Ken Martin, the longtime leader of the state Democratic Party organization in Minnesota, will be the new Democratic National Committee chair after winning Saturday’s election, as his party looks to turn the page and recover from a dismal 2024.
Martin had been the front-runner from the beginning of the race, leveraging his relationships with the more than 400 voting members of the DNC that he forged over more than a decade of work inside the institutional Democratic Party. And those relationships proved essential, as he clinched a majority of the voting members on the first ballot, more than 100 votes above the second place finisher, Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler.
The race hinged more on the candidates’ organizing and fundraising resumes than on their postures regarding the ideological soul of the party, as it did in 2017, after President Donald Trump’s previous election win. Martin was the more experienced hand with deep party relationships, Wikler had been at the center of some of Democrats’ highest-profile races in recent years, and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley had unique electoral and government experience.
Addressing the DNC membership after his victory, Martin called for party unity after a relatively quiet race that got chippy at times, and for the party to focus on opposing President Donald Trump.
“We have one team, the Democratic Party, and we have one fight. The fight’s not in here, it’s out there,” he said.
“The fight right now is against Donald Trump and the billionaires who bought this country.”
Now, Martin will be tasked with helping to pull Democrats out of the hole where they ended 2024, a devastating election cycle that left them without any of the levers of power in Washington. But while Martin will help to lead the party forward, Democrats aren’t necessarily looking to him to be the party’s pre-eminent leader.
“We’re a party out of power, so we don’t have a leader. And I think broadly, philosophically, someone could say that this person would be our party leader. That’s not really true,” said Matt Corridoni, a veteran Democratic strategist who has worked for the committee in the past and also worked on a previous race for DNC chair.
“I don’t know that anyone has ever really looked to the most recent DNC chairs and said, that person was a leader of our party,” Corridoni continued.
That notion is not lost on Martin, who framed the chair role during his campaign as doing the important party-building work that will set the foundation for the Democratic candidates to use up and down the ballot, while helping to set the message as the party takes on Trump.
“Donald Trump, the Republican Party, this is a new DNC. We are not going to sit back and not take you on when you fail the American people,” Martin said during a session with reporters shortly after his victory.
“The role of the party is not just to go out there and build the infrastructure,” Martin added. “It’s also to make sure we’re defining them and we’re out there making sure the American people know what the stakes of not only these coming elections are, but what’s happening in this country.”
During that session with reporters, Martin said that his first priorities as chair will be looking “at the state of the party, the finances,” looking at the party’s “contracts” and starting a “post-election review process.”
“We don’t call it a post-mortem or an autopsy, because our party’s not dead. It’s still kicking right?” Martin said.
“The reality is,” he added, “what we need to do right now is really start to get a handle around what happened last election cycle. We know that we lost ground with Latino voters, we know we lost ground with women and younger voters and of course working-class voters. We don’t know the how and why yet.”
The front-runners were largely in agreement during the race about what the DNC needed to do to move forward: ensure the party has the resources to contest every race across every state and territory, adopt a permanent organizational posture to help build relationships between the party and its potential voters, and take a postmortem look at Democratic Party’s spending, after it fell short at the presidential level despite significantly outspending Trump and Republicans. All of the candidates also talked about pushing to bring their message to new media outlets while highlighting new messengers in part as a way to fix a deeper problem — Democratic underperformance with young and Hispanic voters.
Throughout the race to succeed outgoing DNC chair Jaime Harrison, Martin framed himself as the experienced choice to take the reins of the party organization. Over a decade of experience leading the Minnesota party, he has regularly touted his unbeaten record in statewide races, arguing his state has been a Democratic beacon of hope while the party has taken important losses in other Midwestern “blue wall” states.
As head of the Association of State Democratic Chairs and a vice chair of the national party committee, combined with his record, Martin had developed relationships with party members to help him shore up the votes needed to emerge victorious despite a last-minute push from Wikler.
Those relationships helped Martin amass about 200 public endorsements from the voting body of the DNC, far more than any other candidate. And while Wikler touted support from top congressional Democrats, Martin snagged high-profile endorsements of his own, including Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who was the Democrats’ 2024 vice presidential nominee, and Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, the powerful congressman who helped jumpstart Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential bid.
During a brief address to the DNC’s Poverty Council Thursday afternoon, Martin pointed to Trump’s implication that a focus on diversity, equity and inclusion programs was to blame for Wednesday night’s tragic aircraft collision in Washington, D.C.
“We’ve got to unify quickly as a party because the stakes have never been higher for this nation. What we’ve seen these last two weeks is despicable. They’re shattering people’s lives, they’re destroying communities already two weeks into it,” Martin said, before going on to describe his childhood being raised by a young mother in poverty, “in and out of shelters.”
“Our fight right now is for working people throughout this country,” Martin added. “Think about Donald Trump’s administration, their cabinet is worth $460 billion. Not the top 1%, the top 100th of 1%. You think they give a damn about people like me, people like you or working people and families like mine that are struggling? … Our fight right now is a fight for the future and it’s a fight for workers and it’s a fight for people who are trying to get into the middle class.”
Wikler fell short despite a late push and endorsements from major Democratic Party figures including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, along with governors like Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and Kansas’ Laura Kelly. Wikler also secured the support of major unions including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers and Service Employees International Union.
In a statement congratulating Martin, Wikler called on “everyone who supported me to join me in working with Chair Martin to ensure that the Democratic Party rises to this moment of crisis in our country. “
The race lacked the deep ideological divide of the last competitive race for chair in 2017, when the party had to pick up the pieces of a disappointing election loss as well as a party fractured by the hacking and release of internal party emails that exacerbated the divide between progressives and establishment Democrats.
Even though the race didn’t have the fireworks of some other past races, Harrison took to the microphone multiple times before Martin’s election to issue vague warnings against those who were bullying DNC members for their vote.
“I’ve heard over the course of the last few days, while we were here, that people have been threatened about their vote, people have been intimidated by their vote, that folks have been having donors called and say they’re going to pull funding because of their vote,” he said.
“Folks, in this party there will be no tolerance for that type of behavior,” Harrison said.
Now that Democrats have a chairman, Rev. Leah Daughtry told NBC News shortly before the vote that the new chair “has to become the standard bearer, the visionary that can help our party move from the mat into the place we need to be to win back voters and to win elections in the days to come.”
“Now we have the complete team, and I think we’re ready,” she said. She referenced Trump’s posts on social media and statements after the tragic plane and helicopter crash in the Potomac River earlier this week.
“Instead of him being able to bring our country together, he created more division,” Daughtry said, putting more “focus” behind Democrats’ efforts to oppose him.
