Let’s talk about Ken Martin and the Democratic National Committee.
Even before he released the meandering, error-ridden and wildly incomplete autopsy of the 2024 election defeat, Martin, the party chairman from Minnesota, was not exactly Mr. Popular in the broader Democratic ecosystem.
The D.N.C. began the year $100 million behind its Republican counterpart. The Democratic Party’s cash on hand, minus debt, is negative $3 million. Democrats who worry about funding infrastructure for the 2028 presidential election had long begun to fret that the party was falling behind.
So, in recent weeks, I’d been asking top Democrats if they had confidence in Martin as the chairman.
“I don’t want to go there,” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who twice ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, told me last month.
Just this Tuesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California — a likely candidate for the 2028 nomination — performed verbal calisthenics rather than deliver a straight answer on Martin.
“The Democratic Party, we’re many parts and it’s a bottom-up party, and it is reflected in different realities, different conditions, in different states,” Newsom said. “And so, from that perspective, I don’t have any call-out in any negative sense about his leadership.”
Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, said a couple of weeks ago that Martin should be judged at the ballot box.
“If we were losing elections, he’d be judged by our failures,” Jeffries said. “We’re winning elections, and he should be given some credit for the success.”
And Gov. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia said it didn’t matter who the party chairman was. “I don’t think the Democratic National Committee wins the elections in the first place,” she said.
Those were the feelings about Martin before the autopsy, which on Thursday he admitted that he bungled, spilled into public view.
Yet the Minnesotan, who through an aide declined an interview request, has survived largely because he so far has properly managed internal politics at the 400-odd-member D.N.C., which elected him chairman in February last year and is the constituency he has been most concerned about.
The calls for his resignation from a handful of congressional lawmakers, along with prominent and not-as-prominent podcast hosts, have largely fallen on deaf ears among his supporters within the D.N.C. because Martin has fulfilled a campaign promise to dispense more funds to each of the state parties.
Last month, the D.N.C. sent $15,500 to the Democratic Party in American Samoa, which has no Electoral College votes, and just $10,500 to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, which is in a regular presidential battleground.
The party members who support Martin are thrilled with this arrangement, because, they say, boosting political infrastructure for the state parties outweighs the longstanding priority of the D.N.C. to focus primarily on presidential elections.
It doesn’t hurt that there are a lot of votes to be had in internal D.N.C. matters from state party officials.
“Not everything the D.N.C. does is about winning the White House,” said Jane Kleeb of Nebraska, a Martin ally who is president of the Association of State Democratic Committees. “If we needed a D.N.C. to only be focused on the presidential elections, if that’s what you think the D.N.C. is about, then you’re missing the whole purpose that the D.N.C. is the whole infrastructure for the entire Democratic Party.”
In the coming months, as Democrats broadly try to win enough midterm elections to gain control of Congress so that they can check President Trump’s power next year, we can expect the discussion about the national committee’s priorities to continue.
Martin has set the D.N.C. on a course to ship funds to all the state parties, while he has not proven adept at bringing money in. And as the 2028 cycle grows nearer and formally kicks off after the midterms, voices concerned most about how to win back the White House are likely to become louder and more influential.
Those divergent priorities cannot help but come into conflict and will require that the party chair be viewed as a neutral arbiter and respected figure. How Martin manages that coming storm will say a lot about his ability to guide the party through a primary season that will require deft management of the early-state calendar, copious debates and inevitable rules disputes among candidates and supporters.
Number of the day
$1.8 Billion
That’s how much taxpayer money is in President Trump’s new fund to reward his supporters who claim political persecution by Democrats, Adam Liptak, The Times’s chief legal correspondent, explains.
This has alarmed critics who worry that the fund could be used to reward political allies and finance groups who have ties to Trump, and to potentially aid those charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Quote of the day
“We cannot let Trump destroy Broward County’s power.”
That was Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida defending her decision to run in a newly redrawn South Florida congressional district after Republican-led gerrymandering altered the state’s political map.
Her comments, my colleague Patricia Mazzei reports, underscored Democratic fears that the new districts could weaken both Black political representation and Democratic influence throughout the area.
ONE LAST THING
Lutnick’s timely $5 million campaign donation
Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce, made a $5 million donation last month to a committee supporting House Republicans, one of the largest political donations ever made by a sitting cabinet secretary, my colleagues Theodore Schleifer and Ana Swanson report.
The donation came just weeks after a congressional committee arranged to interview Lutnick about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Hannah Fidelman contributed reporting.
Reid J. Epstein is a Times reporter covering campaigns and elections from Washington.
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