DNC Chair Ken Martin and the DNC 2024 Autopsy Report

We do not even need it to recognize where the Democratic Party has gone wrong

By: Austin Abbring

May 17, 2026

You may have missed it, but DNC Chair Ken Martin had a disastrous appearance on the podcast, Pod Save America, and it exemplifies everything wrong with this current iteration of the Democratic Party. When pressed on releasing the 2024 DNC autopsy report, Martin refused to give a definitive answer on when it would be available. Throughout the interview, he foreshadowed that the Democratic Party learned valuable lessons after an extensive dive into what went wrong with Kamala Harris’ campaign. Unfortunately, he could not articulate the key takeaways when asked several times.

 I commend Jon Favreau’s patience, because I was very frustrated while watching this segment. Martin and the DNC’s autopsy includes over 300 interviews from around the country across its over 200 pages. The 2016 autopsy report was never released to the public, and it appears this one will remain private as well. However, we do not need an autopsy report to deduce the party’s shortcomings in 2024.

First and foremost, Kamala Harris did not distinguish herself from the horrendous response to the Israeli genocide of Palestinians by the Biden administration. Her presidency would have most likely been a continuation of the misguided actions Biden took. You may recall that during the Democratic National Convention near the end of the campaign, Harris refused to allow a Palestinian American to deliver a speech. Her campaign gave no rationale for this decision. The Biden administration is equally as responsible for the genocide in Gaza as the Trump administration is. In fact, under Biden, the United States provided nearly eighteen billion dollars in aid to Israel as they began their “war” against Hamas. Biden prioritized helping replenish Israel’s Iron Dome, and under his leadership, the U.S. vetoed several UN council resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Kamala Harris sided with the Biden administration’s measures with Israel, and that is a woefully unpopular position to take. The AIPAC lobby is one of the greatest threats to our democracy.

Another major misstep for the Harris campaign was its inability to distance itself from Joe Biden. In an interview on The View, she stated she would not change a thing from the Biden-Harris administration. Now, Joe Biden did not do many favors for Harris by running as the incumbent for the Democratic Party despite his clear cognitive decline. I recognize the normalcy of an incumbent president running for a second term, but in Biden’s case, it was clear this was an overall disservice to the party and its voters. It was going to lose independent votes, and that margin cannot be lost in an election. 

This left Harris with very little time to build a demonstrable platform and provide clear direction for the Democratic Party as it ran against Donald Trump for a third time. The Harris campaign was extremely ineffective at explaining the root drivers of the high inflation experienced in the first two years of the Biden presidency. All it took was retorting to the American people that a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, which shocked supply and logistics, and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia had induced the high inflation and fuel prices. She could have easily noted that the first Trump administration had higher deficit spending, more than a trillion dollars higher, than Biden-Harris did. The first Trump presidency saw nearly twice the COVID-19 relief spending as Biden's. These are simple facts and obvious points to demonstrate, but they simply never came to fruition. 

I am not opposed to COVID spending by either administration, as the vast majority of it was necessary to prevent economic calamity. With that said, the Republican Party did a fantastic job propagandizing people leading up to the 2024 election on the negatives of the Biden presidency, with the peak inflation numbers at the forefront of that propaganda. I actually think the positives of the Biden administration overshadow the negatives by a sizeable margin, and his presidency will be remembered as way more productive than the GOP would have many Americans believe. Kamala Harris and her campaign strategist should have been much stronger in this area. Simply riding the Biden years, though, was not going to cut it.

Clearly, Kamala Harris was a much better and more qualified candidate than Donald Trump. There is no question there. However, losing to Trump a second time should really display to party leaders that they are immensely out of touch with their voters. Ken Martin’s fecklessness is a perfect illustration of why the Democratic Party has such an unfavorable view.

The party needs to recognize that running centrist, elitist, corporate candidates and ignoring the wishes of its base is not a sustainable strategy. Abandoning working-class and blue-collar voters while hoping to flip suburban moderate Republicans is not sustainable. Platforming AIPAC candidates is not sustainable. Simply going against Trump while having no clear policy positions as a party is not sustainable. The Democratic Party must return to and appeal to working-class America as it had for decades, while the party was at its strongest. The temperature is reading that a progressive movement with candidates such as Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, and Graham Platner is the future. The party must reject the billionaire class and cut ties with super PAC donors. The party needs to stop being center-right and be a true left-wing opposition to the far-right GOP.