DNC chief Ken Martin faces resignation demands over 2024 autopsy report

Calls for Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin's resignation amped up after the release of the party's 2024 autopsy report, exploring the reasons that led to former vice president Kamala Harris' election loss. Martin, who released the report Thursday, after months of pressure from Democrats, has faced criticism from liberal lawmakers over several fronts, including neglecting grassroots operations. While Martin said that he released the report "in its entirety, unedited and unabridged," many of his Democratic colleagues feel that several critical omissions were made.  

The most contentious point of the report, as Democrats like Rep. Ro Khanna and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed out, was the lack of any mention of Gaza or former President Joe Biden's Israel policies. "There is not a single mention of Gaza in the 192-page DNC autopsy report that was released today," Khanna said in a video message. "As someone who campaigned in Michigan and Wisconsin, let me tell you- one of the main reasons we lost was our blank check to Israel and Netanyahu while they committed genocide in Gaza. We must speak and confront hard truths if this party is to win in 2028," he added. 

Echoing a similar sentiment, Ocasio-Cortez said she found it "pretty unbelievable" that Gaza was not mentioned. “I think it was very clearly a major dynamic and a major threat that was happening in 2024, regardless of how one feels about that issue,” she said at a press conference, adding, “I can tell you for myself as a candidate during that cycle, there’s no way that it was an ignorable issue or totally immaterial.” Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed lashed out at the DNC report, saying that ignoring the Democratic divide over the Israel-Palestine conflict showed that the party was unwilling to learn from its mistakes. 

"Either the choice to not share that part of things — or worse, to ignore the impact that our party’s failure to get it right on human rights had on the outcome of the 2024 election — suggests that our party is still not willing to face down the consequences and learn from our mistakes,” Politico quoted El-Sayed as saying. Other issues, such as Biden's on-camera gaffes and the sidelining of his visible cognitive decline during the early stages of the primary cycle, were also heavily downplayed or omitted entirely from the document, several Democratic lawmakers claimed. 

Subsequently, many Democrats are calling for Martin's resignation, Axios reported, quoting several lawmakers. "I just think the whole thing is odd, saying we're going to this thing and we'll release it, and then you don't release it, and then you do release it, it doesn't give much confidence," Rep. Christian Menefee said, as per the report.