Thousands Urge DNC to Release Autopsy on 2024 Defeat

The chair of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, publicly committed to releasing an autopsy on the 2024 defeat but has refused to do so. Supporters of the activist organization RootsAction, which released its own autopsy more than four months ago, are now flooding top DNC officials' email accounts with requests to keep Martin's promise.

Martin and four other DNC officers have received more than 9,000 emails from nearly 2,000 individuals in the last few days urging them to make public the entire autopsy. Those emailed include DNC Vice Chair Artie Blanco, DNC Vice Chair Shasti Conrad, DNC Vice Chair and Association of State Democratic Committees President Jane Kleeb, and DNC Secretary Jason Rae. They have not replied.

RootsAction brought attention to this issue during the recent DNC meeting in New Orleans, with a mobile billboard out front, flyers handed out by allies, and RootsAction senior strategist and former Democratic nominee for mayor of Buffalo India Walton speaking up and being forcibly removed from the meeting.

A recent NBC News story, “Democrats Want the Full 2024 Election Autopsy Released – No Matter the Findings,” quotes RootsAction national director Norman Solomon about Martin's decision to renege on his promise to release the autopsy report. “There’s a real elitism that is inherent in Martin’s backtrack on releasing the autopsy,” Solomon said.

As the DNC continues to ignore popular demand, Walton comments: “It has been said that those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it. We who are prudent would like to know what mistakes were made that thrust us into this nightmare we are living. Now is not a time for saving face. Releasing the autopsy will help us understand what voters really want heading into midterms and the next presidential election. That’s the least we deserve.”

Solomon summed up the DNC leadership’s approach this way: “We learned a lot, we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at least doing interviews in 50 states, and now we know a lot more about what went wrong and how to fix it, but we’re not going to tell the thousands and thousands of Democratic candidates around the country what we found out. We’re not going to tell the millions of people who donated money to the Democratic Party candidates in the last few years what we learned.”

While the emails pouring into DNC officials’ inboxes can be edited and augmented by each person sending them, they usually begin like this:

"You conducted a comprehensive autopsy of the last election. It reportedly reached conclusions that many of us had long been warning you about before the election, such as that it would be hard to win while supporting an unpopular genocide.

"The truth is not just embarrassing but also inconvenient to those who want to persist in making the same mistake, in arming Israel, in shifting more and more of our resources into wars that devastate millions of lives.

"But the truth is better than continuing to lose. It would be hard not to blame future defeats on your refusal to allow examination of past defeats.

"Release the full and unedited autopsy right away. Then we can all get to work on doing a much better job in future elections."

RootsAction might be viewed as having a particular credibility to make this demand. On Nov. 14, 2022, long before it became mainstream to urge that President Biden not run for reelection – when there was still time to hold an open primary process to pick a stronger candidate rather than a last-minute fill-in – RootsAction began a campaign it called "Don't Run Joe."

RootsAction was founded in 2011 by two longtime progressive advocates and journalists, Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen, and quickly grew, pursuing a fresh approach to defending the public interest and expanding social justice. RootsAction is dedicated to galvanizing people who are committed to economic fairness, equal rights for all, civil liberties, environmental protection – and defunding endless wars.