After months of resistance, the Democratic National Committee finally relented this May and published a draft of its autopsy of what had gone wrong in the 2024 election, saying it was releasing the unfinished document “in its entirety” in the interest of transparency.
But, according to the man who wrote the autopsy, there was a missing chapter.
The chapter raised pointed questions that were notably absent from the draft that the party put out, both about President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s ill-fated decision to run for re-election and the sway of an operative class that had become “generationally wealthy off politics” while steering Democratic strategy.
Paul Rivera, the author of the autopsy, provided the chapter to The New York Times and spoke publicly for the first time about the party’s efforts to analyze its 2024 losses. Both he and party officials agreed that the process had been messy and at times contentious. He said that the draft released by the party had been compiled from work he submitted in November and December.
But he said that the draft omitted a chapter titled “What Happened in 2024,” which he said he had printed out and placed in a three-ring binder that he personally handed to the party’s chairman, Ken Martin, in January.
Mr. Martin sharply disputed that account, denying in a written statement that he was ever provided with the missing chapter.
“That is false,” Mr. Martin said. “This alleged report section was not in any binder I reviewed.” He added, “If we had this in May, we would have released it with the rest of the report.” He declined a request to be interviewed.
The disputed “What Happened” chapter addressed several politically delicate subjects that were not included in the draft the party published in May:
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It analyzed the party’s loss of support among Hispanic, Black, Asian American and Native American voters, which had been mostly missing from the public draft.
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And it pointedly raised the concern that most senior Democratic strategists in 2024 were “financially secure” and thus removed from the challenges facing many Americans. “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 read.
The chapter did not name names of those who had become “generationally wealthy.” But Mr. Rivera wrote that those Democrats seeking change “keep banging their heads up against a system proven to be inflexible and self-enriching.”
“Whether that was a conscious decision on their part to bury the section for the purposes of hiding a paragraph, I don’t know,” Mr. Rivera said of the D.N.C. “That’s a them question. What I can tell you is they had it, and they made a decision not to release it.”
Mr. Martin said that the party did not release the chapter because the D.N.C. never saw it. “If I or the D.N.C. had report materials that went after self-enriching consultants, we absolutely would have included them,” he said in the statement. After all, Mr. Martin said, he had campaigned for the chairmanship “to hold the consultant-industrial complex accountable and ensure the party only pays for work that actually helps us win.”
In the draft that the party released, the “What Happened” section was listed as “pending,” with an annotation stating: “This section was not provided by author.”
The dueling stories about the autopsy are a remarkable breach between the leader of the Democratic Party’s official arm and the friend he handpicked to be trusted with the politically sensitive task of producing the party’s formal 2024 autopsy.
Neither man’s account could be entirely corroborated, in part because many discussions about the autopsy occurred directly between the two men.
Mr. Martin said that the binder in question could not be located and that the party would have had no reason to hold on to it. Mr. Rivera provided a Word document of the chapter in question with metadata that showed that it was last modified shortly before his Jan. 20 meeting with Mr. Martin.
Mr. Rivera said that he had sent an earlier draft of the chapter electronically to another party official. Party emails are deleted after 30 days for security purposes, so there is no record of that email. Mr. Martin said that a search of the party’s files could not locate such a document, and three other party officials who worked with Mr. Rivera on the autopsy said they had not previously seen the document in question.
The dispute threatens to become a distraction for the party less than 100 days before the November midterm elections, when Democrats hope that President Trump’s poor approval ratings will help them win control of the House and possibly the Senate. And it comes as Mr. Martin has come under fire for his stewardship of a party that recently reported more than $2 million in debt, while the Republican National Committee had $128.5 million in the bank.
Mr. Rivera, whose reputation was damaged when the party released and disavowed his draft report, said he was going public because he believed the party needed sweeping changes to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past — which would require frank conversations that he does not see happening.
“It’s coming from a place of hope and, honestly, a little bit of desperation,” he said.
“There’s a very comfortable ecosystem that will profit mightily from no change,” said Mr. Rivera, who added that he was now releasing his own 564-page review of the 2024 election. “And I think that we need some disruption here to force change.”
This is the untold story of the autopsy that won’t die.
Early 2025: Don’t Call It an ‘Autopsy’
When he was elected to lead the Democratic Party in February 2025, Mr. Martin pledged to review the mistakes of 2024 to help the party plan for the future. Saying the report should not be called an autopsy because the party was “not dead,” he described it as an “after-action review.”
He turned to Mr. Rivera, a Democratic consultant who once worked in the Clinton White House, to spearhead the project. Mr. Rivera was an unusual pick: He had not worked on a presidential race since 2004. But he was an old, trusted friend of Mr. Martin’s who could bring an outsider’s eye. He took on the 2024 review as a part-time, unpaid project.
Mr. Rivera was granted access to internal party data, and he and party staff members conducted interviews last year with Democratic officials from across the country.
But by November, the report had blown past some internal deadlines.
Ten days after emphatic Democratic victories in the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races, Mr. Rivera said that Mr. Martin called him. “The request at that time was, Can you send in what you have, whatever condition it’s in?” Mr. Rivera said of his call with Mr. Martin.
Mr. Rivera recalled Mr. Martin as saying he did not want to publish an autopsy anymore but instead preferred to release some sort of slimmed-down “executive summary.”
Mr. Martin disputed that. “That was false,” he said. “The decision to not release the report was not made until mid-December. In fact, my staff and I continued aggressively following up with the author asking for the missing sections and sourcing in hopes of releasing a complete report.”
