Pressure Mounts on DNC To Release 2024 Election Autopsy as Harris Considers 2028 Run

The Democratic National Committee is facing mounting pressure from prominent party members — reportedly including the former vice president herself, Kamala Harris — to release the internal postmortem report examining the party’s widespread losses in the 2024 election.Advocates of the report’s immediate release argue that transparency is essential for the party to rebuild voter trust, learn from its strategic failures, and openly debate its future direction ahead of the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential race. Proponents emphasize the need to confront publicly hard truths about the campaign, including dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war and field operations that, according to internal DNC documents, resulted in only a three percent voter contact rate despite more than 300 million phone calls.“Yeah, release the autopsy,” Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “This is six months before an election. We need to be mobilizing and organizing in this election. Fine, DNC, release it. They should do that. But the most important thing is for people to get out and vote in record numbers.”Shortly after taking over as the party’s chairman in February 2025, Ken Martin ordered the comprehensive review, but he has since opted to keep the findings buried. “There’s no smoking gun in the report,” Mr. Martin told the “Pod Save America” podcast last month. Asked why not release the report if there is no smoking gun, the DNC chief replied, “Because we want to keep the focus on the lessons.”This secrecy has prompted widespread backlash. Some political insiders speculate the move was intended to protect Ms. Harris from political embarrassment should she launch a 2028 presidential bid. However, the 2024 loser has privately told donors she believes the document should be made public, signaling she is comfortable with a public airing of the campaign’s flaws, NBC News reports.Others have suggested that party leaders are putting pressure on the chairman to bury the report. “There’s speculation that decisions were made by campaign leadership to line their pockets rather than advance a strategy to win the election,” said a former senior adviser to Presidents Obama and Biden, Ashley Etienne.Still others within the party ranks have suggested that DNC leadership was out of its depth, a charge that led to more internecine fighting this week.“I believed the DNC should have been empowered to do its job, organize aggressively not just in the midterms (but also the presidential cycle), communicate directly with the base, and operate as a PARTNER, not a subsidiary whose tweets, press releases, and routine decisions required constant White House approval,” wrote Mr. Martin’s predecessor, Jaime Harrison, in response to conjecture by a former White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, that he wanted to focus on policy not fundraising during his 2021-2025 tenure.Prominent Democrats have been vocal in their demands to let the public see the findings. “We need to deal with the hard truths about how our failure to stop the genocide in Gaza cost us support,” Congressman Ro Khanna said in February. “Only when we have a new moral direction in this party will we win back the country’s trust.”A former congressman from Illinois who served as President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, also groused about the lack of transparency. “We are all adults. If we can’t handle an after-action report on how we spent $4 billion and lost, then we are all third-grade soccer players and get a medal for effort. God help us,” he said.While Ms. Harris remains focused on the future — touring the country and sounding out allies about her next chapter — she remains the frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic nomination in early polls. She recently sought counsel from the Reverend Al Sharpton regarding a potential run.“She is being encouraged to run by a lot of people around her and by a lot of people around the country,” Mr. Sharpton told NBC. “She is definitely getting a lot of push, and I think it will ultimately impact her decision.”Even as the party regroups for the coming midterm elections, the Democratic committee is finding funds harder to come by. Recent filings with the Federal Elections Commission show that the Democratic National Committee has had $178 million in receipts and $186 million in distributions in the 2025-2026 cycle. That’s compared to $228 million receipts and $149 million in distributions by Republicans during the same period.

Pressure Mounts on DNC To Release 2024 Election Autopsy as Harris Considers 2028 Run

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