Kamala Harris Calls on DNC to Release 2024 Election Autopsy Report

Democrats continue to rack up wins at the ballot box while aiming to regain congressional majorities in this year's midterm elections.

Electoral successes and strong showings have piled up in the more than 15 months since President Donald Trump returned to the White House. Still, the party's standing in public opinion polls remains deeply negative, and the Democratic National Committee trails the Republican National Committee badly in fundraising, a key measure of party strength.

The DNC faces ongoing demands to release its internal review of the 2024 election defeats, when Democrats lost the presidency and Senate majority and failed to take the House.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris, the party's presidential nominee two years ago, is among those pressing for public release of the report on what went wrong in 2024.

Harris, who is considering another White House run in 2028, recently told donors the DNC should make the autopsy public. NBC News first reported the comments, which Fox News Digital confirmed.

A source with knowledge said Harris had not discussed the report with DNC Chair Ken Martin and did not know ahead of time about Martin's December decision to keep the 2024 postmortem internal.

Martin commissioned the report shortly after his election as DNC chair early last year. Party officials interviewed more than 300 Democrats from all 50 states. Martin promised it would analyze 2024 mistakes and map a path to future wins.

Controversy arose during compilation last summer after reports that the review would skip analysis of whether President Joe Biden should have sought re-election and would avoid judging decisions by Harris and her team after she replaced Biden as nominee with just over three months before the election.

Martin repeatedly objected to the term "autopsy," noting the party was not dead. He called it an "after-action review."

In December, weeks after Democratic victories in the 2025 off-year elections, the party said it would not release the report.

Martin said at the time that doing so would distract from the core mission of winning congressional majorities. "We completed a comprehensive review of what happened in 2024 and are already putting our learnings into motion," he wrote. "And we're winning again — even in places that haven't gone blue in decades."

"Here’s our North Star: does this help us win? If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission," he added.

Republicans criticized the move, as did fellow Democrats. "They are spiking an autopsy of the election that gave us Trump 2.0," former DNC Vice Chair David Hogg wrote on social media. "If party leaders won't take the steps required to rebuild ourselves into a winning coalition, we will take it into our own hands."

Hogg, a gun-control advocate elected DNC vice chair alongside Martin, resigned last summer after pushing primary challenges against longtime incumbents in safe Democratic districts he called "asleep at the wheel."

Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama and co-host of the progressive podcast Pod Save America, called it "a very bad decision that reeks of the caution and complacency that brought us to this moment."

Co-host Jon Favreau, another Obama alumnus, labeled the flip-flop "unreal" and "baffling." "The DNC's actual position is that if the public knew more about what Democrats got wrong in the last election, it would hurt the party's chances in the next election," he wrote on X. "How does this rebuild trust between the party insiders and grassroots activists and organizers?"

Martin appeared on Pod Save America last month to counter the criticism. "We’ve been releasing that," he said when asked about sharing a summary. "The reality is we’re not hiding the ball on this. We have been sharing those things out. There’s no smoking gun here."

He noted the DNC had provided briefings and shared data from the report with stakeholders.

Harris is not alone among potential 2028 contenders urging full release. "Yeah, release the autopsy," Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. "They should do that."

Booker, who lost the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination to Biden and may run again in 2028, said the party must not dwell on the past.

Rotimi Adeoye, a former Democratic operative and New York Times opinion contributor, wrote on social media that the DNC erred by not releasing the report earlier in spring. "Whatever’s in it, you get two weeks of bad publicity, then Trump does something stupid and everyone forgets," he said. "Now it feels like something’s being hidden, which makes it way more salacious."

A person familiar with DNC strategy told Fox News Digital the attention will force a release of some kind. The anonymous source said the issue distracts from midterm preparations.