tour promoting her campaign memoir, Harris was notably incapable of responding with any coherence to questions about why as vice-president she claimed that Biden was fit to run for president in 2024 or, for that matter, to be president for another four years.

The DNC’s refusal to release its autopsy is in keeping with a pattern of evading hard truths that led virtually every elected Democrat in Washington to go along with President Biden’s insistence on running for re-election until his awful debate performance in late June 2024. Meanwhile, big majorities of Democratic voters were continually telling pollsters that they didn’t want Biden to run again.

An autopsy report with any value would not dodge such matters. Nor would it elide sensible questions about how much money went to insider consultants and advertising contractors as the Harris campaign managed to spend $1.5bn during the hallowed 107 days of her presidential campaign last year. An autopsy might also probe the moral and political consequences of nominee Harris continuing to toe the Biden line for huge arms shipments to Israel while its military continued to slaughter Palestinian civilians in Gaza; during the campaign and afterward, polling showed that she would have gained a substantial boost of votes by calling for an arms embargo.

Months ago, news accounts surfaced that release of the DNC’s autopsy would be postponed until after the November election. The draft autopsy reportedly avoided casting blame on Biden or Harris or other Democratic leaders. But as it turned out, even such a tepid autopsy would be too hot for the DNC leadership to handle.

In mid-December, when DNC chair Ken Martin announced the decision to withhold the autopsy from public view, his rationale reeked of elitism, perfumed as pragmatism: “Here’s our North Star: does this help us win? If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.” The actual message to the party’s base – including millions of loyal volunteers and small donors – was that they couldn’t be trusted to know what party chiefs have learned from a report based on hundreds of interviews with people in all 50 states. At the DNC, the political calculus is that the basis for sharing such information should be need-to-know, and ordinary Democrats don’t need to.

Martin’s explanation for hiding the autopsy – his claim that winning in the future would be hampered by the “distraction” of assessing the past – is backwards. Public candor about why Democrats lost the White House is not a “distraction” – it’s vital for disrupting the party’s repeated compulsion of making the same mistakes all over again.

A former chair of the progressive caucus in the California Democratic party, Amar Shergill, was cogent when mentioned Martin in this acid X post : “Bury the report that will help Democrats understand how and why they lost.”