Author says Democratic Party omitted key chapter from 2024 election autopsy

The author of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) review of what went wrong in the 2024 election said the party omitted an entire chapter that scrutinized former President Joe Biden’s reelection bid and questioned whether wealthy Democratic operatives had lost touch with ordinary voters, according to an Aug. 3 New York Times report.

Paul Rivera, the Democratic consultant who authored the autopsy, provided the Times with the chapter, titled “What Happened in 2024,” and told the outlet he personally gave it to DNC Chairman Ken Martin during a Jan. 20 meeting. Martin strongly denied Rivera’s account, saying he never received or reviewed the section.

“That is false,” Martin said in a written statement to the Times. “This alleged report section was not in any binder I reviewed.” 

The dispute comes after the DNC released a heavily annotated, 192-page draft of its review of Democrats’ 2024 election losses in May. Martin said at the time that the party was publishing the unfinished document “in its entirety” following months of criticism over his earlier decision to withhold it, according to the Times. 

The version released by the DNC listed the “What Happened” section as “pending” and included an annotation stating, “This section was not provided by author.” 

“What I can tell you is they had it, and they made a decision not to release it,” Rivera told the Times about the chapter. 

The disputed section — which Rivera provided to the newspaper in a Word document showing it was last modified shortly before the Jan. 20 meeting — raised the possibility that Biden’s decision to seek a second term was a central failure of Democrats’ 2024 campaign. 

“Is there a single point of failure for 2024?” Rivera wrote in the chapter. “Perhaps it is a decision of the President to seek re-election instead of passing the torch.”

The chapter argued that Democrats’ unexpectedly strong performance in the 2022 midterm elections may have caused party leaders to overestimate their political strength and overlook Biden’s vulnerabilities. 

“These wins led Democrats to believe they were stronger than they actually were,” the chapter said. “President Biden, seeing those results, made the consequential decision to seek re-election even when Americans were already sending a very strong signal: they were unhappy with the status quo.”

Biden ended his reelection campaign in July 2024 following mounting concerns about his age, health, and ability to defeat President Donald Trump. Then-Vice President Kamala Harris replaced him as the Democratic nominee. 

Rivera’s chapter also examined the party’s declining support among black, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American voters, which the Times said received limited attention in the DNC’s released draft. According to exit polling previously reported by CatholicVote, Trump made substantial gains among Hispanic and Latino voters.

The chapter further questioned whether senior Democratic strategists’ financial success had insulated them from the economic pressures many of the party’s voters faced. Rivera wrote that many influential operatives had become “generationally wealthy off politics” and were “financially secure,” though he did not identify any individuals by name.

“It is therefore possible the people ‘in the room’ at the highest levels of 2024 decision making misunderstood the mood and practicalities facing everyday America,” the report said.

In a statement to the Times, Rivera said he did not know whether the DNC had made a “conscious decision” to “bury the section for the purposes of hiding a paragraph” but called it a “them question.” 

Martin, however, told the newspaper he would not have sought to suppress such criticism and pointed to his pledge to hold what he has called the “consultant-industrial complex” accountable.

“If I or the DNC had report materials that went after self-enriching consultants, we absolutely would have included them,” Martin told the Times. 

Rivera told the Times that he also emailed an earlier draft of the chapter to a different DNC official. The DNC deletes party emails after 30 days for security reasons, leaving no record of the message, according to the Times. Martin said an internal search of the party’s files uncovered no copy of the chapter. The outlet reported that three other officials involved in producing the autopsy said they had not previously seen the disputed section.

The Times predicted the controversy could divert attention from the party’s midterm campaign with less than 100 days remaining before the November elections and that it adds to scrutiny of Martin’s leadership as the DNC faces a substantial financial disadvantage. The party recently disclosed more than $2 million in debt, while the Republican National Committee reported $128.5 million in the bank.

Rivera is now releasing his own 564-page review, titled “Blue by 2032,” which calls for changes to Democratic organizing, fundraising, and messaging, the Times reported. He said he decided to speak publicly because the party has not adequately confronted the failures that contributed to its 2024 loss.

“There’s a very comfortable ecosystem that will profit mightily from no change,” Rivera told the Times. “And I think that we need some disruption here to force change.”

“In every other aspect of professional life, when you fail, you look back to understand what went wrong — not in politics and certainly not in this party,” Rivera said, according to the newspaper. “The inability to accept responsibility gets in the way of change, reform, growth and progress, and that’s a huge missed opportunity for the party.”