Most autopsies are performed on the deceased by the living. The Democratic National Committee, working from a different theory of medicine, has now performed one on itself—and then disowned the result before the body is even cold.

The party’s long-awaited after-action report on the 2024 election was finally released more than a year after the election it was meant to explain. DNC Chair Ken Martin commissioned the review in early 2025 from outside Democratic strategist Paul Rivera.

Rivera delivered a draft late last year. Martin promptly shelved it.

After months of pressure from state parties, governors (Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro reportedly chief among them), donors, and finally CNN preparing to publish a leaked copy, Martin relented and posted Rivera’s draft online.

It was heavily annotated with skeptical caveats in red by the DNC itself.

Democratic strategist Jared Leopold told Newsweek‘s Alex Rouhandeh in the Midterms Monitor newsletter: “This report would’ve gotten a C+ at best in a college class. I can’t believe we spent a year talking about it.”

In an accompanying Substack post, Martin explained that the report “does not meet my standards” and that he does not “endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it.” Rivera, the DNC has confirmed, is no longer working with the committee.

Picture a hospital releasing a coroner’s report stapled to a Post-it: We don’t actually stand behind any of this.

In this Dissected, we cut through the corporate-retreat jargon, missing sections, and markups to find what the man Democrats paid to diagnose 2024 actually said. And what his clients clearly wanted you to know they did not endorse.

“BUILD TO WIN. BUILD TO LAST.”

The title of a document about losing an election. It reads less like a political diagnosis than the loading screen of a strategy game, or a slogan you’d find embroidered on a throw pillow at HomeGoods.

Things that did not Build to Win and did not Build to Last in 2024 include: the Blue Wall, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, the U.S. Senate, and the popular vote.

“EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This section was not provided by author.”

The Executive Summary. The single most-read part of any document longer than a takeout menu. Missing. As is the Conclusion. And the Appendices. And the Notes for the Reader. And the Sources.

The DNC released a 192-page report on the worst presidential loss for the party since 2004 with all five executive-level sections blank or incomplete. Draw your own conclusions. Literally.

“the DNC and ASDC have conducted more than 1200 interviews to assess the health of our 57 state parties—in every state, district, or territory.”

A Democratic autopsy that opens with an apparent error is an inauspicious start.

Dozens of pages later, the Sources section says they actually interviewed 12,000 Democrats, not 1,200. So there is either a missing zero in the introduction or a phantom zero in the appendix. Possibly both.

“In 1989, after losing three straight presidential campaigns, our party refocused the conversation around policy and purpose to reclaim the vital center of American discourse.”

The report’s animating model for renewal is Ron Brown, who took over the DNC in 1989.

When your most recent template for victory peaked during the George H.W. Bush administration, and your guiding light has been dead for 30 years, you may have a pipeline problem.

“with a better political climate, or advancing slightly different policies, or with a different candidate, victory could have been assured. This kind of thinking—denialist at its core—prevents the Party from seeking real accountability.”

Credit where due: this is the closest Rivera comes to a thesis, and it’s an honest one.

It is also the line most likely to be ignored by every Democratic operative quoted anonymously in The New York Times over the next 24 months explaining that the loss was actually Joe Biden’s fault, inflation’s fault, the voters’ fault, and possibly TikTok’s fault.

“Despite a series of false and unverifiable claims by Walker… endorsements by Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell were enough to take the senate race to a runoff.”

Tucked alongside this passage about the 2022 Georgia Senate race, the DNC’s annotation in red reads, simply: “In 2022, Joe Biden was president.”

The author had implied a political context that didn’t exist. The Democratic Party has been forced to fact-check its own commissioned strategist on which Democrat was running the U.S. two years ago.

“Robinson’s performance must be a wake-up call to Democrats—even without the support of Trump and major organizations, extreme right-wing candidates can still leverage the conservative media ecosystem.”

CNN reported in September 2024 that Mark Robinson, using a pseudonym, had described himself as a “Black NAZI” on the message board of a pornographic website between 2008 and 2012.

Robinson, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina, initially denied the posts and sued; he has since reportedly acknowledged them. He still pulled 40 percent of the vote.

Whatever else this report has trouble grappling with, that one data point deserves to be tattooed on every Democratic strategist’s forearm.

