Kamala Harris looks like she wants to run for President again in 2028.
But Kamala could be facing a crisis.
And that’s because one secret document holds the fate of her future.
A “Disaster” by Any Other Name
New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg didn’t pull any punches. She called the Democratic National Committee’s long-awaited 2024 post-election report “mysterious,” “anticlimactic,” and “ridiculous” — and that was just the warmup.
“The document, it’s now clear, was kept under wraps not because it was impolitic, but because it’s a disaster,” Goldberg wrote.
She didn’t stop there. “What’s most striking is its utter lack of substance,” she wrote, pointing out that in 192 pages, the words “Israel” and “Gaza” don’t appear once.
Think about that. The Democrat Party’s own internal reckoning with why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump couldn’t even bring itself to mention two of the most explosive political issues of the entire 2024 campaign.
“It offers little insight into why the Democratic Party lost large numbers of Black and Latino men, or its failure to speak to disconnected, irregular voters,” Goldberg wrote. Then came the kicker: “I wondered if it was written by A.I., though A.I. probably would’ve done a better job.”
That’s a New York Times columnist. A liberal. Saying the Democrat Party’s own election autopsy was worse than what a chatbot could have produced.
The Drama Behind the Release
The report’s troubled journey to publication is its own story. DNC Chair Ken Martin ran for the chairmanship on a promise to release the autopsy. Then he reversed course in December, announcing he would shelve it entirely. The report became, as Goldberg put it, “an object of suspicion and fascination.”
Speculation ran wild inside Democrat circles. “Some thought he was protecting Kamala Harris ahead of 2028. Many progressives were convinced that the D.N.C. quashed the autopsy because it would show Harris was done in by Gaza. Rob Flaherty, who’d been deputy director of both the Harris and Joe Biden campaigns, speculated that it didn’t even exist,” Goldberg wrote.
What actually forced Martin’s hand was a phone call with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who made clear he was furious the report was being kept under wraps. Martin was rattled enough by that conversation that he finally relented.
But releasing it only made things worse. Martin publicly disowned his own document the moment it went out the door. “I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards,” he said. He added that he could not “in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on it,” but released it anyway “as I received it — in its entirety, unedited and unabridged — with annotations for claims that couldn’t be verified.”
The report was written by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, a friend of Martin’s whom he had personally handpicked for the job. Rivera was not paid for the work. The DNC never received a list of people interviewed, transcripts, notes, or supporting data — despite requesting them multiple times. After the report went public, Martin told DNC staff that Rivera was no longer associated with the committee.
What’s Missing Tells the Real Story
Washington Post conservative opinion columnist Ramesh Ponnuru zeroed in on the gaping holes. “There’s nothing about President Joe Biden’s age and voters’ worries about it,” he wrote.
“Nothing about the border crisis the Democrats first caused through their policies and then denied in their rhetoric. Nothing about the party’s declining appeal to religiously observant voters. Nothing about the boutique left-wing views — such as support for taxpayer-funded sex changes for illegal immigrants and prisoners.”
That last item is worth sitting with. The Democrat Party commissioned a 192-page report to figure out why it lost, and the people who wrote it apparently couldn’t bring themselves to examine whether pushing taxpayer-funded gender surgeries for illegal aliens and prisoners might have had something to do with it.
The document does acknowledge, buried in its pages, that Trump’s anti-transgender attack ad against Harris was “very effective” and that the campaign’s own pollsters knew there was no good response to it. The autopsy’s conclusion? Since Harris wouldn’t change her position, there was nothing to be done. The Democrat Party’s own document treated radical gender ideology as an immovable object rather than a political liability they created for themselves.
And the report’s executive summary and conclusion sections were left entirely blank.
The DNC’s Own Annotations Say It All
Martin didn’t just release the report — he released it covered in red-ink annotations flagging its problems. The DNC’s own notes on its own autopsy include phrases like “no evidence provided; contradicts claims elsewhere in report” and “no sourcing or evidence provided.”
An AI-detection platform called GPTZero flagged the document as likely AI-generated, lending an almost poetic quality to Goldberg’s burn about the chatbot doing better work.
The report itself, in one of its more coherent passages, acknowledged that Democrats have “vacillated between stagnation and retrogression” since Barack Obama’s 2008 win. It blamed losses on “reductions in support and training for our state parties” and “a persistent inability or unwillingness to listen to all voters.”
But the document’s authors apparently couldn’t follow that thread to its logical end. Listening to all voters would require admitting that open-borders policies, woke gender mandates, and the relentless push to criminalize Donald Trump at every turn cost them the working-class voters they used to count on. The autopsy gestures at the wound without ever naming what caused it.
What This Really Means for Democrats
The Democrat Party spent roughly a year and a half refusing to release this report, and when they finally did, their own chair called it garbage on the way out the door. The man they trusted to write it apparently couldn’t provide a single interview transcript to back up his findings.
And the party’s most glaring self-inflicted wounds — the border catastrophe, the gender ideology overreach, the protection of a visibly declining Joe Biden long past the point when everyone could see what was happening — none of it gets a serious examination in 192 pages.
Polls show Kamala Harris is the frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic Party nomination.
But if Democrat nominate Kamala, the autopsy shows the party will run it back in terms of policy as well.
Jon Favreau, co-host of the popular Democrat podcast Pod Save America, laid out the sequence on X with brutal efficiency: “1. Promise to release autopsy 2. Put an incompetent friend in charge 3. Incompetent friend produces incoherent product 4. Announce you’re not releasing the autopsy 5. Lie about why 6. Gaslight people who ask, saying they’re the problem 7. Face internal revolt 8. Release autopsy.”
But here’s what none of the autopsy’s critics on the Left will say out loud: the document is empty because the Democrat Party can’t tell the truth about why it lost without condemning the ideology it refuses to abandon. You can’t write an honest post-mortem when the cause of death is your own platform.
Donald Trump won because millions of ordinary Americans — Black men, Latino men, working-class voters who used to punch Democrat tickets without thinking twice — looked at what the party had become and walked away. No 192-page report written by a friend of the chairman, possibly by a chatbot, with no citations and blank conclusion pages, is going to fix that.
The Democrat Party doesn’t have an autopsy problem. It has a reality problem. And no amount of annotated red ink changes that.
Sources: Fox News, The Washington Post, NBC News, CNN, The Daily Caller, PBS NewsHour, The Hill