Ken Martin is doing a terrible job

The D.N.C. needs a chair who’s up to the task.

The D.N.C.’s problems are severe. (Photo via Politico)

During Donald Trump’s second term, Republicans have re-established the traditional G.O.P. fundraising advantage that evaporated in earlier Trump-era cycles.

The difference in party fundraising is pretty modest except when you compare the Democratic National Committee to the Republican National Committee: The R.N.C. has a seven-to-one fundraising edge, and the D.N.C. has more debt than cash on hand.

D.N.C. Chair Ken Martin has a number of responsibilities, but far and away the most important thing that national party committees do is raise money.

I’m not a fundraising guru and I don’t know exactly why Martin is flailing at this. But in a big picture sense, the chair is normally someone with demonstrated fundraising skills and donor connections and/or someone who is enthusiastically backed by major party figures who are themselves big donor favorites.

Martin isn’t either of those things, and he also isn’t a factional favorite of progressive small donors. He’s a guy who got the job primarily by having a lot of support inside the world of state party committees rather than in the broader Democratic Party universe.

He apparently didn’t do much to make calls or hold meetings with major donors and is somewhat paranoid about his opponents in a way that makes it hard to build bridges.

He’s also facing an objectively difficult situation. Democrats lost in 2024 and voters are disgruntled and angry. Macro-scale trends have alienated a lot of tech-industry and pro-Israel donors. But those headwinds are facing all party organs; the D.N.C.’s problems are uniquely severe because Martin doesn’t have a background in fundraising, hasn’t risen to the occasion, and also has an uncompelling core pitch focused on pumping money into the state parties whose leaders are his base, rather than on something Democratic donors care about, like stopping Trump from taking over the country.

To make matters worse, what he’s doing with the state party money also does not seem great.

A chair who can’t raise money is useless, and Martin’s fundraising failures are directly related to the manner of his accession to the job. If the members of the committee are smart, they’ll vote to remove him and install someone more suitable in his place. It’s embarrassing to admit that you messed up, but failing to admit it could lead to a spiral of irrelevance for the national party committee and its constituent state parties.

Ken Martin’s paradoxical rise

So how did Martin end up in the job?

Before he became chair, Martin was the head of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Not only that, he served as the president of the Association of State Democratic Committees. Since the state party committees have massive representation on the national party committees, being the state parties guy gives you a leg up in a race to run the national party committee.

Or so you might think.