A Messy Process and Product
What is clear is that those late 2025 weeks were messy.
Mr. Rivera started sending documents in batches (the party later packaged them into the 192-page draft, he said). “I think I sent six or seven different emails” over the next month, he said.
At headquarters, party officials were aghast at the quality of the work, frustrated by his use of clichés, data without sources and more, according to multiple officials who saw the documents. The eventual annotations from the D.N.C. dripped with contempt and corrections: “Numbers appear inaccurate based on public data.”
Some annotations noted sections that were left out entirely. Mr. Rivera said those sections were intentionally left blank because he had planned to finalize them together with D.N.C. officials.
“Those conversations never occurred,” he said. “I would send in documents. They would start reviewing them, I guess throw up their hands and say, ‘We can’t do anything with this.’”
Some D.N.C. officials tried to salvage some of Mr. Rivera’s materials but were frustrated that so little was attributed to anyone or anything, according to the people who saw the documents. The eventual red disclaimer atop every page read: “The D.N.C. was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented.”
As for the source material, Mr. Rivera said that the interviews had been recorded and transcribed — with the promise to participants that the files would be deleted when the report was final. Once Mr. Martin told him in November that there would be no final report, Mr. Rivera said, he deleted all of those files from the D.N.C. server on his own.
Mr. Rivera said of the D.N.C., “Did not need their permission to record, did not need permission to delete.”
On Dec. 18, Mr. Martin publicly pulled the plug, announcing that there would be no published autopsy. Other party officials involved have said the final decision not to release an autopsy was not made until the quality of Mr. Rivera’s work product was apparent.
A January Meeting
In January, Mr. Martin told him he had “delivered a crappy product,” as Mr. Rivera recalled it, and they agreed to meet on a Saturday. Mr. Rivera said they had met for six hours, discussing a wide range of topics, including the autopsy.
“He started to say, ‘Well, you didn’t say this, you didn’t say that.’ And I was like: ‘Yes, I did. Those things were in the document,’” Mr. Rivera said. “So that was, like, the tell to me that they hadn’t put the full document in front of him. So then I printed a version and gave it to him.”
Mr. Rivera said he assembled a new 173-page report, which he printed and placed in a three-ring binder that he delivered personally to Mr. Martin on Jan. 20. The report was shorter than the one the D.N.C. released in May because it did not include a section on battleground state outcomes.
The documents provided to The Times show that they were last modified just before the Jan. 20 meeting. The files were still a rough draft. The document of the missing chapter misspelled its title in part of the file name: “What Happend.”
That Mr. Martin and Mr. Rivera met in January or that a binder was exchanged is not in dispute. The disagreement is over what was in the binder.
Mr. Rivera said that it included the “What Happened” chapter, which among other things explored how Democratic victories in the 2022 midterms might have masked the party’s — and Mr. Biden’s — vulnerabilities.
But Mr. Martin said that there was no new section but rather old material. “My work with Paul in January is being misrepresented,” Mr. Martin said.
“The only binder I was working with Paul on was for ‘lessons learned’ materials,” Mr. Martin said, which could be later shared with allies and donors. He added, “That effort did not include reviewing new report material, only the material the D.N.C. had already received.”
Mr. Rivera said that not only had Mr. Martin seen the chapter, but that the chairman had marked the binder with annotations and Post-it notes — and returned it to him via overnight mail from a California trip. Mr. Rivera said he returned the binder to Mr. Martin in person later in the month.
Mr. Martin said that he received at least 10 binders every week with briefing materials and that he did not recall this particular binder being kept for more than a few weeks during the winter, when he was actively working on the “lessons learned” materials. He said that party officials had looked for the binder in recent days at the request of The Times but did not find it, which he said was unsurprising given that the contents had not been needed for months. The party also performed a search of its digital files.
“To the best of our knowledge, this document was never shared with nor reviewed by the D.N.C. — and we did not locate it in an extensive search of our files,” Mr. Martin said in his statement.
The Party Releases a Draft
By April, Mr. Martin was still taking heat for what might have been in the autopsy.
After a confrontational appearance on the liberal podcast “Pod Save America,” clips went viral of Mr. Martin trying to explain why no autopsy had been released.
“There’s no smoking gun,” he said more than once.
Soon after, CNN approached the D.N.C. with more details of what was in the unreleased autopsy. The party decided to provide a full draft to the news outlet.
CNN published the draft at 10 a.m. on May 21.
At almost exactly that moment, Mr. Martin called Mr. Rivera to inform him the D.N.C. was releasing the annotated draft, Mr. Rivera said.
The call was the last time the two men spoke.
The reputational stakes are high for both men.
Mr. Martin has faced intensifying questions about his leadership that go beyond the party’s precarious finances. The Times previously reported that in early July, he threw his phone at the desk of a junior aide, resulting in a human resources complaint.
For Mr. Rivera, the party’s extensive — and dismissive — red annotations had publicly maligned his credibility. In the last two months, he has worked to finish his own “Blue by 2032” autopsy. It includes an “opening note” detailing his version of events.
Mr. Rivera remains openly worried about his party’s direction. His broader report suggests some systemic changes, in areas including organizing (“invest earlier to scale earlier”), fund-raising (“crack down on scam PACs and spam PACs”) and messaging (“spreadsheet jockeys have delivered a weak brand for Democrats”).
“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,” Mr. Rivera said. “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.”
