Hi, y’all. Welcome back to The Opposition. Today’s edition is about ongoing turmoil at the Democratic National Committee as officials become increasingly frustrated with Ken Martin’s leadership. Such party infighting and finger-pointing might seem like annoying palace intrigue. But as you’ll read in the piece, many Democratic operatives believe it’s vital to have a well organized and competent DNC going into the 2028 presidential election cycle. And there’s a growing concern that Martin isn’t the man for the job. Let’s get into it. But first: if you’re not already a member, today would be a great day to try out Bulwark+—for free! Enjoy two weeks on us, and see what you think of our member community and full access to all our products. –Lauren
KEN MARTIN’S TENURE AS CHAIR of the Democratic National Committee over the last year has been defined largely by frustration with his leadership. That frustration crested last week when Martin went on Pod Save America to defend himself against charges that he has backed out of his promise to release an after-action report about what went wrong in the 2024 election—as well as accusations that the DNC has had trouble raising money and balancing its budget. DNC members and party strategists I talked to after Martin’s podcast appearance said they believe his defensive comments further tarnished the party brand and deepened trust issues stemming from his decision to cancel the autopsy report. The concerns have become so pronounced in recent weeks that some DNC members have privately discussed trying to force Martin out of the job, according to three people familiar with these conversations. The idea was put on hold after members failed to identify an alternative candidate willing to step into the role. But the panic over the direction of the party hasn’t dissipated. Instead, it has led these worried party leaders to entertain other possible reforms, such as trying to force a resolution that would require Martin to rein in the DNC’s spending and balance its budget. “I think that would be a very hard job, no matter who has it. But [Martin] seems to be uniquely ill-suited for it,” Democratic strategist Jesse Lehrich, who is not a party to those internal talks, told me. “The Pod Save interview was mind-blowing to me.” Martin’s rocky tenure as party chair does owe something to factors out of his control. A party that is out of power but desperate to flex its muscle will naturally see its leaders as feckless. Martin, like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, is a convenient punching bag. But much of the criticism is about things that are directly under Martin’s purview. Since 2025, the DNC has spent more money than it has raised and has more debt than cash on hand. The RNC has a roughly seven-to-one money advantage over the DNC, and last October, Martin took out a $15 million loan ahead of the elections in Virginia and New Jersey. Multiple people familiar with the DNC’s money issues said that the situation is so dire that Martin will likely be forced to make another tough call this summer: take out another loan or lay off staff. During his Pod Save interview, Martin repeatedly characterized the claim that the DNC is contemplating layoffs as “garbage.” “The biggest strike against him is that he seems to be utterly incapable of managing a budget. To put the DNC in such a bad financial situation going into what is . . . likely be the most wild [presidential] primary we’ve had in a while—it reeks of irresponsibility and immaturity,” said a DNC member who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the topic. “It just feels like we’re being gaslit at this point.” The agita over the state of the DNC is not merely another round of Beltway bickering. It’s one of the more consequential storylines in Democratic politics these days. There is a deep concern among party officials that Martin is driving the committee into irrelevance, potentially harming Democratic chances in the midterms, and inviting uncomfortable questions about whether the 178-year-old committee should even exist anymore. “The DNC should not be a useless or irrelevant institution,” said Democratic strategist Ross Morales Rocketto. “It’s currently irrelevant because of the leadership.” THIS ISN’T THE FIRST TIME THE DNC has faced questions about its relevance. Following the 2008 election, Organizing for America, the political operation that grew out of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, became the central organizing axis for the party. But when Democrats suffered heavy losses in 2010, and again after Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, party leaders demanded a shift back, blaming OFA for taking away donor money and volunteers from the DNC and leaving the party unable to coordinate effectively. “I almost think of Obama as a similar figure to Trump in terms of having this movement of people that were so fired up about him. They weren’t exactly Democratic party super fans,” said Lehrich, who served as communications director for OFA (rebranded then as Organizing for Action) in the late 2010s. The goal of OFA, Lehrich explained, was to keep Obama’s loyal army of grassroots supporters engaged. “But the DNC was rightfully frustrated that it was funneling away people and resources and creating a shadow apparatus.” Shortly after Tom Perez, the former labor secretary in the Obama administration, was elected DNC chair in 2017, OFA was quietly wound down. But while the DNC played important roles in helping the party win back the House in 2018—and the White House in 2020—it never quite reemerged as the central organizing entity in the Democratic party firmament. Instead, much of that responsibility has been taken over by nonprofit organizations and super PACs. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision generated a wave of donations to non-party entities, empowering them in the process to handle traditional party functions like GOTV, research, and advertising. Many Democratic strategists say that while they understand the trend, they have lamented it, too—noting that the DNC has at least one major advantage over these groups. “The biggest . . . is they coordinate across campaigns,” said Steve Schale, a longtime Democratic strategist and Obama’s 2008 state director in Florida.¹ “It’s way fucking easier to run a campaign when you can talk to the main players in the operation. I can’t imagine, for example, on either Obama campaign, having to run a state where my entire field operation was outsourced to an organization I couldn’t talk to.” “The DNC allows all that to work,” Schale added. “That’s why I think it’s pretty vital for it to be a—not even necessarily a thriving—but a competent, respected vessel for where donors have trust in sending their money.”
