Tessa Stuart
Contact Tessa Stuart on X View all posts by Tessa Stuart March 23, 2026
Ken Martin on Aug. 5, 2025 in Aurora, Illinois. Scott Olson/Getty Images “There are politicians who have the ‘it factor,’ and are highly charismatic,” Ken Martin, the head of the Democratic National Committee, tells me. “That’s not who I am.”
Martin is speaking by phone from a parking lot in Ottawa, Kansas, population 12,000, where he just left a roundtable with farmers. When we spoke the day before he was in Missouri, talking with a group of students at a local university. The day before that, it was Illinois. Since he took the job atop an embattled Democratic Party in January of last year, Martin has only been home in Minneapolis, where he was born and where his wife and family still live, four times.
With his admitted lack of starpower and limited name recognition, Martin was not the top choice of the megadonors, the party elite or the pundit class when the race for DNC chair got underway after Vice President Kamala Harris’ brutal defeat in 2024.
His chief rival in the race was Ben Wikler, then-chair of the Wisconsin Democrats, a celebrity whisperer known for raking in millions of dollars via star-studded stunt fundraisers. Wikler’s candidacy was fawned over by the Daily Show, the Pod Save America bros, and The New York Times (which declared “If Anyone Can Save the Democrats, It’s Ben Wikler”). He secured the backing of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, and collected donations from LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and a George Soros-affiliated PAC.
But that flurry of high-profile endorsements did little for Wikler in the end. The DNC chair is not a position voted on by the average Daily Show viewer or Times reader — it is voted on by 443 party insiders, roughly one-quarter of whom are state party chairs and vice chairs. By the time voting began, Martin had secured public commitments from at least 200 of them. Most of those endorsements were won years earlier, during the time he spent toiling in relative obscurity as president of the Association of State Democratic Chairs. “This is an insular body,” one person who supported Wikler’s candidacy tells me. “It’s a relationship body.” The race was functionally over before it even began.
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This is what Martin means when he says he knows how to win elections — how to win them on a practical, mathematical basis, laying the groundwork far in advance. It’s what Martin did as chairman of Democratic Farmer-Laborer-Party in Minnesota, where, over his 14-year tenure, the party never lost a race for statewide office. It’s what he has planned to do at the DNC too, if he can get everyone to stop bickering and back-stabbing long enough to focus on the actual work. And, even amid the sniping, he is not off to a bad start: in 2025, the party posted the best off-year election results in its history.
If he had his way, Martin would devote all of his attention to that — the winning, and ensuring it continues — but he’s been forced instead to spend a frustrating share of his first year on the job refereeing petty intra-party slapfights over who is to blame for the Democratic Party’s past failures.
The extraordinary levels of dysfunction he inherited at the DNC seemed to take even a grizzled party veteran like Martin by surprise. He had only been in the role for a few months when audio leaked of the exasperated party chair telling staffers “the other night I said to myself for the first time, I don’t know if I wanna do this anymore.”
IT WAS GOING to be a rough start no matter who took the reins of the Democratic Party in late January 2025. It wasn’t publicly reported at the time, but the party, under former chair Jaime Harrison, had struck a deal to assume the Harris campaign’s outstanding debt. (The vice president had raised over $1.5 billion over the course of her 107-day campaign, yet somehow still ended it with more than $20 million in liabilities.)
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Inside the party and out, the post-election narrative wars were already raging. Political operatives, PACs, vendors, and the party’s highest-profile figures were peddling their grievances and prescriptions “on background” to reporters, on social media, or in competing Times op-eds. Democrats, they said, were too old, their incumbents “out-of-touch” and ineffectual, the party was too beholden to “the groups,” or to corporate and industry lobbyists, or to AIPAC.
“Whether it was donors or elected officials or activists or volunteers or just general voters, people were really frustrated at the Democratic Party: How in the hell could we lose an election — again — to this monster, right?” Martin says. “Particularly after we spent so much money, and particularly after we had so much energy and volunteerism on the doors — How did this happen?” (Like everyone else, Martin has his own thoughts about how it happened. More on that later.)