“In the current media ecosystem, Republicans own and Democrats rent. Democrats pay for seasonal access to the networks, stations, platforms, and newspapers owned by Republicans or right-wing entities.”

This is a stunningly honest sentence, and it explains roughly half the grievances you have ever heard from a Democratic operative.

The party correctly diagnoses the problem. The proposed solution, several pages later, involves spending even more money with the same entities. Insanity theory, anyone?

“Democrats are essentially raising billions of dollars from retirees, activists, working Americans, and organized labor, and transferring most of it to the pockets of legacy and digital media oligarchs.”

Read that again. The Democratic Party, in an official report it published itself, describes itself as a pipeline that moves money from grandmothers and union locals to “media oligarchs.”

If a Republican opposition group had written that sentence about the DNC, it would be the centerpiece of a campaign ad.

“If Democrats took every dollar raised in the two-year cycle and laid them end to end, it would circle the earth more than 33 times.”

This sentence appears verbatim in the report, in a section devoted to explaining how Democrats lost the White House, the Senate, the popular vote, and ground with virtually every demographic outside of college-educated white women—despite outraising Republicans by roughly $2.5 billion.

It is not framed as the problem. It is framed as a flex.

“Trump and affiliated committees spent $435 million, and Harris and affiliated committees spent $903 million.”

Those are media-spending figures from the report—and they hold up against AdImpact data, which puts Harris-aligned advertising at roughly $880 million versus Trump-aligned at roughly $425 million.

The Harris operation outspent the Trump operation by more than two to one in campaign-affiliated advertising, raised more in nearly every category, and lost all seven battleground states.

Build to Win, indeed.

“Every down ballot Democrat did better among men than Harris… Even Craig, who lost in New Hampshire, still did 5 points better with men.”

The Male Voter Problem is so acute that the only Democrat the report compares to Harris, who actually lost her own race, nonetheless outperformed the party’s presidential nominee with men by five points.

When the down-ballot Democrat who lost is the one quietly outperforming you, the phrase “the call is coming from inside the house” gets a real workout.

“Harris: 48% (first time Dems fell below 50%)… Irregular voters are disproportionately voters of color, younger, non-college, male, and urban.”

The first Democratic presidential nominee in modern history to fail to clear 50 percent with first-time voters—a coalition the party has spent two decades insisting it owns by birthright.

The report’s diagnosis, in a rare moment of plain prose: the campaign “appears to have assumed Trump was so unacceptable that persuadable voters would automatically vote Democratic.”

A theory that hit a wall, hard, at roughly 11 p.m. Eastern on November 5, 2024.

“In North Carolina, engaged educated voters went Trump-Stein—they rejected both Harris and Robinson but voted for Democrats down ballot. The problem wasn’t Democratic policy or party brand. It was specifically about how Harris as a candidate”

The sentence ends there. No period. No final clause. We are not, in the year of our Lord 2026, going to find out what specifically about Harris as a candidate. The author just stops typing and starts a new paragraph.

Whatever he was about to say was, evidently, better left to the imagination of the reader and the lawyers.

“Numbers appear inaccurate based on public data.”

This is one of dozens of in-line annotations the DNC itself added to Rivera’s document before publishing it.

Other greatest hits include “Claim contradicts public reporting,” “Analysis not supported by the data,” “Methodology appears internally inconsistent,” and “Contradicts claims elsewhere in the report.”

The DNC paid Rivera to write a 192-page report on what went wrong, then spent additional staff time marking up Rivera’s report to flag what was wrong with it, then watched its own chair publicly disown the result.

“CONCLUSION: This section was not provided by the author.”

After 192 pages explaining why one of the two great American political parties just lost the White House, the Senate, the popular vote, and significant ground with virtually every demographic it counts as its own, Rivera seemingly had nothing else to add.

The Conclusion is blank. So is the Appendix. Notes for the Reader is incomplete. Perhaps he had already moved on to the next contract.

“Sources, interview materials, and other evidence not provided.”

The Sources section of an autopsy containing hundreds of empirical claims, drawn from “more than 1,200″—or perhaps 12,000—interviews, contains, in the end, no sources.

The autopsy closes, in spirit if not in print, with the same phrase that opens every one of its 192 pages: we cannot independently verify any of this.