The News
The battle to lead the Democratic National Committee began the day after the election – slowly, and politely.
Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley declared his candidacy first, followed by Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chairman Ken Martin. Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler is considering it; Latino strategist Chuck Rocha is talking about it; other Democrats are trying to talk Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel into it.
They would need to play catch-up.
“I’ve probably made about 275 calls so far,” Martin told Americana on Thursday, estimating that “a little over 100” of the party’s 450-odd voting members now support him. As president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, Martin worked for years with fellow state chairs on what he called the “57 state party strategy” (the states, DC, and territories), funding them year-round.
His basic pitch: “We need to get the DNC out of DC.” This transcript of the conversation is edited for clarity.
The View From Ken Martin
Americana: What’s your analysis of what happened to Democrats in non-swing states this year? The Harris campaign poured resources into Wisconsin because it was competitive, and Harris got 37,000 more votes than Biden. In Minnesota, it wasn’t competitive; Harris got 50,000 fewer votes than Joe Biden. What happened?
Ken Martin: The national average, in terms of the swing to the right, was about 6%. Here in Minnesota, it was about 2%. It was a little bit more of a red trickle. While we lost two open seats, we only lost one incumbent in the state House in a year. We held the line.
But we did have a sort of A/B test of swing states and non-swing states, and I think that goes to show that what we need to be doing is investing in every race downballot. Legislative seats, city council, school boards, county board seats. That helps us up the ballot, too.
But that’s not where all the $2.5 billion went.
One idea from the Unity Reform Commission, created after the 2016 election as a compromise between Hillary and Sanders forces, was to be fully transparent about party spending. Do you want to revisit that and have more transparency in how the DNC is spending money?
There should be no sacred cows, right? We should be looking at everything. We should look at media spending. We should look at our ground operation. We should look at our targeting, our messages, our polling, our research, and have a critical eye of what worked and what didn’t. I don’t want to call that an “autopsy” because we’re not actually dead.
Here in Minnesota, I’ve always believed that there’s really nothing to hide. You pull back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz and see it’s just a guy — it’s like that. When you’re transparent and open, it sort of takes the mystery away.
If we’re not transparent, the people that are giving us money, the grandma who’s sending us $5 a month, we’re going to lose her trust. We do have to justify it.
So why did Republicans do so well in greater Minnesota, outside of the Twin Cities and Duluth? What do Democrats need to do to be competitive there?
We still have huge pockets in greater Minnesota that are Democratic, right? But we have been losing ground, for sure — that’s not an excuse. For the first time in modern history, the perceptions Americans have of the two major political parties has switched. The majority of Americans believe the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor, and the Democratic Party is the party of the wealthy and the elites.
That is a deep challenge to our brand. We’ve always been the party that fights for the working class. We’ve always been the party that fights for the poor and for the marginalized and the oppressed.
But clearly, that’s not what people perceive. Working-class people and folks in rural communities don’t see us talking about them.
What’s the media part of this? Starting in 2007, Democrats said: We’re not letting Fox News host our debates any more. In 2020, Bernie Sanders goes on Joe Rogan, and some outside groups say: He shouldn’t have gone on a bigoted transphobe’s show.
That’s absolutely dumb. That’s why I posted my op-ed after the election on Fox News. We have to be a party that’s competing in every message environment and information environment. It’s about showing up in all of these spaces and platforms where people are getting information.
My boys, who are 22 and 20 — they get all of their news and information from TikTok. I still read a hard copy of the newspaper from front to back every morning. That probably makes me a little abnormal.
We have to recognize that across the strata of generations in age, that people are getting information in different ways, and we have to be in those spaces. There should be no space that we’re afraid to bring our message to.
Trump and the Republicans have been messaging since the 2020 election, spreading misinformation and disinformation on these platforms, using trusted validators, messengers that were already on these platforms, micro-influencers, people that they already knew and trusted.
We are in a continual information environment that we have to start competing in better.
Would you allow Fox News to host a presidential debate?
I think that’s a conversation we should have, right? It should be on the table. I think all that stuff battle-tests our candidates. It helps us reach out to people who are in those spaces. Being on some of these platforms doesn’t mean you subscribe to their belief system or what they’re saying. It’s not about legitimizing their viewpoints, it’s about making sure that people are hearing our viewpoints.
I want to make it very clear: I don’t think we should be chasing Republican votes. That’s because I think that’s a failed strategy.
But we shouldn’t be afraid to be on any of these platforms to get our message out.
In early 2023, the DNC passed a resolution basically saying: Biden is our nominee. We won’t sanction debates. You had RFK Jr. out there in the wilderness, eventually just quitting the party. Was it a mistake to endorse him and close that down?
Look, we can’t go back. It’s an academic exercise, right? There was a primary, you know, Dean Phillips ran in it, and he lost. Joe Biden won. So to suggest that there wasn’t a primary just isn’t accurate. There was, and people had an opportunity to compete in that. Our party, in primaries throughout the country, decided that Joe Biden should be our nominee. The process was open, it was fair, it was what it was.
But we have to use this opportunity right now to make sure that as we go into 2028, which will be an open primary, that the process is open and fair and transparent to anyone that wants to participate in it.
Even if the vice president decided to run?
Of course.
Leaving out Jaime Harrison: Who was the best chair of the DNC? Who would be your model?
Howard Dean, for sure. I think he’s been the best party chair we’ve ever had. He had to tell a lot of power brokers in D.C.“no,” and he did it. And his record of success during that time was tremendous. If I’m successful in being elected to chair, I really hope to serve in the same sort of vein that he did.