The first big public fight Martin was forced to referee was picked by newly-elected DNC vice chair and Parkland school shooting survivor David Hogg. Leaders We Deserve, Hogg’s PAC, declared it would spend $20 million to primary sitting Democrats in safe seats whom it deemed “asleep at the wheel” — an announcement that predictably irritated sitting Democrats in safe seats. Martin tried to broker a peace agreement by asking all DNC officials to sign a “neutrality pledge” promising not to take sides in party primaries. (“We just had that fight inside the party in 2016,” one Martin ally explains, referring to the race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. “When the base was yelling at us and not wanting us to be engaged in primaries.”)
Hogg ultimately refused to sign, and quit the DNC over the dispute. Amid the back and forth, someone leaked audio of Martin complaining that Hogg had “destroyed” any chance he had to “show the leadership” he needed to in that fraught moment for the party.
Hogg, the Washington Post would later report, would dramatically underdeliver on his $20 million pledge, with his PAC spending a fraction of that amount supporting just three primary candidates by July of last year — none of whom were challenging incumbent Democrats. Only one of those candidates won their primary, but it was now-New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — arguably the biggest upset of the year, and a prime example of the kind of candidate and message that younger voters in particular were clamoring for, and that establishment Democrats were slow to embrace. (Martin endorsed Mamdani in the general election, but the Democratic leader in the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), never did, and Schumer’s counterpart in the House, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) issued an anemic, eleventh-hour statement in support of “him and the entire citywide Democratic ticket.”)
The next big dust-up was over the 2024 post-mortem and the lingering question of who bears responsibility for the Democrats’ humiliating defeat to Donald Trump. When he was elected DNC chair, Martin pledged to release the findings of any such report. But, several months and more than 300 interviews later, when it came time to do so in December of last year, Martin backpedaled, saying he wouldn’t share the report itself publicly, but would gladly impart the “lessons” the party learned through the process.
Martin stands by the decision to keep the findings inside a desk at DNC headquarters, in spite of vocal criticism from all corners. “It became very apparent to me that there were people who wanted this report released because they wanted to relitigate the 2024 election,” Martin says. “They wanted to turn inward and point fingers and place blame and have a messy internal conversation that, frankly, in my opinion — and it’s why I didn’t release it — doesn’t help us actually win the next election.”
Releasing the report at this point, he says, would only cause more of the kind of tension he has been trying to excise from the party ahead of critical contests in November. But, months later, the wisdom of that decision continues to be debated. In late February, Axios reported that several individuals interviewed by the DNC for the report had told them Harris’ position on the war in Gaza — her reluctance to articulate any break from the Biden administration’s unqualified support for Israel’s bombing campaign — cost the Democrats votes in 2024. Martin declined to speak about the Gaza findings specifically, and a spokesperson for the DNC denied the party withheld the report because of its findings related to Israel and Gaza.
Harris’ stance on Gaza is one of many decisions and positions — on immigration, trans rights, the cost of living — one could argue cost Democrats the presidential election.
In Martin’s view the most important factor contributing to Harris’ loss was a relatively simple one, captured in a data point that surfaced in the spring of 2024. It showed, he says, “for the first time in modern history, the perception of the two political parties had been flipped on its head: The majority of Americans believed that the Republican Party best represented the interest of the working class, the middle class, and the poor, and the Democratic Party was the party the wealthy and the elite. That was a remarkable shift in the electorate, and something that should have been a wake up call to us.”
That perception was a contributing factor, Martin says, but the real reason the party lost in 2024 is because the math just wasn’t there. “Ten million people who voted in 2020 did not vote in 2024 — 10 million Democrats,” he says. Voters who backed Biden but failed to return to elect Harris didn’t share a single unifying reason for not showing up, and Martin recognizes his job is to bring those voters back into the fold. “We’re engaging them early, and we’re engaging them now, and we’re listening to their concerns, and giving them a sense that we give a shit about them — and that means actually showing up where they’re at and having those conversations and listening.”
Ken Martin claps as Los Angeles County Democratic Party chair Mark Ramos leads a chant during a phone banking event for Prop 50 with volunteers at Women’s March Foundation Office, on Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025 in Los Angeles, CA. Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images A JOURNEYMAN CAMPAIGN staffer before he begrudgingly accepted the job steering his own beleaguered state party, Martin is familiar with the deeply unglamorous work required to build political power at the most basic level — the kind of work that takes you places like Ottawa, Kansas.
