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Hi, y’all. Welcome back to The Opposition. The year 2025 is ending on quite a dramatic note for the Democratic party, thanks to DNC chair Ken Martin’s decision to keep secret a highly anticipated post-election report. When Martin first took over as chair earlier this year, he emphasized the importance of doing a thorough investigation of the 2024 campaign and sharing the conclusions publicly. The idea was that it would help the party make better decisions in future election cycles and help rebuild trust with the donors and base voters. But now that isn’t going to happen.
Before we get into the backstory of why Martin changed his mind, I want to take a moment to thank y’all for reading, and to ask you to consider signing up for Bulwark+. If you do, you’ll have access to all our locked content in the months leading up to next year’s midterms, and you can join in the comments sections. We’d love to have you as part of our community!
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–Lauren
An Autopsy Report of the DNC’s Autopsy Report
Who killed the committee’s look back at the 2024 election—and why?
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WHEN KEN MARTIN TOOK OVER as chair of the Democratic National Committee in February, he promised to move in uncomfortable directions if they were merited. The committee, as he saw it, had been too conciliatory in the past, too reluctant to offend its powerbrokers.
Specifically, Martin stressed that he was not coming to Washington to placate the political consultant class. His allies said that underneath his Minnesota nice exterior, he could be cutthroat. They promised he would be. And that the getting down to brass tacks would start with a rigorous analysis of where the party went wrong in the 2024 election, written up in a report that Martin committed to release publicly.
“Of course it will be released,” Martin said after winning the chairmanship. “There has to be some lessons that we glean.”
Ten months later, Martin has backtracked completely, announcing last week that he would not release the report after all. “Here’s our North Star: does this help us win? If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission,” he said in a statement, suggesting that he did not think the intraparty debates that would result from releasing the report were worth the lessons that could be gleaned.
That calculus may hold true. But it has led to inevitable second-guessing of Martin and the DNC as well. What changed his thinking? And what might he be hiding?
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Martin declined to be interviewed for this piece, so he unfortunately can’t tell us himself. But in my conversations with DNC members and Democratic operatives, some said that they believed Martin withheld the report because it had been edited down so much that there was little value left in it.
Over the ten months spent compiling it, a small group of Martin’s confidants interviewed hundreds of Democratic officials and strategists from all fifty states. People who participated described it as a cathartic, almost therapeutic process with interviewees giving honest answers (“maybe too honest,” as one participant put it to me) about the party’s flaws. But Democrats familiar with the process say a number of relevant stakeholders also aggressively lobbied the DNC in hopes of coming out unscathed. Top consultants on the Biden-turned-Harris campaign privately urged the DNC to keep their names out of the report. And there has been persistent chatter circulating in Democratic circles that Future Forward—the main super PAC backing Democrats, which brought in $613 million from donors last year—was pressuring the DNC to not make them look bad.
Martin and the team of roughly five senior officials assigned with putting together the report listened to the cases the stakeholders made and incorporated elements of it into their findings. The end result was more a synopsis than an autopsy. When the time came to decide whether or not to release the report, the determination was made that it would prove more distracting than constructive. A source familiar with the process said the decision was unanimous.
“It would be a strategic failure to turn the entire ecosystem’s gaze back [to 2024],” is how they described it.
Xochitl Hinojosa, a former DNC communications director, also said it was the right call. “We all know why Dems lost in 2024. The DNC has and should continue to make changes, and that is one of the reasons Dems have been winning up and down the ballot. Let’s stop looking back. Let’s look forward and continue winning,” she tweeted.