CNN Obtains DNC's Internal 2024 Election Post-Mortem Report

On May 21, 2026 — eighteen months after Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump — CNN published the full text of a document the Democratic National Committee never wanted the public to see: a 192-page internal autopsy of what went wrong in 2024 [1]. DNC Chair Ken Martin had promised the report would be out by spring 2025, then pushed it to summer, then fall, then announced it would never be released at all [2]. It took CNN's reporting on the document's contents to force Martin's hand, and even then, the DNC released it with an extraordinary disclaimer: "This document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC" [3].

The result is a party simultaneously publishing and disowning its own self-examination — a move that tells you as much about the Democratic Party's institutional dysfunction as anything in the report itself.

Who Lost What: The Demographic Reckoning

The scale of Democratic losses in 2024 cut across nearly every demographic category the party has relied on for a generation. The autopsy identifies declining support among men, working-class voters, non-college-educated Americans, and rural voters as the defining feature of the defeat [4].

The numbers are stark. Hispanic men swung 35 percentage points away from Democrats compared to 2020, with Trump actually winning that demographic by one point [5]. Among Black men under 45, Trump roughly doubled his support, capturing about 3 in 10 voters in that group [5]. Young men aged 18-29 shifted 14 points toward Republicans, producing a 31-point gender gap among youth voters [6]. Harris fell below 50 percent with new voters for the first time in modern Democratic history [7].

Source: AP VoteCast / Pew Research

Data as of Jun 26, 2025CSV

The report calls for "a renewed focus on the voters of Middle America and the South, who have come to believe they are not included in the Democratic vision of a stronger and more dynamic America for everyone" [4]. It characterizes the party's reliance on identity-based appeals as a vulnerability that "provided Republicans opportunities" while hampering "growth, evolution, and ability to find common ground" [3].

But the demographic data also reveals a more complicated story than a simple "move to the center" narrative suggests. Senate Democrats in several swing states outperformed Harris significantly. Michigan's Elissa Slotkin outperformed Harris in 68 of 83 counties. Arizona's Ruben Gallego and Nevada's Jacky Rosen won through year-round presence and economic messaging that spoke directly to cost-of-living concerns [8]. These candidates ran on broadly the same policy platform as Harris but communicated it differently — suggesting the problem was not solely ideological.

Money Spent, Votes Not Won

Democrats significantly outraised and outspent Republicans across all federal races in 2024, and still lost [9]. The financial imbalance makes the defeat harder to rationalize as a resource problem.

Source: OpenSecrets

Data as of Nov 30, 2024CSV

Future Forward, the main Democratic super PAC, raised $613 million from donors [10]. Total Democratic spending on federal races exceeded $4.7 billion, outpacing Republican spending of approximately $4.1 billion [9]. Yet the autopsy questions whether any of it was deployed effectively.

The Harris campaign split spending roughly evenly between digital and television advertising — a significant improvement over the traditional 70/30 TV-to-digital ratio seen in most Senate campaigns [11]. Rob Flaherty, a senior Biden-Harris digital strategist, told the autopsy team that areas where Democrats advertised experienced "smaller overall political shifts" than those where they didn't, suggesting the ads worked to some degree [11]. But a massive spending advantage in paid media could not overcome what the report describes as a fundamentally incoherent brand.

The autopsy contrasts the Democratic "always late" spending pattern — concentrated in the final months of the cycle — with a Republican "always on" model that shaped voter perceptions year-round [4]. Much of the Democrats' voter outreach relied on low-response tactics like phone calls and text messages rather than door-to-door canvassing, which the report identifies as far more effective [4].

The Economic Backdrop

The autopsy's findings land in the context of an economy that, by traditional metrics, was performing well but didn't feel that way to many voters. Despite infrastructure reform, prescription drug caps, and one of the strongest post-pandemic economic recoveries in the developed world, 66 percent of voters said Democrats had accomplished "little or nothing" [8].

Source: FRED / Bureau of Labor Statistics

Data as of Apr 1, 2026CSV

The Consumer Price Index climbed steadily through 2023 and 2024, reaching levels that translated into visible grocery, housing, and gas price increases for ordinary households. By Election Day 2024, cumulative post-pandemic inflation had raised prices roughly 20 percent from early 2021 levels — a fact no amount of messaging about wage growth or job creation could erase from voters' lived experience.

Source: FRED / Bureau of Labor Statistics

Data as of Apr 1, 2026CSV

The unemployment rate remained historically low through the election period, hovering around 4.1-4.2 percent. But the disconnect between macroeconomic indicators and voter sentiment is precisely the gap the autopsy identifies as a failure point. Democrats did not develop an effective response to the cost-of-living question beyond citing aggregate statistics that contradicted what people saw at the register.

Structural Failures: DNC vs. Campaign vs. White House

The report distributes blame across three power centers, though its allocation is itself contested.

The Biden White House is faulted for failing to build up Harris's public standing before the candidate switch. No polling or messaging research was conducted to identify which issues Harris should talk about or how she should talk about them [8]. The White House also failed to push back against the "border czar" framing that Republicans applied to Harris's immigration portfolio — unofficial terminology that became a liability the campaign never escaped [8].

The Harris campaign is criticized for targeting the wrong demographics, focusing excessively on college-educated suburban voters while neglecting rural America [8]. The campaign's messaging never moved beyond "not Trump" and the "prosecutor vs. felon" frame. Trump's attack ad — "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you" — proved, in the report's own assessment, "devastatingly effective," with Harris's own pollsters acknowledging its potency [8].

The DNC itself stands accused of chronic underinvestment in state parties. The report traces Democratic decline since Obama's 2008 victory to "missed opportunities to invest in our states, counties, and local parties and candidates," concluding that the party has "vacillated between stagnation and retrogression" for over fifteen years [2].

