OXON HILL, Md. — Democrats on Saturday elected Ken Martin, the party leader in Minnesota, as the national chair, turning to a low-profile Midwestern political operative to coordinate their resistance to Donald Trump’s presidency.
Martin succeeds Jaime Harrison of South Carolina atop the Democratic National Committee. Harrison did not seek another term after the 2024 election when Trump became the first Republican to win the popular vote in two decades and made modest gains with core Democratic constituencies — African Americans, Latinos and working-class voters among them.
Martin offered a warning to Trump and his Republican allies after the vote was announced: “We’re coming. This is a new Democratic Party. We’re taking the gloves off.”
Martin now becomes one of the most important players in the Democratic Party’s comeback attempt as Trump pushes the limits of presidential power. While Martin promised bold changes, he said he could not discuss specific actions until the party conducted a postelection review to determine what went wrong in November.
The party leadership election played out in suburban Washington, D.C., as more than 400 DNC members from every state and U.S. territory assembled at the committee’s winter meeting.
Martin’s ascendance comes less than two weeks after Trump’s inauguration and as Democrats struggle to confront the sheer volume of executive orders, pardons, personnel changes and controversial relationships taking shape in the new administration. At the same time, public perception of the Democratic Party has hit rock bottom.
Just 31 percent of voters have a favorable opinion of the party, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released last week. Forty-three percent of voters have a favorable opinion of the Republican Party.
Martin, 51, easily defeated Wisconsin party chair Ben Wikler, who had earned the backing of leading Democratic donors and leaders in Congress, including the top Democrats in the House and Senate.
Ultimately, Martin’s relationships with DNC members helped him overcome Wikler’s higher-profile alliances. Martin is one of the longest-serving state party chairs, having led the Minnesota Democratic-Labor-Farmer Party since 2011.
While the Democrats inside the cavernous hotel ballroom cheered Martin’s election, not all were convinced that he alone can lead the party’s resurgence.
Jeanna Repass, the Kansas Democratic chair and an unsuccessful candidate for DNC vice chair, described Martin as “a workhorse” instead of “a champion.”
“Your workhorse pulls the plow, and you need that. But we don’t have that voice, that champion, to get out in front of us,” Repass said. “Donald Trump, for all of his faults, is able to get up there and lie with impunity and do it convincingly, and I don’t hear or see that voice in our party.”