Kansas has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964. Martin rattles off a list of reasons why he’s there anyway: this year’s governor’s race (Democrat Laura Kelly is term-limited after two four-year terms), the race for Congressional District 3 (Democrat Sharice Davis is up for reelection). There’s the fact that, if the party can win just five seats in the state house, Democrats could break the Republican supermajority there, and also a desire to send frothing anti-immigrant Attorney General Kris Kobach — who squeaked back into office by just 1.6 points in 2022 — packing.
Democrats might not win all of those races but the party, under Martin’s direction, is determined to compete and in more places than usual. In Indiana this year, Democrats will field candidates in all 25 state Senate races — the first time that’s happened since the 1970s. In Texas, for the first time ever, Democrats are running candidates on every single ballot line at the state and federal level this fall.
“One of the things that I’ve seen over the 35 years is that the Democratic Party keeps making the same mistake over and over again,” Martin says. “They invest their time, energy, and money in one election cycle or one candidate or one campaign at the expense of a long-term strategy. I marvel at the conservative movement in this country. I don’t agree with anything they do, but they have a very long term plan — a 40-, 50-year-long plan on how to build power, up and down the ballot, throughout the country, around their agenda — and part of that, of course, is building infrastructure that lasts beyond one cycle.”
“What I’ve seen in our party is, because we have a short-term strategy, every two years or every four years, we’re recreating the wheel. We’re starting over. We’re rebuilding that way. For any organization to build, we actually have to have a long term plan to help us win everywhere.”
These trips — Kansas is the 36th state Martin has visited in the last year — are in service of that bigger strategy. One Martin deputy explained this last summer, “We meet with elected officials, party leaders, allies, union members. We take everybody through an interview process of ‘What’s working? What do we need to change?’ That analysis will then be put into a 4-year plan for each state party, and that will filter into a 10-year plan for the DNC.”
Martin characterizes the trips in simpler terms: “Just meeting with folks, talking to them, and listening, more than anything to their hopes and dreams and our work together to rebuild this Democratic Party.”
It’s a skillset that seemed to fall out of use in recent presidential cycles, as the Democratic Party torched obscene amounts of money on things like Katy Perry concerts and plastering Kamala Harris’ face on the Las Vegas Sphere, while skimping on the funds it funneled to the state parties, the bodies tasked with the work of recruiting viable candidates, staffing county parties, and registering voters year-round. Martin campaigned on a promise to redouble support to those parties. “We have to give them the resources so they can actually do that organizing work and build the infrastructure we need,” he tells me.
It was similar to the pledge made in 2005 by the DNC’s then-chair Howard Dean to distribute funds evenly among the 57 states and territories, rather than airdropping the vast majority of it into a few battlegrounds. Dean’s was a controversial decision at the time — criticized by figures like then-DCCC chair Rahm Emmanuel — but it ultimately proved essential to securing sweeping victories for the Democrats in 2006 and 2008.
Like Dean, who took over in 2005 after John Kerry’s crushing loss, Martin was elevated during a period of collective soul-searching. When he took the reins of the DNC last year, the party’s favorability had fallen to 34 percent — the lowest point recorded by Gallup since it started tracking the metric in 1992. That sentiment was reflected in party registration data, which showed that over the preceding four years, Democrats had lost ground to Republicans in every single state that tracks voter affiliation.
“Morale was very low,” Martin admits. But assuming responsibility for a deeply depressed party wasn’t exactly unfamiliar territory for Martin. In 2010, Minnesota Governor Mark Drayton — the first Democrat elected governor in the state in 24 years and on whose campaign Martin had worked — told him he had job for him: helming the state party. “I was like, ‘Are you f-ing kidding me? That’s my reward for getting you elected?” Martin says.
The cycle before, Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor party had just suffered its worst election loss in half a century, and the organization was more than $500,000 in debt. “People were fleeing the party, and no one wanted anything to do with us,” Martin says. He told the governor no.
Up until that point, Martin had spent years as a political organizer for the Carpenter’s Union, between cycles spent on Democratic campaigns. In college, he signed up to organize campuses across the South for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential run.
His first day on that job, Martin remembers everyone going around the room and introducing themselves. “It was clear they were sons of, or daughters of [important people] — they were people who were well-connected, a lot of them with money. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘I don’t belong in this room,” he says.
