Ken Martin, a front-runner in the race to become the next Democratic National Committee chairman, proposed sweeping reforms to help his party rebound from staggering losses on Election Day.
With outgoing DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison retreating from a renomination battle after voters handed Democrats setbacks at the White House and both chambers of Congress, Martin joined a slew of colleagues eager to lead a comeback for their party.
As the chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, Martin on Tuesday released a 10-point memo outlining a strategy to restore his party’s glory as the DNC’s next chief.
Titled “A New DNC Framework,” the memo warned that sweeping reforms, including a “massive narrative and branding project,” are warranted because “the majority of Americans now 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.”
While Martin is deep-rooted in the Democratic establishment, serving since 2017 as the DNC’s vice chairman, he said he is ready for change after calling the election results “a damning indictment on our party brand,” earlier this month.
His document continued, “We must be willing to dig deep and recenter the Democratic agenda to unite families across race, age, background, and class.”
Some of the changes Martin is calling for, Politico reported, include showing up “in nontraditional and uncomfortable media spaces on a regular basis,” increasing “outreach to local messengers and trusted validators,” and creating “our own platforms for authentic engagement.”
After Vice President Kamala Harris lost the election to President-elect Donald Trump, many strategists, and even top Democrats such as Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), argued that her lack of engagement in alternative media spaces heavily frequented by voters contributed to her loss.
Democrats have often viewed widely used platforms such as Elon Musk’s X and intensely popular podcasts such as the Joe Rogan Experience with suspicion. Both are examples of populist-leaning pulpits where alternative narratives often flourish and all speech, even hate speech, is allowed, leading many on the Left to criticize them for fomenting alleged disinformation.
Commenting on reports that progressive Harris staffers pushed her to decline an invitation to appear on Rogan’s podcast, which boasts roughly 11 million listeners per episode, Fetterman said, “We have a challenge.”
“The power that the platform that he created — to ignore that, I can’t imagine why anyone would do that,” he added.
Echoing Martin’s concerns about showing up in “uncomfortable media spaces,” one Democratic communication professional talked with the outlet about the importance of having a presence on X, arguing that leaving the platform “because you don’t like Elon is the kind of purity politics that landed Democrats in this mess to begin with.”
“The echo chamber produced a party more conscious of pronoun dogma than the travails of the working class they purport to represent,” the communication strategist told Politico.
Martin’s memo also called for the DNC to examine “our spending with a fine-tooth comb.” His comments came after Democratic megadonors fumed over news that the Harris campaign burned through a known $1.5 billion over the fall and ended up with at least $20 million in debt.
In another dig at how the DNC helped pick its presidential nominees this election cycle, Martin urged for a “rigorous, open, and effective primary process to battle-test our candidates to prepare them to win.”
The DNC effectively canceled several primaries this year, receiving criticism from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) for that move and other legal tactics. The former Democratic presidential hopefuls argued that the DNC tried to rig the system to ensure Biden had a smooth path to being the party’s nominee. Democratic chiefs received additional criticism after Harris swiftly replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket in July, despite not having won any primaries.
With Martin already receiving nearly half of the needed endorsements to win the contest to be the next DNC chairman, he could well be in the position to enact changes should he clinch the position during the party’s leadership elections on Feb. 1, 2025.
Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, former DNC Vice Chairman Michael Blake, and New York state Sen. James Skoufis are among the other candidates for the chairmanship.
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Skoufis, in particular, has pitched himself as the outsider alternative to Washington insiders such as Martin.
“We’re losing on politics, messaging, organizing, and policy,” the New York Democrat said when he announced his candidacy. “And we’ve been running the same stale, inside-the-Beltway playbook driven by the same, tired, inside-the-Beltway voices.”
