Politics

The DNC’s Secret Report Is Tearing the Party Apart

By Mike Harper · May 11, 2026

Eighteen months after the 2024 election, the Democratic National Committee is sitting on a 200-page internal analysis of why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump. The report was commissioned at public expense, completed by professional analysts, and reviewed by party leadership. And the chairman has decided the public — including Democratic voters trying to understand what went wrong — should not see it.

That decision is now fracturing the party in ways that are becoming impossible to manage quietly.

Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey appeared on Meet the Press Sunday morning and was unambiguous: “Yeah, release the autopsy.” He then pivoted immediately to the midterms, as if the question barely needed answering. It was the kind of answer that lands harder for its brevity.

Booker is not alone. Harris herself — according to NBC News reporting — has been privately pushing DNC Chairman Ken Martin to release the findings. Her own campaign burned through $1.5 billion in 107 days. She lost. And she believes Democrats deserve to know what the analysis says about how and why.

Martin’s position has shifted repeatedly. He initially promised to release the autopsy. He then said it would be released in summary form. He then said it might come out as “top-line findings.” He now defends keeping it private by arguing there is “no smoking gun” in the document and that releasing it would amount to “navel-gazing” that distracts from the 2026 midterms.

Democratic strategists are not buying it.

“It raises more questions than it answers to conduct an autopsy and then not release it,” said Christy Setzer, a veteran Democratic strategist. “Why make the diagnosis if you’re not going to tell the patient what they have?” Strategist Jamal Simmons called the decision “dumb.” “Get all of the dirt out of the wound now so we can all heal.”

The specific question the autopsy is believed to address — and that Martin is protecting — is what went wrong with the $1.5 billion. By comparison, Trump’s winning campaign spent $388 million. Harris had more than four times the resources and lost the Electoral College, lost the popular vote, and lost ground with nearly every demographic group Democrats had spent years building coalitions with — including Black men, Latino men, and working-class voters without college degrees.

A prominent Harris donor who still speaks with her told NBC News: “I don’t know how she runs from Israel, and I don’t know how she runs from Biden, and she’s not good at threading the needle.” Harris has been touring the country promoting her memoir “107 Days” while quietly consulting allies about a potential 2028 run — a campaign the sealed autopsy could either enable or undermine depending on what it says about her decisions.

Booker — who is widely seen as a 2028 contender himself — added something that landed as both charitable and pointed: “I think that it was a disservice to Kamala Harris that we did not have a primary in the last election. I hope we have the most robust ‘28 primary there is.”

A party going into a midterm cycle it believes it can win, against a president at 62% disapproval, with a sealed report about its last catastrophic loss, is making a bet that the past won’t haunt the future. Whether that bet is right will probably be obvious by November.