One Chapter Never Made It Into Democrats’ 2024 Election Autopsy

The Democratic National Committee’s effort to explain and learn from its 2024 election losses has descended into fresh controversy after the author of the party’s official postmortem claimed Democratic leaders omitted an entire chapter examining what went wrong.

According to the New York Times, Democratic consultant Paul Rivera, who authored the DNC’s after-action review, says a 28-page chapter titled “What Happened in 2024” was missing when the party released the report in May after delaying publication for nearly a year.

The omitted chapter reportedly addressed some of the most politically sensitive questions surrounding Democrats’ defeat, including whether former President Joe Biden should have sought reelection, the party’s declining support among key voting blocs, and what Rivera described as a self-enriching Democratic consultant class that had become disconnected from ordinary Americans.

“An emerging critique of Democratic decision-making is there are too many people who have become generationally wealthy off politics and drive too much of the decision-making within the ecosystem,” Rivera wrote in the missing chapter, which he provided to the Times.

He also questioned Biden’s decision to remain in the race.

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

Rivera says he personally handed DNC Chairman Ken Martin a three-ring binder containing the completed chapter during a January meeting after Martin criticized the draft report. Rivera said Martin later returned the binder after reviewing it.

Martin denied ever receiving the missing section.

“As we said at the time, in May we released all of the draft report as we’d received it from the author,” Martin said in a statement to the Times. “If we had this in May, we would have released it with the rest of the report.”

Martin maintained that the January meeting focused solely on “lessons learned” materials for internal planning, not on new report chapters, arguing that neither he nor the DNC ever reviewed the disputed document.

The dispute comes after the DNC initially announced it would not release an official autopsy of the 2024 election, with Martin arguing the effort had become a distraction. He later reversed course amid mounting pressure, publishing an annotated draft in May while insisting it was “not ready for primetime” and refusing to endorse its conclusions.

Rivera told the Times he decided to go public because he believes Democrats cannot fix their problems without candid self-examination.

“It’s coming from a place of hope and, honestly, a little bit of desperation,” Rivera said. “There’s a very comfortable ecosystem that will profit mightily from no change.”

The controversy comes as Martin is already facing growing scrutiny over his leadership. The DNC recently reported having roughly $16.3 million cash on hand while carrying $18.5 million in debt. Martin has also come under fire following reports that he threw his cellphone at a staffer’s desk during an internal dispute, prompting a human resources complaint, as well as comments suggesting he was uncertain how much longer he would remain in the position.

With fewer than 100 days until the midterm elections, the dispute over whether Democrats buried the most politically explosive section of their own election autopsy will likely do little to assuage concerns about whether party leadership has fully come to terms with the reasons behind its 2024 defeat.