The Democratic National Committee has belatedly published its own autopsy on the 2024 election, and it’s nothing if not passive-aggressive. DNC Chairman Ken Martin published the 192-page “after action report”, commissioned in 2025, with a Substack post earlier today, throwing its unnamed author — identified in news reports as Democratic strategist Paul Rivera — straight under the bus.

“When I received the report late last year, it wasn’t ready for primetime,” Martin wrote. “Not even close.” Rivera, according to CNN, is a consultant with ties to Martin “who volunteered to work on [the report] part-time and waited several months to contact key officials with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ campaigns”. CNN added: “Many top decision-makers in the campaigns were ultimately never interviewed, and Harris herself has expressed frustration privately that questions about the document have gone on.”

For months, Martin confounded Democrats by mysteriously refusing to release the document. In a statement on the decision last December, Martin said: “Here’s our North Star: Does this help us win? If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.” Today, Martin conceded this made matters much worse: “In short, I didn’t want to create a distraction. Ironically, in doing so, I ended up creating an even bigger distraction. And for that, I sincerely apologize.”

Now, Martin’s effort to diffuse the distraction is only exacerbating it. His chain of decisions reflects staggering incompetence, to paraphrase Selina Meyer. Commissioning a report, hiding it, then alluding mysteriously to its flaws is inexplicably stupid. What’s worse, Martin is presumably aware that we live in an era of low institutional trust. He implied in his own Substack post that the report could have been repaired, writing that “because no source material was provided, fixing it would have meant starting over, from the beginning — every conversation, every interview, every data set.”

So why didn’t he do that? To the average Democrat, his excuse will sound foolish at best. Why not spend the money to put together a clear picture of what went wrong?

What Martin chose to do instead of using the DNC’s vast resources and starting from scratch was to try to get away with hiding the draft, then releasing it with the most passive-aggressive annotations imaginable. The entire document is marked up like a high-school book report, splattered with red ink that seeks to persuade readers that many of Rivera’s claims are not supplemented with requisite citations or are simply inaccurate. Such annotations are even attached to subjective but defensible points Rivera made, and some are attached to easily verifiable ones as well. (It took me about 15 seconds to find the source for Rivera’s “Trump but not Moreno” line.)

Every page, meanwhile, is topped with a bright red “disclaimer” that reads: “This document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC. The DNC was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented.”

It’s clearly true that Rivera’s product, as published by Martin, was incomplete. The executive summary and conclusion, for example, are left blank. The report itself is a lengthy tour of recent political history, from 2008 through the Donald Trump era, an analysis of downballot races around the country, and some media criticism. It vacillates from philosophical clichés to deeply technical notes on state races.

Rivera lands on the inoffensive concept of “Winning Anywhere”, which means “providing 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”. There is no mention of Gaza in the report, and just a brief reference to Trump’s “they/them” ad. Many of both the dubious claims and the reasonable ones are highlighted with annotations, leaving the reader with little to glean from either Rivera or Martin.

Can any conclusions be drawn from this entire protracted fracas? Can the Democrats learn anything? The most obvious takeaway, perhaps, is that Ken Martin should not have a job.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington correspondent.

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