MARTIN’S PITCH WHEN RUNNING FOR DNC CHAIR was that he would restore the committee to its status as a central coordinating hub for the party—and that he would do so by ensuring that the DNC was supporting those parts of the party that had long been neglected. Last year, he announced that the DNC would spend more than $1 million a month on a fifty-state program and would increase transfers to parties in red states by 50 percent and in blue states by 30 percent. The data is mixed as to how well that’s going. Some state parties, like Mississippi and Alaska, are receiving far more cash this cycle compared to 2022. But some DNC members said that Martin is overstating just how significant these investments are. They noted that although all fifty state parties (plus the territories) are now regularly receiving funds from the DNC, there’s still significantly less money on the whole being transferred to state parties so far this election cycle than by this point in 2022. Martin and his allies often argue that 2022 isn’t a fair comparison because Democrats were in power then, and it was a far better fundraising environment for the party. The better point of reference, they say, would be the 2018 cycle. However, as Democratic strategist Tim Tagaris has noted, a larger percentage of the committee’s overall budget went to state parties in 2018 compared to now. Still, Martin has his defenders. Although the DNC did not provide a comment for this newsletter, Michael Kapp, a California-based DNC member, told me that people were upset with Martin because he’s “shifting the party away from a consultant-centered model and toward one that is more centered on state parties and organizers—and that was always going to create friction.” “The loudest people in D.C.—including the Pod Save America folks—are often the furthest away from the doors that are being knocked. What I’m hearing from state parties, organizers, and activists on the ground is overwhelmingly positive,” Kapp added. “Since [Martin’s] become DNC chair, we won 30 out of 30 State House legislative flips. The strategy is working.” Another DNC official—who declined to go on the record—also stressed that the committee was making significant investments in voter registration and on-the-ground organizing. They suggested that the fundraising concerns were overblown, noting that the DNC hasn’t hit the limit of its existing line of credit and doesn’t have to start making payments on the loan until after the midterms. And they, too, reiterated that Democrats have been overperforming around the country under Martin’s leadership. Others, however, have publicly argued that Martin is taking too much credit for some of those wins. Allison Campolo—chair of the Tarrant County Democratic Party in the Fort Worth area—tweeted on Friday that the DNC provided minimal support earlier this year in a special Texas Senate election. Although the Democratic candidate, Taylor Rehmet, flipped the deep red seat, Camolo said it was thanks to county parties, volunteers, and donors who stepped up.
Aside from the investments in state parties, other Democratic officials have taken issue with the fact that Martin is still spending DNC money on consultants, despite pledging during his campaign for chair to get rid of the consultant-industrial complex. In a February interview with Newsweek, Martin said that “the consultants who are trading in practice and tactics that are not rooted in the reality of where we’re at in politics right now . . . they’re all gone, I fired them all, none of them work for the DNC anymore, right? And as long as I’m here, they’re not going to work for the DNC.” While the DNC’s problems under Martin have sparked panic in the party, there is still considerable confidence that the midterms won’t be lost because of them. Candidates themselves are raising loads of money on their own. And the anti-Trump backlash is likely to provide a highly favorable electoral climate for them. But if the DNC isn’t raising money and building infrastructure as effectively as it could be, then its problems will compound. And in addition to the current frustrations and anxieties, there are growing concerns among party leaders about how the committee will manage the explosive intraparty fights that come with an open presidential cycle, which Democrats are facing in 2028. The committee will be tasked with running a primary and hosting debates while also managing skepticism and suspicion from the party’s progressive wing following years of perceived mistreatment; the DNC was accused of putting its thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and shielding Joe Biden in 2024. Martin could still turn things around. He could shine up his currently tarnished image. But the very thought of him still being in charge during that process is making some Democrats uneasy. “In a year where the presidential primary is going to be a wide-open race, when they have a chance to reset the calendar, when there’s going to be debates with insane cutoffs [for qualifying]—it matters that people trust this institution to do that well, to do it in a way that they feel like is confident, is fair,” said Amanda Litman, the cofounder of Run for Something, a progressive group that recruits and trains first-time candidates. “I don’t think Ken Martin is doing himself any favors in terms of rebuilding trust.” 🫏 Donkey Business:— On Friday, Republican governors in Alabama and Tennessee called for their state legislatures to reconvene for special sessions to redraw congressional lines following the Supreme Court’s ruling that significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act. Louisiana’s GOP governor also suspended House primaries in order to give lawmakers time to redraw congressional maps, despite the fact that absentee voting had already started and early voting was set to begin this past weekend—leading to an enormous amount of confusion for voters. It’s truly bonkers stuff that these Republican governors are pulling, and it’s forcing Democrats to consider where else they might be able to redistrict ahead of the 2028 elections. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told Politico that New York, Illinois, Maryland, and Colorado could redraw their maps for 2028. Of course, one could reasonably ask why those states didn’t go ahead and redistrict this cycle when it’s been fairly clear for months that SCOTUS was going to rip up the VRA. It’s unclear what options Democrats will have to push back before the elections, especially as primaries are already over in some blue states and the window for acting is quickly narrowing. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker told reporters last week that “we have options for pushing back and that’s under discussion with the legislature,” but didn’t give much detail. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) also told reporters that Democrats needed to keep exploring ways to “provide balance” to the GOP’s gerrymandering “until we get to the day when we can all finally agree to put this behind us and pass nonpartisan gerrymandering federally.” The GOP in states like Tennessee may be taking a pretty big risk in what is expected to be a wave election year for Democrats. There’s no way to redraw the districts without making some of them more competitive, meaning that it’s not implausible for Democrats to end up picking up an additional Congressional seat or two. My open tabs:— Inside Democratic Fundraiser ActBlue’s Big Spending and Internal Drama — The 152 Best Horse Names in Kentucky Derby History
1
Schale is also an occasional writer for The Bulwark. You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber.We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can read and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletters or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here. Having trouble with something related to your account? Check out our constantly-updated FAQ, which likely has an answer for you.
|
