Ken Martin wins election as the next chair of the Democratic National Committee

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 frontrunner 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. 

The race hinged more on the candidates’ organizing and fundraising resumes instead of becoming a battle for 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, Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben 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.

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 DNC 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 party’s candidates to use up and down the ballot. 

“We have to tap into the rich, rich, rich diversity of elected officials we have throughout this country who are actually delivering on our party values right now,” Martin said. “The DNC chair is just one spokesperson, but we have so many other spokespeople out there we should be tapping into. Instead of sending celebrities out, we should send workers out to talk to workers, we should send out other folks out to talk who are trusted messengers and validators.”

“My job is to get out there and define the Republicans,” Martin said. “I will take the low road so they can take the high road. I will throw the punches so they don’t have to, and we will go on offense against Donald Trump. That’s the role I will play as spokesperson, and I will also be the organizer-in-chief for our party.” 

The frontrunners were largely in agreement during the race about what the DNC needed to do to move forward: ensuring the party has the resources to contest every race across every state and territory, adopting a permanent organizational posture to help build relationships between the party and its potential voters, and taking a postmortem look at Democratic Party 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, 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 were 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.”