The author of the Democratic National Committee’s widely panned 2024 postelection autopsy report released what he said is an unpublished chapter on Monday, breathing new life into a scandal that threatens to distract the party as it prepares for the closing stretch of the 2026 midterms.
Paul Rivera, a longtime Democratic consultant, shared the 28-page installment with The New York Times, claiming that the missing document includes questions about President Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection and addresses frustration that high-earning Democratic elites “drive too much of the decision-making within the ecosystem.”
The consequences of Biden’s decision to run again were not discussed at length in the original 192-page document released in May. In the newly released chapter, Rivera addresses the former president’s decision.
“Is there a single point of failure for 2024? Perhaps it is a decision of the President to seek re-election instead of passing the torch, but Democrats do not have a time machine to go back and change his decision,” Rivera wrote.
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Rivera told the Times he personally delivered the chapter in a binder to Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin in January. But Martin and other representatives for the DNC disputed that they had ever seen the chapter in question, and that the “missing” chapter could not be located in an extensive search of the committee’s files.
“That is false,” Martin wrote in a statement. “The only binder I was working with Paul on was for lessons learned materials. This alleged report section was not in any binder I reviewed.”
If the DNC had received the chapter in question from Rivera, it “would have released it with the rest of the report,” Martin said.
Neither NOTUS nor The New York Times could independently verify either account.
The chapter also reviewed Democrats’ declining support from Hispanic, Black, Asian American and Native American voters, and noted that digital consultants had missed the mark with voters.
“They missed important signals about why people were frustrated with Democrats, who seemed not to appreciate or understand their situation,” Rivera wrote — though he did not identify anyone by name.
Martin said “one of [his] key priorities remains, to hold the consultant-industrial complex accountable,” and added that the DNC would have “absolutely” published any “report materials that went after self-enriching consultants,” if the committee had them.
“Whether that was a conscious decision on their part to bury the section for the purposes of hiding a paragraph, I don’t know,” Rivera told The New York Times. “That’s a them question. What I can tell you is they had it, and they made a decision not to release it.”
After submitting files to the DNC in late 2025, Martin allegedly told Rivera he was disappointed with the quality of his work, and the pair met for a discussion in January. Rivera then compiled a new 173-page report that he claims included the chapter in question.
But Martin said his “work with Paul in January is being misrepresented,” because they only discussed documents that outlined “lessons learned.”
“That effort did not include reviewing new report material, only the material the DNC had already received, which is what we released in May,” Martin said.
The original report drew a rebuke by Democrats for its failure to address Biden’s impact on the race and Kamala Harris’ subsequent campaign without an official primary process. The report was also missing an executive summary, even though there was an apparent place for one in the first few pages of the report, with an annotation that the section was not provided by the author.
The entire report included an annotation in red at the top of every page, saying “this document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC.” The committee added in the disclaimer that Rivera did not provide “underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions” contained in the report.
Some Democrats thought the original report failed to draw any meaningful conclusions about where the party went wrong in 2024.
Rivera sought to address the criticism by releasing a 500-page independent autopsy report on Aug. 3, called Blue by 2032, that opens with an accounting of the events surrounding the original report.
“In late December, 2025 the DNC decided to announce it was not releasing a report, and did not release an executive summary. In the ensuing six months, the DNC never asked for a meeting to discuss content, or provided markup or questions to the after-action project team,” Rivera wrote.
The timeline appears to conflict with Rivera’s account of his discussions with Martin in January. Blue by 2032 did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
After the Times released Rivera’s missing chapter, some political analysts said the new document suffers from many of the same problems that plagued the publicly released version of the report.
“I think the author of the DNC autopsy is giving himself too much credit,” Nate Silver, a statistician and the founder of FiveThirtyEight.com, wrote on X. “If you actually read the omitted chapter (good of the NYT to include it), it consists largely of boilerplate and clichés and mentions Biden’s decision to run only in passing.”
Neither the original report nor Rivera’s additional chapter make any mention of Israel or its war in Gaza, a crucial issue that split Democratic voters in the lead-up to the 2024 election and continues to be a controversial topic for candidates.
Critics of the original report released by the DNC also took issue with the omission of the conflict, but in a statement at the time Martin acknowledged that a number of key issues were left out of the autopsy.
“I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards,” Martin said in May. “I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it.”
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