The report is notably silent on several of the most consequential decisions of the cycle: Biden's choice to seek reelection, the impact of the Gaza war on young and Arab-American voters, and the fact that Harris assumed the nomination without any competitive process [3]. Progressive organizations protested these omissions, arguing that they render the autopsy incomplete on its own terms [3].

Policy or Messaging? The Central Debate

The autopsy leans heavily toward a messaging explanation for Democratic losses, but the evidence it presents doesn't entirely support that framing.

On one hand, the report documents that Trump and his allies mentioned immigration "many times more" than Harris did, effectively ceding the issue [8]. It shows that the Harris campaign lacked a coherent economic message that spoke to voters' cost-of-living anxieties. And it demonstrates that Senate Democrats who ran on similar policies but with sharper, locally tailored messaging outperformed Harris in the same states.

On the other hand, the report's own data shows 66 percent of voters believed Democrats had accomplished "little or nothing" — despite a legislative record that included the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law [8]. When two-thirds of the electorate dismisses a party's actual accomplishments, the problem may run deeper than how those accomplishments were communicated.

The report does not seriously engage with the possibility that Democratic positions on immigration enforcement, gender identity, or policing represented genuine substantive disagreements with a majority of the electorate rather than communications failures. This is the gap critics have identified: an autopsy that diagnoses messaging problems while skipping the question of whether the message itself was the problem.

Democratic strategist Simon Bazelon criticized the party's "constant drive to minimize intra-coalition disagreement," arguing that it prevents learning from mistakes [10]. The report's own structure — simultaneously released and disavowed — exemplifies exactly this tendency.

Recommended Reforms and Their Fate

The autopsy offers several structural recommendations:

• Shift away from identity-based appeals toward "middle-class appeal" and economic messaging [7]
• Invest earlier in election cycles rather than concentrating spending in the final months [4]
• Rebuild state party infrastructure with sustained funding and training [4]
• Adopt year-round voter engagement modeled on the Republican "always on" approach [4]
• Prioritize door-to-door canvassing over low-response digital and phone outreach [4]

Several of these recommendations mirror what the party has told itself after previous losses. The DNC currently faces concurrent fundraising struggles, trailing Republicans significantly and requiring credit lines for 2025 elections [3] — a financial reality that makes major infrastructure investments difficult.

As of this writing, no DNC leadership has publicly committed to implementing the report's recommendations. Martin's simultaneous release and disavowal of the document suggests the institutional appetite for structural change remains limited.

The Autopsy of the Autopsy: Process Failures

The report's credibility is undermined by the process that produced it. Martin chose Paul Rivera, a Democratic consultant who had not worked on a presidential campaign since John Kerry's 2004 race, to lead the effort [2]. Rivera volunteered to work part-time and waited months before contacting key officials from the Biden and Harris campaigns [10].

Many senior Democratic campaign and super PAC leaders from 2024 told reporters they never spoke with Rivera [10]. Several state party chairs said they felt they "were simply being used to validate conclusions Martin and Rivera had already made," with one describing the document as "Ken's theory of the case for the future of the party through the lens of 2024, as opposed to 'autopsy'" [10].

The report is missing key sections, including a conclusion and the executive summary it references. It contains factual errors — misspelled names and an incorrect margin of victory for the North Carolina governor's race [3]. The DNC says the 5,000 interviews with party members, voters, and supporters that supposedly informed the report were never documented with source materials [3].

Top consultants from the Biden-Harris campaign privately urged the DNC to keep their names out of the findings. Future Forward, which raised $613 million, allegedly pressured officials to avoid negative portrayals [10]. The final decision to suppress the report was described as "unanimous" among senior DNC leadership before CNN's reporting forced the release [10].

The Pattern: 2004, 2016, 2024

This is not the first time the Democratic Party has produced a post-mortem it didn't want to confront. After John Kerry's 2004 loss, the party conducted an internal review. After Hillary Clinton's 2016 loss, the DNC commissioned an autopsy that then-Chair Tom Perez chose never to release to DNC members [2].

The recurring themes across these exercises are consistent enough to qualify as a diagnosis in themselves: the party loses working-class voters; consultants protect their own interests; the institutional leadership promises reform, then shelves the findings; and the next cycle begins with the same structural weaknesses intact.

Rivera himself had not worked on a presidential campaign since the 2004 Kerry race [2] — a detail that frames the 2024 autopsy as bookended by the same consultant class that has presided over two decades of Democratic decline outside of Obama's campaigns.

The Republican Party's 2013 post-mortem after Mitt Romney's loss — the so-called "Growth and Opportunity Project" — recommended the party become more inclusive on immigration and expand its demographic appeal. The party then nominated Donald Trump, abandoned those recommendations, and won. The lesson some Democrats have drawn is that autopsies don't change parties; candidates and circumstances do.

What Comes Next

The DNC's autopsy is a document at war with itself — too honest to be comfortable, too compromised to be trusted, too late to be useful. It identifies real problems: the party's hemorrhaging of non-white working-class men, its failure to communicate economic gains to voters experiencing economic pain, its chronic underinvestment in state-level infrastructure.

But it also protects the people and institutions most responsible for those failures. It skips the questions — Biden's candidacy, Gaza, Harris's uncontested nomination — that most divided the coalition. And it arrives after a year and a half of suppression, into a party that has already moved on to the 2026 midterms without addressing the structural deficiencies the report describes.

Senator Brian Schatz warned that the DNC had broken its commitment to transparency and predicted the suppressed report would generate lasting controversy [10]. He was right. The question is whether the controversy produces change or, as in 2004 and 2016, simply generates another autopsy to be buried after the next loss.