Ken Martin during a speech at the Minnesota Democratic Convention in Minneapolis on Saturday, June 4, 2016. Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune/AP MARTIN ENDED UP in that room — and in politics at all — after of an off-hand suggestion from his high school government teacher, Steve Cwodzinski, who thought Martin might like to work for a “bushy haired college professor running for the U.S. Senate named Paul Wellstone.” Cwodzinski, who Martin later recruited to run for office — he’s now a state senator — recalls a student who was “just mature beyond his years, and he didn’t seem to be that interested in what normal high school kids were interested in.”
Martin was born in Minneapolis to a single 15-year-old mother, who, by the time she was 20, had three more children. “My mom really struggled,” Martin says. “When we were little kids we were in and out of shelters. We were unhoused. You know, she did the best she could. She had a house cleaning business. She took all four of us along with her, but she had some real chemical addiction issues.”
The family lived an itinerant existence during his early years, bouncing around Minneapolis, relying on social support programs — the same ones Republicans have halted or gutted since Trump retook office. “If it wasn’t for Medicaid when I was a child, I wouldn’t have had health care,” Martin says. “And if it wasn’t for SNAP we wouldn’t have had food. And if it wasn’t for a safety net of people who gave a shit about a young mom and her kids who were struggling, I don’t think I’d be here.”
When Martin was 10 years old, his mom met his stepfather in a rehab program. “I think finding each other really created stability for the two of them,” he says. “They became clean, and for the first time in my life we were sort of stable in terms of housing.”
The family moved to the suburb of Eden Prairie, where Martin went to school and eventually became the student of Cwodzinski’s remembers. But his early years shaped the political mindset he still holds today.
After Wellstone’s and Clinton’s campaigns, Martin worked in various capacities for Gore’s, Kerry’s, the Kansas Democratic Party’s coordinated campaign, the Minnesota DFL’s coordinated campaign, and too many others to list, before Drayton asked him to take over the Minnesota DFL. He ultimately relented, accepting the position without enthusiasm at his wife’s urging. But once firmly ensconced in the job, he stayed there for 14 years. In those 14 years, the DFL didn’t lose a single statewide race, and the party won a trifecta — full control of all three branches of state government — twice.
Martin doesn’t take credit for it, but those wins helped usher in a kind of Democratic golden age in Minnesota. In 2023, with a two-vote margin in the Minnesota House, and one-vote margin in the state’s Senate, Democrats — led by Senate president Kari Dziedzic, former speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives Melissa Hortman, and Governor Tim Walz — passed a package of bills codifying progressive priorities: free school lunches for all, tuition-free college for those who couldn’t afford it, increased funding for education, and restrictions on guns and protections for reproductive rights and gender-affirming care. It was dubbed the “Minnesota Miracle 2.0.”
Over the last year and a half, as Martin has entered the national spotlight, back home, everything has been unraveling. In December of 2024, just as Martin was launching his campaign for DNC chair, Dziedzic succumbed to a battle with cancer. In June, Hortman — with whom Martin had been close since 1998, when she ran for office for the first time — was assassinated at her home by a paranoid Trump supporter. (Trump responded to Hortman’s murder by spreading a conspiracy theory that Walz was personally involved.) In January, Walz announced he would not seek reelection in Minnesota, amid a growing furor over allegations of fraud, and shortly before federal troops invaded Martin’s hometown of Minneapolis and shot two Americans dead.
“We lost two of the three architects of the ‘Minnesota Miracle’ in less than a year. Followed by the [Church of the] Annunciation shooting, and then, of course all of this stuff with Operation Metro Surge — it’s just devastating to see my community, the state I’m so proud of and proud to be from, just being terrorized like that,” Martin says. Still, he adds, “I think Donald Trump picked the wrong state to pick this fight with, because Minnesotans weren’t going to allow him to just terrorize their neighbors.”
If there is anyone who understands on a deeply personal level the stakes of allowing Trump to remain in power, and Republicans in full control of every branch of government, it’s the it-factorless Martin — who, despite his lack of charisma, and in spite of all the shit he has gotten since taking over the DNC — might actually be the exact person the party needs in the job right now.
James Skoufis — a state senator in New York and former rival of Martin’s who ran against him in the chair race last year — thinks so. “The metric that matters more than any other, and is a near exclusive metric in my mind, when it comes to evaluating the job a DNC chair is doing or not doing, is: Are you winning?” Skoufis says. “Indisputably, he and we have done nothing but win since he became DNC chair.”
Martin, Skoufis says, has invited more of the people who bring lived experience like his own into the party fold. “The DNC has historically been an extremely top-down, opaque, and secretive place, and DNC members, historically, have played little to no role in actually participating in the the activities and responsibilities of the Democratic National Committee. And Ken has dramatically changed the culture in that respect,” Skoufis, now a member of the DNC executive committee, says. “He has brought more rank-and-file members into decision-making processes. He’s reduced the number of donors and lobbyists on important committees like the executive committee, and has opened up rules and bylaws and the executive committee to folks who don’t spend a lot of their time on what I’ll call the D.C. cocktail circuit.”
Those choices, so far, appear to be paying dividends for Democrats. The party logged an impressive string of victories in 2025. Democrats are poised not just to reclaim the House this November, but to make a credible run at control of the Senate, despite Trump’s pressure campaign to gerrymander as many extra seats as possible for the GOP, most notably in Texas.
“I think we’re winning on that front,” Martin says of the redistricting fight. “Here’s the crazy thing about what they did in Texas — and this shows you just how dumb the Republicans are — they drew the lines down there based on the 2024 election results. Why does that matter? Because they made a giant assumption that those gains they made with the Latino community were baked-in for future elections. We’ve already seen that that has completely disappeared. Of those five seats that they drew, only two of them are, potentially, certain Republican seats. The other three are seats that the Democrats could win.”
In California, he says, Democrats were able to add their own five seats. Meanwhile, the GOP’s efforts to pad their margins in Indiana and Kansas have flamed out, and the outlook is not promising in Missouri.
“They’re the ones who miscalculated here,” Martin insists. “They’re essentially cutting safe Republican seats and re-distributing some of those votes into other places, in a way that will make their margins much thinner in a year where they are really going to need every single vote. Just think about this very tactically: We’re overperforming at plus 14 percentage points right now. … There are 50 members of Congress — 50 Republican members of Congress — who sit in seats that they won by 14 percent or less.”
His point is not that Democrats will win all 50 of those seats, but he says, “Certainly it allows us to expand the map. It’s a bad strategy, and it wasn’t well thought out… But, look, if it helps us win, they can keep being foolish.”
One might counter that it would be foolish for Democrats to assume that Trump and the Republican Party will be playing by the rules this November, to assume that they won’t pass legislation with the potential to knock 21 million Americans off the voting rolls (the SAVE Act, currently being debated in the Senate), or to assume that the Department of Homeland Security won’t be deploying ICE to polling places in the fall.
Martin calls Trump “a desperate maniac” who “is going to try to hold on to power at all costs,” as evidenced by his recent decision to seize ballots from the 2020 election in Georgia six years ago. “If he’s willing to do that, he’s certainly willing to do anything else,” including, Martin says, sending “ICE agents, or to military the polls.”
But, asked whether Democratic leaders — still in the midst of negotiations to fund the Department of Homeland Security — should make funding conditional on a promise that ICE will not be allowed near polling places this November, Martin demurs. “I don’t want to step on what they’re negotiating on at this point, only to say that, you know, it’s not likely that they would agree to that anyways. But it’s not lost on anyone that this is a possibility.”
He adds: “I understand the frustration of people around this country who want us to use every tool in the toolbox to fight back. At the same time, I think our elected officials are using every tool in their toolbox… In some spaces, we don’t have the power to slow him down, and particularly in Congress, right?”
Martin’s reluctance to step on congressional leaders’ toes, frustrating as it might be, is the same instinct that guided his handling of the dust-up with Hogg, and the his decision to keep the autopsy under wraps: an overwhelming desire to avoid any more intraparty drama, to keep as many people as he can rowing in the same direction. “We don’t have the luxury to be divided,” Martin told me himself. “We have to be unified. We have to focus our efforts. And we have to win.”
If Martin fails, one ally predicts, his downfall may ultimately be that he was too cautious, too concerned with keeping the peace, keeping the tent as big as possible instead of taking strong positions on difficult issues — a similar version of the problem that may have doomed Harris’ campaign.
Money, too, remains a challenge. As of February of this year, the Republican Party holds a $80 million cash advantage over its rival, with $95 million cash on hand, to the Democratic National Committee’s $14 million. One of the arguments against Martin’s candidacy for DNC chair was a question of whether he could fundraise as well as someone like Wikler. (The race, as one Martin supporter characterized it at the time, boiled down to “The Democracy Alliance” — the network of progressive megadonors — “Versus the state parties.”)
